Humankind Delayed After Community Feedback — But It’s All Good

It’s been a while since we’ve covered the upcoming 4X strategy game Humankind, but that doesn’t mean Amplitude Studios hasn’t been hard at work on the title — or released any updates for it. From covering their plans regarding Humankind mods and sharing details on everything from music to game mechanics in developer deep-dives, Amplitude has shared quite a bit of info already. 

But the latest update is likely one that fans will be a little bit bummed about. Humankind has been delayed to August 17, 2021. It was originally scheduled for an April 2021 launch window on PC and Google Stadia.

In a statement released on the Humankind dev blog, the team was thankful for fans’ support and said that because of critical, yet positive, feedback received through the OpenDev program — which saw some 26,000 games played and 2.7 million turns taken — they have decided to push back the release date to fine-tune and tweak the overall experience. 

So, what is all the feedback we are talking about? What did our players tell us about their experience with the OpenDev, and what are we doing to address their concerns? We’ll be working to address pacing, balancing, diplomacy, accessibility, and AI (among others)…

The blog post goes on to outline what the team hopes to make better, including pacing and balancing, influence systems, research costs, diplomacy mechanics, tutorials, and user interface enhancements. The full blog, including a complete rundown of target changes, can be seen here. 

Those who have pre ordered Humankind will now receive the Lucy and Edgar Allen Poe avatars. This is on top of the Boudicca avatar set and player profile decoration and symbols set already available for digital deluxe pre orders. Currently, the digital deluxe edition is the only version available for pre order, retailing for $49.79 on Steam and the Humankind webstore. 

With its latest game, Amplitude is building what appears could be a rival to the Civilization franchise, though we’ll still have to wait and see how deep those comparisons go. Stay tuned for more on the next era of Humankind.