Digital Extremes has announced that its opening up access to its upcoming fantasy action RPG Soulframe, allowing anyone who signs up for access to its alpha prelude tests to jump in.
Anyone who signs up between now and the end of this weekend will be able to download the game and hop in to its latest update. This open period coincides with Tennocon, where this announcement was revealed alongside a suite of surprises.
This announcement comes alongside a new trailer for Soulframe, showing off an overhauled combat system as well as a new quest. In it, the player character ventures deep underground to fight a big bear with the help of a French witch. Love it.
In an interview with Eurogamer, Soulframe creative director Geoff Crookes explained the reasoning why Digital Extremes decided to throw the doors open. “I think a big part of it is sentiment and feedback we got. We didn’t realise the queue was so big, and when we started to let people in, a lot of the people who were immediate sign ups kind of got left behind. Some people, out of frustration, didn’t check their emails. So we thought lets be aggressive and give people an opportunity.”
In a Q&A with creators and press prior to the show, Soulframe community manager Sarah Asselin revealed that prior to this initiative to get more people into Soulframe, the game’s Prelude test has had 1.2m sign ups, and roughly 850,000 people waiting to get in.
“We now have such massive interest from people who have wanted to play for a long time” Asselin stated in an interview with Eurogamer. “Soulframe was a game announced very early on in its development stage, so we’ve had a lot of interest from the get go. This is us saying, ‘hey if you want to play Soulframe Preludes, this is your chance.'”
But with Soulframe opening its doors to anyone keen to play it, what does that mean for the game’s full release date? It was previously stated that Digital Extremes was aiming for a 2025 release, but given that the team is still tweaking features and adding new stuff, is that still the goal? According to Geoff and Sarah, that’s more of an aspirational goal at this point.
“I’m going to be flakey here and say we have ambitions” chortled Crookes. “We’re going to judge where we are in the fall. We have ambitions to release it as soon as we can!”
Asselin echoed this sentiment: “It’s an aspirational goal. We’re looking at where we’re at by the end of the year, but we want to feel confident that we’ve built Soulframe out to the point where it feels good to do so, for the players and the developers.” It’s clear that if the team isn’t confident in the state of the game near the end of the year, then we’re looking at a push back to 2026.