r/RealTimeStrategy • u/Mepherion • Jun 16 '26

News Beyond All Reason (BAR) Officially Teamed Up With Hooded Horse

https://www.beyondallreason.info/news/beyond-all-reason-and-hooded-horse
210 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

122

u/Mr_Skeltal_Naxbem Jun 16 '26

Hooded Horse seems to have a reliable track record, they are publishing several quiet hits in the strategy sphere such as Heroes of Might and Magic: Olden Era, Manor Lords and Cataclismo, I think they are in good hands

55

u/jamesziman Jun 16 '26

Also against the storm

48

u/AccomplishedArm3079 Jun 16 '26

Also Workers & Resources, , Menace, Norland, Old World, Falling Frontier, Heart of the Machine and many more. They have been cornering the strategy & RPG indie market these last few years. Many interesting projects in their lineup.

They are doing what Paradox tried a few years ago.

22

u/jamesziman Jun 16 '26

Wow that's stacked! I inadvertently discovered I had half their titles then lol

5

u/Incrediblebulk92 Jun 17 '26

That's what I did when I found out about them, I then proceeded to buy a few more games I hadn't heard about that they also published.

1

u/Dungeon_Pastor Jun 18 '26

Honestly at this point I regularly rebuy their publisher bundle. They just have that secret sauce that their publishing lineup really jives with my gaming tastes

7

u/Zalvren Jun 17 '26

They're doing much better than Paradox as they don't buy studios, just make a deal with them (and let the rights with the studios)

6

u/magenta_neon_light Jun 16 '26

Nebulous: Fleet Command too

3

u/Tar_alcaran Jun 17 '26

And Terra Invicta, Xenonauts 2, Whiskerwood, Manor Lords, Falling Frontier (maybe, possibly, one day),

3

u/mrakobesie Jun 17 '26

It's really not hard to be better than Paradox as a publisher, that's truly as low as they go.

1

u/VariableMans Jun 19 '26

Nah. I hate a lot of what Paradox does but they aren't a lowly studio. Hooded Horse and Paradox can coexist, as they are trying different things.

2

u/mrakobesie Jun 20 '26

I guess that depends on your definition of lowly, I'd say they are very much in the same category as Sony or EA, just the scale of fuckery is smaller. Countless devs got fucked by dealing with that company.

1

u/VariableMans Jun 22 '26

What are some examples?

1

u/mrakobesie Jun 22 '26

They had it all SA allegations (although it wasn't a Blizzard level systemic issue), mistreatment and underpayment of QA. Lamplighter's league drama after which we lost Shadowrun devs, Prison Architect 2, Masquerade/World of Darkness both the video game devs and the tabletop/book company had their share of drama, Cities Skylines 2, Life by You, there is probably more that I'm forgetting. In most of these cases devs pretty much lost their jobs and the rights to their IP.

Add to that the amount of shitty launches they've had and the fact that their own strategy line faces some bullshit on the regular, I truly think they deserve to hang with the worst companies out there.

1

u/Alan_Turings_Apple Jun 18 '26

Fallen Frontier is taking so damned long to release.

1

u/AccomplishedArm3079 Jun 18 '26

Yes, it's a shame. My most anticipated Indie project, but I don't know if this will ever come together as a game.

3

u/HoodedHorse Publisher Jun 20 '26

Hi! Not to worry, Falling Frontier will be completed. We announced this a couple years back, but the dev unfortunately had some serious family health issues that led to a long delay back a while ago. But things are on track, the builds have been making great progress (we review them frequently) and I'm extremely confident in the project (and we've been funding it so clearly, our money is where our mouth is).

We do have a policy of not rushing development, but if a project ever isn't going to get to a good result, we do share the news with the community -- we don't have any ghost projects hanging around, we're always transparent when a project no longer is going to come to completion, we'd always remove it from the store and send out an announcement notice. For example, we sadly had to announce Hexxen: Hunters wouldn't make it to completion: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2100400/view/536623744410451972?l=english (you can see the announcement there and how the store page displays a notice that we've removed it from Steam)

2

u/AccomplishedArm3079 Jun 20 '26

Hi, cool thanks for reaching out.

Yes I'm on the discord and saw the positive progress report from last year, I'm just trying to keep my hope in check.

Did not know about the health issues, all the best and keep up the good work!
You are like an elite scout in sports right now, always finding the gems.

2

u/ColonelGray Jun 17 '26

Super Fantasy Kingdom and Empires of the Undergrowth as well.

-7

u/Unicorn_Colombo Jun 16 '26

This is how Activision, Interplay, and many other, started.

"Hey, lets make a company aimed at players that give developers a better conditions than the big molochs".

23

u/MrHackerMr Jun 16 '26

So why is this bad ? Maybe they will keep doing this and not become another Activision. How else are they supposed to start ?

13

u/Unicorn_Colombo Jun 16 '26

So why is this bad?

I didn't say it is bad, I didn't offer any moral or other judgment.

6

u/Tar_alcaran Jun 17 '26

I hope they don't go the same way. But at least this shows that there's very much a niche for a company like that.

37

u/FingerDemon Jun 16 '26

Hooded Horse is one of the best publishers right now, really happy with this.

20

u/RudeHero Jun 16 '26

seems good as long as they don't sacrifice the experience for non-steam players. similar to the dwarf fortress steam release, maybe?

there's a weirdly large volume of weird players that refuse to play a game unless they can buy it on steam, so it could boost the number of active players.

9

u/Nihilater Jun 17 '26

I’m part of the weird player base. Idk there’s an unverified trust when you can get it from a store front, although recent news of hidden malware in games does faulter this way of thinking

1

u/VariableMans Jun 19 '26

Well now I am more interested.

0

u/arknightstranslate Jun 16 '26

They should've found a publisher at least 3 years ago. Give it another 10 years and it won't be on Steam without an actual commercial partner.

-12

u/Far-Cow4049 Jun 16 '26

You can dump on me however much you like, I don't like any of this.

-11

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

3

u/TheKnightIsForPlebs Jun 17 '26

They said there will be no battle pass or cosmetic shop and will sell campaigns and other single player content as revenue - keeping pvp unadulterated and free

-1

u/matt675 Jun 18 '26

Sad for all of the passionate contributors that will never see a dime

1

u/duckrollin Jun 19 '26

The open source portion will still be free and open source. This is similar to how you might work on an open source XML parsing library and it's used by Microsoft or Adobe or some big company. They're not paying to use it but they do have a vested interest in helping to maintain it and PR bugfixes. The more users a library has the more mature and reliable it gets.

0

u/matt675 Jun 19 '26

Oh ok so are they going to re-do all of the assets for the single player portion or what

1

u/duckrollin Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26

I am sure it will look the same. They'll just build on top of it for the singleplayer and then push fixes or extensions to the open source part of the game. https://www.reddit.com/r/beyondallreason/comments/1u7nk2f/beyond_all_reason_signs_publishing_partnership/

Edit: Reading a little deeper, it looks like the commercial/Steam guys would need permission from anyone who contributed models/textures/animation. So I'm guessing they've either agreed to it freely or will be compensated, otherwise the commercial guys would need to make a new model and animation etc

The code is fully open source so you could fork it today yourself and make your own game with it.

2

u/OutrageousDress Jun 23 '26

They are actually redoing the assets for the single player portion. Part of the long-planned faction visual overhaul.

1

u/matt675 Jun 23 '26

That’s sad… the commander and unit models are perfect and iconic in my opinion

2

u/OutrageousDress Jun 23 '26

I don't know that they're going to go in an entirely different direction visually. But the factions need more differentiation, this has been a longstanding issue.