Paradox Interactive and Nitro Games announce plans to release a free add-on for East India Company later this month to update the seafaring real-time strategy game to what they are calling the "designer's cut" (begging the question who is responsible for the release "cut" of the game). The commercial add-on called Privateer announced in August is still in development, but in the meantime the designer's cut will be released for download on October 27, and the announcement also includes word of a price cut that makes the game's MSRP $29.99/€29.99 both at retail and via digital distribution. Here's a bit on the project:

The free add-on introduces a vast amount of enhancements for improved gameplay, including new port views, the ability to fight on land in island battles, the introduction of multiplayer modes "Beehive" and "Breakthrough", history graphs to help track long term progress, and many more new features to make East India Company a deeper experience than ever before.

“In 'Designer’s Cut', we made several improvements to the original game to make it even better," said Kim Soares, lead designer for East India Company. "Some features were chosen from the ideas presented to us by the East India Company community. This kind of feedback from the active players is invaluable, as they have spent hundreds of hours playing our game and know it inside and out."