Now that we've reached Alpha, we've been updating our milestone schedule for the rest of the project. Playing the Alpha has been a lot of fun -- in particular, combat is shaping up great -- but it's also made us more aware of areas that we believe need more work. As a result, we're moving our expected ship date to Q4 2004 and expanding our programming and art staff to tackle the next milestone.

While we'd like to ship sooner than that, we don't want to rush the initial release. This extra time will help us ensure the stability of the game, make it more fun, and improve the quality of certain features.