Timeline Update - September 2025

As summer winds down, we want to share the latest on Bellum’s development and update you on our timelines for the Supporter Closed Alpha, Deluxe Closed Beta, and Early Access launch.

First and foremost, thank you. Your support, enthusiasm, and patience have carried us through this journey. The sheer volume of positivity we’ve received so early in development has exceeded anything we imagined, and it has meant everything to our team.

An Update to Our Timelines

The number of pre-order’s we’ve received is beyond what we expected. Thousands of you have purchased the Supporter Edition alone, making it the most popular tier at 73% of purchases. And to the thousands more who chose the Deluxe or Standard editions, we thank you as well. We greatly appreciate all of your support, and cannot wait to get in-game with all of you. We’re humbled, grateful, and continually floored by the growing community forming around this project.

With that trust, we owe it to you not to rush Bellum’s first public hands-on release. To ensure the game is in the condition it deserves to be, we are slightly adjusting our original schedule.

We are now targeting the weekend of November 21st, 2025 for the first Supporter Closed Alpha test.

This milestone build will feature:

• Occupation Gamemode Loop
• B-TAK Smart Device Tool
• Authentic Ballistics System (including wind & armor)
• Crew-Served Weapon Systems (initial iteration)
• Advanced Medical System
• Explosives & Grenades
• Grenade Launchers
• Objective Demolition System
• Plus additional first-pass systems and features

All of this will run on our custom game launcher, in-house distribution services, and Astarte’s own hosted servers.

For backers of the Deluxe Edition, we are targeting Closed Beta shortly after the New Year, with Early Access for all players arriving in Q1 2026. We’d rather delay than deliver something unstable, and we believe this approach sets Bellum up for long-term success.

Founder Testing in Progress

A few weeks ago, we began Founder Edition playtests, the largest sessions we’ve ever run. These tests included Founders, the Astarte dev team, and our internal QA group.

The focus has been on:

• Stress-testing our internal networking and distribution
• UE5 server performance at scale
• Client performance across a wide range of hardware
• Identifying user experience concerns
• Initial feedback to core mechanics like gunplay and medical

This feedback has been immensely valuable. In fact, when asked for overall impressions, many Founders stated that the tests “exceeded their expectations”. Over the next several weeks, we’ll continue deeper gameplay testing with Founders while preparing for Supporter access in November.

The Summer Roadblocks

Game development never goes exactly to plan, and this summer presented us with some time-consuming challenges:

• A dramatic issue with procedural generation of our map-wide foliage
• A core inventory system issue that required extensive in-game testing
• UE5 networking bottlenecks in our current engine version
• A mass reconfiguration effort to transition to UE5’s Gameplay Ability System

Three of these issues are now largely resolved, and we’ve made significant progress on the fourth, which we expect to complete by the end of this month. As we finish wrapping up these major roadblocks, we will shift our focus back to the remaining development items we need to complete before Bellum’s Closed Alpha.

For Astarte, this tradeoff is necessary. Many indie games release too early, then undergo painful rewrites to fix core systems. With the lessons our team brings from other projects, we’ve chosen a different approach: invest heavily in solving foundational problems before we release them. It consumes more time upfront, but it ensures a sturdier platform for Bellum’s future.

When these kinds of issues arise, it’s crucial that we safeguard the long-term quality of our codebase. As a small indie studio building an ambitious project, we can’t afford to fall into the trap of ‘spaghetti code’ born from quick fixes and rushed patches. To ensure Bellum can grow and thrive for years to come, we are committed to addressing core issues the right way, even if it takes more time, rather than cutting corners for short-term gains.

Together, we’re shaping Bellum into the experience it’s meant to be, one test at a time. With Founders already in the field and Supporters joining in November, the next chapter of development is about all of us testing, refining, and shaping the experience side by side.

Thank you for being a part of this journey. We’ll see you in the field this November.

-The Bellum Team