Next Kilometer: Our Most Important News

Hello Drivers,

Welcome, we’re taking you along for our new series: “Next Kilometer”. As you may have read in our previous announcements , a few months ago we made the decision to completely rebuild the game. We’re now ready to reveal more about this project.

In “Next Kilometer”, each episode will take us one step further in discovering the rebuild, until we reach the game’s release. This is a very important series that we invite you to follow if you’re interested in the development of the game. Get comfortable, fasten your seatbelt, and join us on the road!

Today, we’re at Kilometer One, the starting point. Let’s get going!

If it's too long for you to read, we have a video for you. You're welcome

Personal note: my text is much cooler though, but I'll let you decide that in the comments.

Where Drive Beyond Horizons Comes From

The journey of Drive Beyond Horizons started with around two people: one developer handling all of the gameplay, and a second developer working on the terrain. Then, two more people joined the team: an environment artist and a 3D artist.

In its early days, the team wanted to make a multiplayer game that could work internationally. Something along the lines of other major games such as Lethal Company and R.E.P.O. , to name some of the more recent ones. Of course, we needed to find a game with potential; making another battle royale would have been a little difficult, right?

Before releasing a game on Steam, the most important thing for a studio is Wishlists. You’ve probably heard about them, like a lot. There aren’t 36 different ways to get them: you need to show what your game is made of, and what your studio is capable of. This is how the Drive Beyond Horizons Demo was born. Released in June 2024 during Next Fest , the Demo reached 10,000 Wishlists in just one week! A real success, far beyond the team’s expectations.

We then seized the opportunity by building our Discord server. It was a chance for us to hit the road with a co-pilot: our community. We asked for valuable feedback, and we want to thank everyone who helped us at that time, and who continues to do so through their feedback, suggestions, and more.

From our perspective, we wanted to release as much as possible to prove the game’s potential, with the idea that we would have time to fix things later. This success was truly unexpected and came as a real surprise. At first, we thought the Demo would slowly fade into obscurity. Instead, we had 180,000 Wishlists by the time Early Access launched.

And unfortunately, it was this desire to move fast that, months later, would force us to pull over and take a closer look at the damage: an engine with many flaws, and above all, one that could no longer be fixed.

Why the Current Version Has Reached Its Limits

The current version (Early Access) has some very serious problems. Problems that cannot be optimized away. To name just a few:

• Item system = Actor Blueprints (rather than C++). Objects that are “heavy” to load/save, with many heavy components (all in Blueprint), making this version around 1,000 times less performant than it should and will be.
• Hardcoded interactions. A huge amount of duplication, leading to many oversights and bugs that are difficult to resolve.
• Unreal Engine 5.2. One of the early versions of Unreal Engine 5, with poor performance and still many bugs.
• All bugs that can appear in single-player are multiplied in multiplayer, leading to entirely new bugs compared to the single-player experience, and to problems on a much larger scale.
• The POIs in the current version were not built to meet the requirements of Unreal Engine 5’s Lumen system. To fully take advantage of its capabilities and achieve the visual quality we’re aiming for, they need to be rebuilt from the ground up.
• The first POIs had no optimization system, with Marketplace assets that were sometimes low quality and did not match the game’s Art Direction.
• The way the terrain currently works does not allow us to create biomes. There is no possible transition between biomes, and adding a new biome would cause numerous bugs in other areas.

These problems currently define the game. It is not possible for us to change the way the game works at its core; we would have to change everything at once, which would essentially mean recoding the entire game. The major difference here is that we would no longer be able to keep updating the game, slowly putting the project at risk in the eyes of the players.

Think of it this way: we could either rebuild our car by keeping it in the garage for several months, leaving you unable to drive it, or we could keep it on the road, even if it’s shaking, while building an entirely new vehicle in parallel.

For these reasons,we decided to start the game again from scratch. It was a major decision, and we spent a lot of time and thought considering it, but it became clear that this was the only viable solution to give you the best experience possible while continuing to update the game.

That said, whenever we find a way to optimize the current game, we take the opportunity. But given the technical constraints, optimizing the project in its current form is not our priority; that changes with the next version.

The "Next" Version

Since the Demo, the game has evolved a lot, and so has the team. From 4 people, the studio has grown to 30-40 professionals (including outsourcing partners). We now have a larger team, with more experienced people , a creative production force capable of creating all of the game’s assets, and a much clearer vision thanks to the addition of a Game Designer .

Our goals have become more ambitious: we want more depth for the game, and a more robust open world with many more possibilities, without compromising performance.

We’re starting from scratch, and we understand that this can be worrying for some of you. But this time, we’re setting off with a plan, with page after page of completed and detailed Game Design documentation showing us where we’re heading, and with professionals in every field who are able to make the right decisions.

It’s like setting off properly equipped: we have the map, the compass, and everything we need for the journey ahead.

The Solutions

This rebuild is not just about graphics, but about the game’s structure. We are starting the game from scratch, which also allows us to change our technology by moving to Unreal Engine 5.8+ (although this may evolve depending on future updates). This version brings major performance improvements, offers new tools, is more stable, and provides significant visual improvements.

We have also decided to change several technologies, including:

The AVS plugin, which we are replacing withChaos Modular Vehicles, allowing us to have a true physics simulation. We will use this opportunity to work on and add much more depth to the physics simulation of engines, transmissions, and all vehicles.

This change will bring more stability to the physics, less variation depending on FPS, and fewer unexplained “explosions”.

The save system and item system have been completely redesigned, allowing for faster, lighter, and more reliable saves.

We have also completely changed the way procedural terrain is handled. This is an aspect we do not intend to overlook. This new technology allows for:

• Better FPS, with a stable target of 120 FPS without freezes.
• Greater view distance without increasing costs, thanks to better handling of Levels of Detail (LOD).
• Fixes for “seam holes”, anomalies in terrain generation that create “holes” in the terrain.
• Lush and optimized vegetation, thanks to new generation algorithms giving us more control, as well as custom rendering algorithms.
• The ability to add new biomes, thanks to new technologies allowing us to handle biome transitions and combinations, which is not possible in the current project.
• Road rework: winding roads, different types of roads, and multiple roads.
• Multiplayer rework to make the netcode simpler and more robust, helping prevent desynchronization, improve performance, and make the experience smoother.

Game Design rework. The idea is to make the game more fun, especially by removing technical limitations that currently restrict what we can do.

We have always wanted to have modding, but the current version of DBH made the process very difficult, both for developers and modders. The rebuild will bring many new possibilities in this area: creation of new vehicles and components, creation of POIs, and much more.

We will also take this opportunity to revisit important aspects such as the Art Direction:

• Lighting rework.
• UX/UI rework, bringing it in line with accessibility standards.

This Is Only the Beginning of the Journey

This adventure started several months ago, but the first stages are also the longest. This is the point where we have to create the entire codebase of the game, and we cannot afford to make mistakes. So we are taking the time to optimize everything and solve each problem that appears, one by one. But don’t worry, we’re making good progress!

We have some major projects coming up:

• Terrain rework to improve generation even further.
• Vehicle and engine physics simulation.
• World generation (roads, POI placement, etc.).
• Save system.
• World interactions.
• New Character Design.

These are only the broad outlines of the project, and we’ll talk about them in more detail over time in our “Next Kilometer” series.

Our internal roadmap contains dozens of points, ideas, and possibilities. But we have a first destination that we want to share with you!

Our current goal is to reproduce the game exactly as it is on this new version (features), with a few important changes (particularly UX/UI). Once this version is ready, we will officially release it for free, like any update, for everyone who owns the game already (Early Access). Internally, we call this version 0.8; for you, it will be Kilometer 80.

Early Access will serve as a large-scale test, allowing us to gather feedback from the community. We will rely mainly on Discord (sharing images, videos, and logs) and BetaHub (bug reports), but we will also keep a close eye on our other platforms (Steam, of course, as well as Reddit and our other social media).

After Kilometer 80, our destination will change:Kilometer 100, the game’s 1.0. This will be the final stretch, not necessarily the shortest one, but the one that will take us to the game’s official release.

Q&A Session

If you have questions, we’ll answer them! Please understand that we won’t be able to reveal everything about the future of the project yet. Many things are still in development, while others are still being discussed, so it would be difficult to share details that are still uncertain, even for us. But we will answer what we can about the current project and its rebuild.

Where can you participate?

• In the comment section, on Steam.
• On Discord, in #ask-the-dev channel.
• On Reddit, comment the announcement.

We are very happy and excited about this new journey that we will once again take alongside you. Your feedback is invaluable! We will need you, and we hope you will once again be the best co-pilots we could dream of!

You might also want to check out:

Our previous patch: Patch Note: Meet the Froggy! (New Car) ↗

Our official Drive Beyond Horizons 2026 Roadmap (Updated) ↗