Game Announcement & Developer Insight – Equinox: Homecoming is a story-driven, horse-focused MMO that takes its audience seriously

Disclaimer: I work for Blue Scarab Entertainment and Equinox: Homecoming on a freelance consulting basis. While I would have been eager to cover this game and interview its developers in any case, working for Blue Scarab has allowed me to prioritize this article and get it published in time.

For years I’ve wondered why no game investors and publishers seem to take the impressive player numbers of Star Stable Online as evidence that horse-loving gamers are an audience worth investing into. Imagine my utmost satisfaction then, when I caught wind of a brand new company of veteran game developers called Blue Scarab Entertainment doing exactly that and more. Equinox: Homecoming combines dark mystery with horse-focused gameplay into one of the most promising new game announcements our genre has ever seen. Let’s have a look at the announcement trailer and dive into some juicy behind-the-scenes insight for how this game is getting made and why it took so long for someone to realize this potential.  

Announcement Trailer

The announcement press release describes Equinox: Homecoming as

“a new multiplayer online role-playing game that’s a surprising and unique blend of cozy exploration and dark mystery. Perfect for fans of horses, detective mysteries, and relaxing, story-rich gameplay! Players will saddle up and charge into an adventure together, where every trail leads to both wonder and intrigue while uncovering an occult murder mystery.”

The trailer shows serene environments and peaceful rides through the fields and forests of Alderwood Island, before turning to a darker tone as it recounts a recent death on the island at the hand of… presumably an animal. Yeah, I’m sure it was just an animal attack and nothing more. That’s a reasonable explanation, and it would be weird to blame any odd local legends about something more dangerous in the woods. 

Other shots tease horse care, investigating tracks on the ground and going on rides out together. The game’s Steam Description adds: 

Embark on an adventure that puts your bond to the test. Even when your world has fallen apart, your horse has your back. You can always count on them, but can they count on you? Train up your horse in challenging races, care for them after a long ride, and even give them treats you’ve foraged. 

Now for the sake of transparency and hype, I am thrilled to let you know that I’ve actually played quite a bit of the game already to give feedback on animations, equestrian-friendly dialogues, horse controls and more, and I am incredibly excited to see this project go public. Regular readers will know that I’m not one to get particularly excited about multiplayer games inherently, but a horse-focused game with a slightly creepy mystery story and high production value aimed at an audience that isn’t young children? Sign me the fuck up, I can’t wait to see this succeed. 

Mood and Inspirations

To provide the TMQ readership with more insight into the background and future of Equinox: Homecoming, I sat down with CEO Colin Cragg, Studio Creative Director Craig Morrison, and Community & Marketing Director Ashley Nicollette earlier this week, asking them how this project came to be.

Colin Cragg, Co-Founder and CEO of Blue Scarab Entertainment, has worked in video games for about twenty years. His CV includes game companies Funcom, Star Stable Entertainment and Toadman Interactive.

Craig Morrison is Studio Creative Director at Blue Scarab and has previously worked for DICE, Blizzard and Funcom among others.

Ashley Nicollette is Community & Marketing Director at Blue Scarab and has worked for Arrowhead Game Studios, Tlön Industries and Fellow Traveller in the past.

 “There’s been hundreds of smaller horse titles produced over the years,” explains Colin, citing the long history of our niche genre.  “I think it's always been recognized that there's a market for this, but no one's been willing to treat that market with respect.”

Having just returned from GDC in San Francisco to their studio’s headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden, Colin recounts the industry’s reaction to their novel pitch of cozy mystery horse MMO for adults. “The narrative element catches people by surprise because there’s this anticipation of cliché: If you're making a horse game, it has to be ‘your uncle has died and you are taking over the farm and you need to clean up your stable’.” 

To settle on a new and fresh direction that moves away from those clichés, the Blue Scarab team looked to other media, and podcasts in particular. “We looked into the kind of content that's popular,” Colin explains. “Behind celebrity interviews – which don’t translate particularly  well to gaming – true crime and mystery is dominating the space ahead of almost any other subject matter.” In an earlier conversation at Gamescom 2024, Craig and Colin already told me about the two-stage reaction their game has provoked in industry circles: initial confusion at the unusual combination, followed by swift realization that everyone they talked to has at least one woman in their life who loves horses or True Crime stories, if not both. And while I’m not much of a True Crime aficionado myself, I can absolutely speak to the general interest in our community to get horse-focused stories beyond the “inherited a farm” trope, especially in a murder mystery direction. This “finally, something fresh” sentiment is a reaction I’ve seen from the target audience time and time again in the discourse surrounding WIndstorm: The Legend of Khiimori.

So what does a “cozy mystery MMO” look like? “We’re not classifying Equinox: Homecoming as a horror game,” explains Craig. “We're more thinking of murder mystery elements with a slice of the occult.”
The team explains that players won’t find jump scares and hauntings in the game, but explore a creeping, slowly brewing tension that aims to keep people intrigued and captivated by the narrative. “A lot of horse and cozy games end up feeling juvenile and immature,” Ashley adds. “It drives me crazy! We didn’t want to shy away from more mature story elements, but your character is never in any danger.” They describe the game as a dark and mysterious drama, and says playtesters have compared their experience with it to Nancy Drew games.

Horses in Focus

“Our audience has infamously high standards when it comes to horse models and animations, and I absolutely take some of the blame for that,” I point out. “How are you tackling those? Are the animations in the trailer final?” 

“They're being tweaked on an ongoing basis,” says Colin, explaining that transitioning from one rig to another has caused some issues to arise that have not been fixed yet. Fortunately, Blue Scarab has me to send detailed feedback explanations for which leg positions are wonky, and the team promises there will be further improvements before release. 

What’s more interesting than the basic looping movement animations is Blue Scarab’s plans for cutscenes though: “We partnered up with Rune Entertainment to set up a motion capture studio on location in a barn in Canada,” Ashley reveals. “That way we could get as much time with the horses as possible, with their home just steps away.” 

Actor Jasmine Ward, handler Jen Lyons and Bella the horse.

Jasmine Ward with Bella. Bella is wearing a custom-made suit for mocap points to be fastened to.

The team realized that while it required a significant advance investment, motion capture was the only way to allow them to produce high quality cutscenes on an ongoing basis. “We initially tried to hand animate the horses,” says Colin, “and found that the quality was very dependent on the person that we got in to do the job. With this user demographic, so much focus is on the horse, which means those animations need to be absolutely amazing.” 

Colin recounts the story of an early cutscene of a character struggling to control a horse in a paddock, which went through multiple iterations including the talents of highly senior character animators and still did not match expectations. A process that would simply not scale for various new animations and cutscenes added over time. 

The announcement trailer describes the setting of Alderwood as “horse country”, prompting me to ask what exactly that means for the game’s story… and getting a quite intriguing non-answer. “I could sit here and tell you everything the narrative team has planned for the next two or three years,” Craig says and laughs, “but I'm not going to because they'd kill me.”

He and Ashley explain that the role of horses in the Alderwood folklore will be explored and peeled back in layers as players discover the narrative. What I take away is that horses and riding are planned to be an integral part of the game’s narrative, the gameplay and the worldbuilding, and I look forward to finding out how that all plays out. 

Horse Customization in Equinox: Homecoming. Don’t worry, I’ll let them know that that’s not in fact a Roan body, there’s time to fix this

Horse care will be a recurring element of the gameplay

Release Plans and Updates

Equinox: Homecoming does not yet have a release date, nor is the team ready to share any plans regarding the game’s business model just yet. What Ashley can tell me is that Blue Scarab plans community-led development as a crucial part of their process, that they’ve been running focus tests and expansive playtests as soon as they had something playable. 

Since multiplayer online games tend to get updates and additions rather than being one-and-done products, I do assume that not all of the game’s story will be released at once. Colin confirms this and explains that they think of the game’s narrative like a TV serial, releasing an “episode” of content at a time and allowing the community to speculate and theorize in between, as is currently becoming more popular again in prestige television as some networks recognize the benefit of ongoing engagement over binge watching. 

“But on the flip side,” Colin goes on, “we're also a fully functioning MMO with all the content and gameplay that is going to allow for repeat play.” He talks of races, leaderboards, factions and reputation as well as weekly and daily quests around the island that allow the player to level up their character and improve their equipment. Beyond these activities, Blue Scarab also plans to explicitly cater to the kind of player who spends time on modded Red Dead servers to go on trail rides together, citing The Rift Trails as a reference. 

Racing against the clock is one thing to keep players busy between story episodes.

Blue Scarab is aware of the community-driven trail riding communities for Red Dead Online, and hopes to scratch a similar itch.

“Outside of the core areas that we're creating for the narrative, we've also spent a fair amount of time on the pipeline to create new areas for riding and exploration. It's incredibly difficult and time consuming to create base narrative gameplay areas because there needs to be something new to see or interact with every few seconds. But if the intention is just going for a nice scenic ride, where you have this cozy, social experience instead, we can deliver that in parallel.”

Market Reflections and Risks

I’ve been preaching the need and demand for games like Equinox: Homecoming for years, so I felt like I had less to learn from “why are you making this” and more from “why did it take so long for someone to make this”. 

Blue Scarab Entertainment is a team of industry veterans with extensive MMO experience. Colin Cragg himself was CEO of Star Stable Entertainment for a few years early in that game’s life cycle, and Craig Morrison’s CV includes over 7 years in Senior Design Leadership on World of Warcraft. If these experienced professionals realize the potential of the horse game market, what’s stopping others? 

“It's a bit of a chicken and egg scenario,” explains Ashley. “Larger scoped horse projects don't get funded, so they can’t get made, which means there’s no ‘evidence’ they’ll be successful. I know a lot of studios who want to make horse-focused games actually, but the first and largest hurdle comes down to capitalism.”

“The current state of the games industry is risk-averse,” Craig adds. “When pitching the game, we’ve heard a lot of ‘we agree this is an underserved demographic but no one's really done this before’. A lot of people tend to try and be safer and work within an established genre, and when you step out of those people don’t know if that’ll work out.” 

To briefly add my own two cents here, I don’t doubt for a second that these exact arguments get made but I also remain incredibly frustrated that “let’s make another PvP team shooter” is seen as a “safer” bet by game investors instead of tapping clearly existing niches that they agree are underserved. I find that bizarre, illogical and shortsighted, but then that’s just how a lot of capitalism works. 

From his time at Star Stable, Colin recalls the challenge of centralizing an audience that had been traditionally ignored by the games industry. But as we now know, the girly horsie MMO managed that challenging feat and boasts of an impressive twenty million registered users nowadays. 

“I always thought that after the amount of effort that it took to build this audience,” Colin muses, “that their intentions and their focus going forward would be to produce that next thing for this big group to move into over time.” He expected a “Star Stable for adults” kind of game to come out of Star Stable Entertainment itself.

When SSE instead revealed Wildsong, a mobile game targeting an even younger audience, Colin saw a huge missed opportunity. “It became a very simple thing to sit here and think ‘God I would love to give that audience what they actually want’.” From there, a few short conversations with select investors followed to get Blue Scarab Entertainment off the ground.

Colin and Ashley go on to talk about the diversity of the general gaming audience today, that girls and women are expected to like games that are ‘for everyone’ without proper regard for the fact that perhaps not everyone wants to be shooting each other in the face all the time, that there’s a ton more room for “tend and befriend” mechanics instead of just “fight or flight”. I think I get a little bit starry-eyed at hearing people with the relevant connections, experience and influence so closely mirror the thoughts and frustrations I’ve had for years. 

Colin adds that he does not find it surprising at all that Windstorm: The Legend of Khiimori is currently raking in six figures on Kickstarter. “These people are dying for something that they actually want to play and want to see.” He sees that success as synergy rather than competition. “A good tide lifts all boats. If Khiimori does well, great, you're creating more people within our core audience who understand that there’s content for them.”  

Outlook

Talking to the people of Blue Scarab makes me feel seen and heard in absolutely wonderful ways and I’m thrilled to be working with them. I very deeply hope that their gamble in targeting the adult “horse girl” audience pays off, and I appreciate a lot of the game that I’ve seen so far, even as unfinished and in need of animation iteration as it is. 

For closing words, Colin calls the community to action, relying on the aforementioned underserved audience to make their presence known: “It's really important for us as a smaller studio that we ask players for their support if the game appeals to them, and that they do all the things they can to help, like wishlist on Steam, join our playtests, become part of the community. We have faith that this audience is here and that we can create this really cool game for them but that can only work if we get the community on board and bring them along on the voyage.”