Beautiful Light's road to Early Access: the development timeline, 2023 to 2026
Beautiful Light went from two developers to a Geneva studio near 700,000 wishlists. The public milestones, year by year, up to December 2026.
Beautiful Light was started by two developers, several years before most players had heard of it. Deep Worlds has documented a lot of the journey since in its posts on Steam. This timeline pulls together the milestones the studio itself has shared.
2023: a studio takes shape
By April 2023, Deep Worlds said the project had been started about four years earlier by two developers and had grown to 12 people, many of them from modding communities.
- January. Deep Worlds is created and new people join the project
- February. The team moves to Geneva
- April. Videos by the creators Player2 and Bigfry bring the game to a much wider audience, a moment the studio called the month that changed everything
- May. First playtests, 50,000 wishlists and 3,000 Discord members
- June. The decision to add AI anomalies to the game; 100,000 wishlists
- July. The lighting moves to Unreal Engine's Lumen system
- September. The CGI trailer is revealed; 150,000 wishlists
- October. Huge changes to the Ground Zero raid loop, and 200,000 wishlists
- December. Playtests dedicated to content creators
2024: systems and scale
- February. The first version of the Skin Forge brings character customization; wishlists pass 400,000
- March. AtmoStorm, a dynamic weather system based on real sun position data
- April. A major optimization pass, and a public development timeline on the studio's website
- May. PC Gamer tests the game; the Discord reaches 25,000 members
- June. A rework of the movement system, which Deep Worlds released as open source code
- July. The Juggernaut becomes the first playable anomaly
- August. 500,000 wishlists
- October. The biggest playtest yet, with more than 250 community members
- December. The forearm PDA and the Sheitan anomaly appear in Dev Update #4; the Discord reaches 37,000 members
By January 2025, the game had passed 600,000 wishlists.
Watch on YouTubeBEAUTIFUL LIGHT DEV UPDATE #6 New Anomalies, more guns and A LOT of new stuff2025: the core systems
Deep Worlds described 2025 as a year of technical foundations:
- A full backend and matchmaking system
- Persistent stash and inventory
- A new AI system, and major work on the Reaver creature
- An in house audio system for verticality and room based reverberation
- The full PDA: compass, health, raid information, map and scanner
- New weapons including the AS VAL, F2000 and Mosin, and a knife based melee system
- New third person animations, which is how other players see you
In January 2026, the studio said the game was approaching 700,000 wishlists.
Watch on YouTubeNew Anomalies, guns, monsters and MORE BEAUTIFUL LIGHT DEV UPDATE #82026: the trailer and the rework
- January. Deep Worlds releases its first gameplay trailer at the New Game Plus showcase, and announces a rework of the core game mode after playtests showed the raid had become too scripted
- February. Dev Update #8 details seven new or expanded points of interest on Ground Zero, and shows door breaching
- August. The Dev Update #9 video covers anomalies and monsters, audio, weapons, equipment, PvP and playtesting, and level art
- December. The planned Early Access launch on Steam and the Epic Games Store
Watch on YouTubePlayers FLY now?! BEAUTIFUL LIGHT - New Anomalies, new guns, new equipment and more DEV UPDATE #9How the release plan moved
Release dates for Beautiful Light have shifted several times. In 2023, Deep Worlds' posts pointed to dates between early 2024 and the end of 2025, and the studio has always been cautious about committing to a day. The store pages now list December 2026 for Early Access, still without a specific day.
That caution is worth keeping in mind for the current window too. The release date page is updated the moment anything changes.
Sources
- Deep Worlds news on Steam: the FAQ (21 April 2023), the playtest report (31 May 2023), Dev Update #1 with the 2023 rewind (13 February 2024), Dev Update #4 (4 December 2024), the 2024 review (27 January 2025), Dev Update #7 (15 September 2025), the 2025 review (14 January 2026) and Dev Update #8 (26 February 2026)
- Development update videos presented by Psychoghost for Deep Worlds, on YouTube
BL Guide, unofficial community coverage of Beautiful Light: how we check what we publish.