Goblinworks’ Ryan Dancey served up his latest milestone update for Pathfinder Online this week and it had some tasty news for fans. The team managed to complete all of their goals for Q4 2013, which ended this past Monday and was capped off with a play session on Wednesday. The devs will be refining the content this week for another play test session with Paizo on Friday.

So what was completed? Here’s the list from Goblinworks itself.

• At log in, the player can select a Wizard, Rogue, Cleric, or Fighter to play at 4th level (with prebuilt stats and wearing appropriate gear).
• Each class has at least one weapon with a full set of attacks.
• Once logged in, the player can run around a multi-hex area with different hexes having their own escalation Strength.
• Each hex is appropriately populated with monsters due to the escalation cycle.
• There are two escalation cycles running, originating from different monster hexes.
• There are two settlement hexes, showing different stages of advancement.
• Players can get loot from treasure chests spread across the hexes.
• In combat, players can take advantage of different states and effects on the target and use attacks to put those on the target.
• Characters can earn achievements for completing goals in game.
• Players will have some number of XP they can spend at trainers in the settlements to purchase additional skills that require achievements to unlock.

Dancy notes that “some of the moving pieces still have to fit together”, but the team managed to meet the experience goals that they levied on themselves. Class stats were crafted by hand and currently have appropriate weapons, animations, and visuals.

So what about that alpha? The short version is that if all goes well it should be getting underway in April. Barring that, the target is sometime in Q2 2014.

“The question that everyone is asking is "when will Alpha testing begin?" Our answer is early in the 2nd quarter of 2014! The next quarter's milestone is targeted at getting us ready to begin Alpha testing and we expect that we will start that test in April. Right now we do not have firm dates or a process for how players will get access to the Alpha or how our Kickstarter backers who paid for Alpha access will be prioritized into the testing—those are all questions we'll answer in the first quarter as we determine critical system features like how much load we can put on the servers and what kinds of system requirements we need for testers, etc. We feel very confident right now in our processes and procedures.”

Source: Pathfinder Blog