One of the frustrations often expressed is new content when?. As our community knows, we have spent several months looking at the tech in use in the game, rebuilding systems etc to hopefully improve the general stability and performance of the game (we are aware some people still have an FPS drop). As we have been doing this we have continued to work on new content but we have not yet shown that new Content. To this end we feel its worth taking a look at exactly what is meant by Content and what we have been doing. The DLC Plan:
During our Kickstarter we released a Roadmap which included different Downloadable Content packs and the order they would be released in. With this map you now get some ideas of what areas of the game world we will release in each DLC pack. This takes us to what is meant by Content, as for a large number of players content = maps, and this is a very misleading way of looking at games. Often on our reviews we see people say there is nothing to do and yet we know there are players who have played for hundreds of hours. This is because content is often layered within each area, and until you dig past the first few layers you dont find the content that is hidden underneath. We realise that being unable to find that content is our fault, and that is why we needed to re-write some of the features to make it easier to reach the content. During development and Early Access the general process is you create some features, people use the features and the number of features in an area reflects a level of content. When people ask for more content, pushing out more areas with features that dont work just leads to more things not working. An easy example is our fire creation system. You can build fires anywhere, but we have some prebuilt fires you can just light yourself. If that is broken, having 20 zones with 20 broken fires makes little sense. So, it is important to make sure features work and are robust and useable before you use them at a large scale. With a quest creation system, if its broken and thus delivers broken quests, adding 20 new quests just leads to more broken quests and a higher level of frustration with our players that we dont want them to experience. Changeable clothing is a feature, 20 different cloaks are content. If clothing is broken having 20 different cloaks does not mean anything. This is why its important to us to get Features working correctly as and when we release content. This includes changing the way we explain features so the existing and new content we have already added around starting quests and exploring can be experienced the way we want. As we released new achievements, new storylines and quests are starting to be uncovered. Over the coming weeks the layers of content around the changing storyline will start to be unlocked. Some of it is already there, and some of you have found it. We have enjoyed seeing people piece together their theories and examining every piece of junk they find hoping it reveals some dark secret there is more to come...
Until then, Joe, COO