What are we currently working on? - A few words about coming changes
Tutorials
As you know there are 2 more tutorials being produced. One of them won’t be here till the full release. We decided to limit them and trust you, the player to use the knowledge and find a way to use it in practice. We were on the edge with the 4th tutorial because the new players won’t get any ideas on how to use Black Market in an optimal way. Nevertheless, we decided to leave it without comments and suggestion about the player’s tactic. We feel that even without a good idea how to use Black Market player can still enjoy the game and win on easier difficulties, even if this feature is required to win the game on the harder difficulties.
Same with 5th, we tried to show different paths for the player, but after all decided to deliver only information about more advanced game rules and a few observations, which can help the player to better understand if the current strategy is a good or bad one in the long term.
This way the tutorial won’t teach anybody how to win and its goal is only to present the rules and show the player how certain mechanics works, without telling if something is a good or a bad thing to do. We believe that the learning curve won’t be too long for the new players to make them confused or annoyed because each tutorial will be introduced after certain missions in the career mode. This also means that the first missions in the career mode may be a little bit too easy for the players who spend some time with Archeo, like more than 5 hours.
Career Narrative
Yes, the career story and narrative. The first impressions weren’t good, we needed to scrap it and assemble it again. The quality assurance flagged the story as the weak spot for the game and we decided to delay the voice over to polish the narrative. Due to the QA statement, we decided to test the story on a closed group of testers, which wasn’t easy because not all parts of it were implemented, but after all, we received some feedback. Our main problem is that the story isn’t clear enough, especially for people who don’t have knowledge in the field of history and archeology. What’s more, testers felt that the story lacks a good transition between missions.
To address those problems we rebuild the story, maybe not from the beginning, but we tried to make it more clear and easy to understand. The main change is 5 new animation clips, which will appear before each mission. We also merged ending with epilog to capture the essence and cut the unnecessary transition time (and confusion, because the ending did not answer a crucial question). Those changes for sure will extend the time period before the release, but that’s the price of the quality.
And the opponents will talk less during the career mode. We decided to capture their personalities in a few personal letters to the player and merged it with informative letters to spare the player void words without any impact on the actual game. The digressions will appear only in letters between career missions in order to keep the player focused on the current task. We also limited Institution presence in the story, we are going to reference it very often, but it won’t be an active interlocutor. This way we will give you a more condensed story, fewer digressions and more space for the gameplay.
Career Assets System
This system will allow the player to take something from one mission and use it in the second one. We are polishing it and testing its impact on the gameplay. It’s a really straight forward process, but we need to set some limitations, like that the player can’t take legendary explorers. The system is easy to understand and similar to the equipping explorers before the expedition, but in this case, the player is equipping the main character with explorers before the mission. But we don’t want to stop on explorers, we want more options, like lands or cash.
Text correction and minor adjustments
We’re still working on text correction and more. Actually, most of those adjustments will be released in the next update in May. We’ve added 20 tips to the base of Cuppy commentary to help players better understand the game. And we certainly don’t want to give you a reason to turn Cuppy commentary on again. The legendary explorer’s specialization will be correlated with his life story (John Dillinger wasn’t a geologist, and it’s rather funny to see him with 100 Geology and 20 in Combat Capability. However, it’s funny only for the first time, but later on, it becomes a little bit annoying. Well… according to our lead game designer, it’s super annoying, but we can’t quote him on that because he used mean words to flag this problem).
There’s also a minor bug with the forecasts, the player can open the forecast’s tab only once per round now, it’s obviously a bug and it will be fixed too.
The flavour texts
We won’t discuss this topic here, if you want to learn more about that you can find it here ->
and here ->
Flavour texts in a nutshell - There will be 3 texts for each standard expeditions, but we are still working on it, because we want them to make sense and don’t contradict anything, like the random events in the letters after the expeditions.
Cheers!