It's been close to year since Element TD 2 officially released. Since then, we've added Quad Element Towers, applied numerous balance patches, added tons of Quality-of-Life features, done a bunch of bug fixes, and more!
However, we still have plans for more content. We did some posts last year about this (What's next for Element TD 2 & Roadmap - Next Few Versions); this post will be also addressing those things + other stuff we're unfortunately not committing to, and reasons for said things.
Mazing DLC
Since our announcement last year about Mazing DLC, many of you have expressed curiosity and excitement about it, and thus far we've remained largely silent. Most of our work in the past half year has gone to Version 1.4's Quad Towers and addressing fixes for it, so we still don't have anything to show you for Mazing yet; however, we can confirm it's in-progress and in a working state.
Due to the amount of content we're packing into this mode, it will be sold as a DLC. We don't have an exact price for it yet, but we can confirm it'll contain the following things:
- 2 Chapters worth of a Mazing Campaign
- Mazing versions of at least 8 FFA/Teams Maps & 3 Co-op Maps
- Mazing Leaderboards
- For multiplayer, only the host will be required to have the Mazing DLC; everyone without the DLC will be able to join their games.
Expect Mazing DLC to release Q3 2022!
More Maps
Our our Discord, we recently announced we'll be adding new maps to the game, and have since created a #map-ideas channel for people to post their ideas. Many of you have responded with numerous map designs, both for FFA/Teams & Co-op.
Not every one of these will be included (that'd be way too many), but we're looking to add a good few in the next update. In addition to these maps, this update will also include:
- Variants & Reversed versions of maps given new wave orders
- Improved Map Selection
- Improved Lobby & Lobby List UI
- More balance updates tailored towards making Quads a supplement to the game, not a requirement
With this update, not only will there be new maps to play with, but some of the existing maps that have been overshadowed will receive some love, too.
The More Maps Update is coming in Version 1.6 and will see a release by Early May, possibly sooner.
Cancelled Plans
Now to address the downer news. In the past, we've promised updates to certain parts of our game that we wanted to add more of. However, in the interests of prioritizing stuff that benefits the larger playerbase (like the above two updates), or things that are simply "too late to add", we've had to cancel plans for these things.
Chapter 5 of the Campaign
For those of you that have played all the way through the Campaign, you'll know that the later missions are somewhat ridiculous in scale, especially all of Chapter 4. Not only that, but the amount of upgrade points you eventually get lets you create some truly game-breaking builds by the end (if you know what you're doing).
In order to extend the Campaign by another full Chapter, it'd involve maintaining a somewhat similar scale, while also addressing how powerful your upgrades are at that point. Each mission of Chapter 4 already took an insane amount of time to create, and that'd only get worse for Chapter 5. Ultimately, we've deemed it's not worth the roughly estimated 4-6 months it'd take to extend the existing Campaign.
Instead, we'll be pouring our efforts into the Mazing Campaign that'll be introduced in the Mazing DLC, as noted above. It'll start the upgrade tree over but progress faster than the original campaign. Expect that to be roughly the length of Chapters 2 & 3 combined.
Ranked Teams
This one's been requested quite a bit. The reason we haven't added this though is because our backend for Ranked only supports 1v1, and the effort it'd take to support 2v2 is more than it sounds like. Plus, until we figure out the eternal Desync Issue, Ranked Teams would suffer from that far more than current Ranked already does.
An Actual Tutorial
To be frank about this one, the main reason we haven't added a full-blown tutorial to the game is, well... it should've been implemented from the start. We know the game is fairly unintuitive to learn, and while the early Campaign somewhat addresses some basics, it's a far cry from what's necessary.
However, that doesn't mean we're giving up on this entirely. Expect to see more tips on the loading screen, as well as tips in the Customize Towers section of the game. We may also find other UI upgrades to the game that could help out. There's also a Beginner's Guide in our Steam Guides section.
Expanding War Mode
Contrary to the lack of support on our end for War Mode, we actually really like this mode. Unfortunately, it hasn't exactly taken off, and it has its own set of problems that make it more problematic to deal with than the standard game. We do have a few things left we're going to try for fixing this mode (like higher Base HP & HP Scaling), but other than that, plans for 4v4 War Mode and other expansions to it have been dropped, sadly.
Workshop Support
This has easily been the most requested feature to get added to the game. Ultimately, the reason we can't add it though is because our backend does not support it at all. In order to do so, we'd have to do some major overhauls, which would not only take forever, but would be likely to break a lot of things, thus taking yet more time.
As always, we'll continue to support the game with our usual updates. Balance, QoL, bug fixes, new cosmetics, etc. And we're still trying to track down that elusive Desync Issue, as always. If you've got any logs and replays that can help us track it down, hop onto our Discord Server and post them in #bug-reports.
Thanks for reading our giant wall-of-text, and hope you look forward to our future updates!