Hello, Extinction Elites!
It’s time for another update. This time, I’m going to be a little more future-focused and talk about some of the exciting stuff on the horizon.
As always, the State of the Game letter’s goal is to provide an open channel between you and us. Feel free to reach out at any time in the Discord.
What we are (and have been) doing
As you no doubt have seen, we will be coming to Xbox Preview very soon! Releasing on three platforms (Win10, Xbox One, Series X/S) at the same time is a very challenging task, so a lot of our development team has been focusing on that.
Once Xbox has been released, content for both Steam and Xbox versions will be on parity. This means that we will be sim-shipping everything on both versions as we go through Early Access/Preview together. It also means that game updates will take a little longer in between than what we’ve done in the past with our PC-only version. However, we will keep an eye on any PC-specific fixes that need to be made (such as addressing crashes).
With Xbox on the horizon, we also feel pretty confident in presenting the main features coming for this year - so take a look at our roadmap!
What we will be doing
Our year will be pretty intense; the roadmap graphic doesn’t include all we are doing! In-game communications, a better tutorial experience, and gamepad mapping are some of the most requested features from our playerbase, so we’re happy to put them up there. Cross-play is another exciting feature that is a first for Avalanche Studios in general.
There is also a myriad of other suggestions, improvements, features, and tweaks that aren’t shown on the map but are things we are working on - we just don’t have an ETA on delivery yet. Also, we will keep looking at gameplay information and the community polls to help tweak a lot of systems. Having more things to do in Expedition Mode, as an example, is something we heard you say in our Discord poll a few weeks back.
Speaking of polls, we’re going to start with some more formal surveys about your feelings towards aspects of the game. We will be assessing the launch readiness of the title based on these surveys, so I would like to strongly encourage you to take the time to fill them out as best you can. They’re not long or scary, I promise! In fact, here is the link for the first one, where we ask you about our difficulty settings:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Pre-season3
It’s only open until March 18.
Seasonal Contracts
This bears its own category! We goofed and put the wrong date as the deadline for Preseason 2 contract completion. We can see that some of you missed out on completing the contracts, and therefore receiving the rewards, including the very awesome Rosy Hornet skin.
We’re working on a resolution for this. The way the contracts were designed was that they would only be active during a certain time period. It’s not easy to just flick a switch, and they’re back. But we will find a way to allow those contracts to be completed and associated rewards to be earned in-game to a reasonable extent.
We’re also aware that Xbox players are wondering if they have missed out on the Preseason rewards that have already been released and will be released before the Xbox launch. Don’t worry; we have thought of this scenario, and we won’t be punishing Xbox players for waiting! We’ll have more information on how these rewards will be earned at a later date, but I will need to stress that these events will be Xbox-exclusive, as Steam players have already had the opportunity to do the Preseason content.
One Final Note
As always, if you experience any bugs, technical issues, or problems, please reach out to our Customer Service team for assistance. We want to make sure the game is stable and works for everyone who has the requisite specs, and the more information we have, the better our game will be.
Thank you for being a part of our Early Access journey, and see you in Discord!
Cheers,
Julianne Harty
Product Owner
P.S. Take the survey!