Dear Traveller,
Book of Travels is nearing its one month anniversary on the market, and while there definitely has been ups and downs, we've thoroughly enjoyed watching you explore Braided Shore so far. We're also listening intensely to what you have to say about our game, and what your biggest points of concern are.
Right now we gauge that permadeath is causing a lot of headaches for many players. We know that it has been a controversial topic for some players since the start, and we've expressed our thoughts on it in terms of the design philosophy behind it before. The real issue isn't even that the game currently has permadeath, but that because of the nature of Early Access there are bugs in the game that could cause the player to die through no fault of their own. I've personally talked to some of you that have had hundreds of hours of playtime go to waste because of technical issues. Obviously, that's not fair.
What are we going to do about it, one might wonder?
What we're doing about it
Starting beginning of next week, we're going to turn off death entirely, making it impossible to die at all. This may seem like an inelegant solution to a larger problem, but we want to stop unnecessary loss of Traveller lives as soon as possible and preferably without taking too much resources from the fixing of bugs and polishing efforts of our team. We discussed several alternatives to this solution, but ultimately we decided that this would cause the least frustration for our players.
We're also going to revive every character that has already died up until this point. This probably won't happen at the same time as death is disabled, but we're aiming for this to be done within a few days of the update rolling out. Please note that while your dead characters indeed will come back to life next week, their inventory will sadly have been wiped. This is an unfortunate side effect of the revival that we couldn't get around. However, any equipped gear should still be there, as should any items stored in a storage box.
We've said before that permadeath isn't holy to us. We've been experimenting with various ideas of how to make ghost gameplay more interesting and we've talked about implementing cool ways for Travellers to revive fallen players through special quest lines or rituals. The problem is that these things take time to get realised, and eliminating the risk of dying completely is simply the fastest way for us to put a stop to players having their characters lost unfairly right now.
We're not considering this a permanent solution. Our goal in the long run is to have death play a role to give our game the sense of tension we strive for but how that looks in practice is impossible to say with any certainty right now. Today we're only concerned with limiting player frustration.
Best wishes,
Oliver & the Dev Team
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1152340/Book_of_Travels/
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Unique Stories
When you play Book of Travels there is no linear questline, instead every player will have their own journey and stories to tell. Find out more about how our game design works to make your journey unlike any other...
Revealing the Early Access World
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