Original Post by the Creator of ADOM: Thomas Biskup himself:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1266820/discussions/0/3050608452021165961/
Dear community,
Our recent announcement of moving the production release date forward to end of August has raised questions and concerns. Only now we start to understand that we probably failed to communicate our strategy for Ultimate ADOM clear enough (although – after looking through older posts – we did communicate it from the very beginning).
Let me once more summarize our vision for Ultimate ADOM which basically is twofold:
- Our short-term goal was to create a new audience for a sequel to ADOM by addressing a more mainstream audience (people who regularly play RPGs but are not really into roguelikes). We felt that this move was an absolute necessity to be able to sustain the development of a modern graphical game worthy of a 21st century audience. Doing so requires higher investments compared to building a simpler pure ASCII based game. We always had the vision to prove that even a complex game of the nature of ADOM is mainstream-capable and can provide exciting new venues to players accustomed to such more classical RPG games out there.
- Our long-term goal (and this mirrors in the name prefix “Ultimate” we chose) was to build a much deeper ADOM that surpasses the original in every aspect: More stories, more complex story lines, more character options, more skills, more spells, more items, an extensive surface world and so on and so forth.
Our decision to move to production status is related to the short-term goal: We feel that Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos is very nearly complete enough (and detailed enough) for the needs of more mainstream gamers. Already now Ultimate ADOM in many areas (though certainly not all) by far surpasses ADOM Classic/Deluxe (and for the sake of completeness I will do an extensive comparison of where Ultimate ADOM already today has far more depth than the original ADOM had… and of the areas where it still needs to grow – expect it to show up in a day or three on our blog, we’ll announce it here, too).
For sure Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos is on a certain level a much simpler game than ADOM: It’s more focused on roughly 20 levels of play, you probably can win it within 3-6 hours based on your level of experience and it still has a wide variety of options to choose from and a wide variety of surprises waiting for you. It’s not quite yet where we want it to be for prime time but close enough according to our estimate. Three areas needed improvement:
- Melee
- Magic
- Overall balance, stability, performance and pacing
Comparing the player behavior from ADOM shows that Ultimate ADOM is already a much more accessible game than its predecessor. Especially new players make it deeper into the dungeons than ever before.
The plan so far has been to address melee aspects by 95% with the June release (which is out – and the game has become a lot more challenging although we still are fine-tuning some areas like critical hits by monsters), address magic with the July release and do the final tuning and polishing in August before production.
We’ll (again) slightly adjust this by focusing on performance and bugs for the next couple of weeks to prove that the game foundation is rock solid and then finish the content aspects mentioned above before production release.
I have to admit that we probably kind of fumbled communicating this vision clearly enough because the name “Ultimate…” already insinuates that the game will be better than ADOM in each and every aspect you can think of. This never has been our goal for the first step. Because neither Rome nor ADOM were built in a day. It took an extended period of time.
Which brings us to the second part of the vision – the long-term part: We do want to continue working on Ultimate ADOM for many years in order to surpass the original in every dimension. And we have a plan for that. But it takes time. So to put this very clearly:
- We want to continue developing Ultimate ADOM for an infinite amount of time if this is sustainable by any means.
- We want to release a lot more content updates addressing all dimensions of the game the old community craves and loves.
But we need time for that.
And to buy time we need a wider audience with different needs and requirements. Regarding the more mainstream audience we feel that the current offering is going to cater to their needs once the above-mentioned additions have been addressed before the August release.
And then it’s hopefully “to the moon”.
Our content and idea backlog is crammed full for years to come. And we’d love to do this journey together. But our vision never was to simply to ADOM once again “just with better graphics”. It’s far more extensive and we just have taken the very first step.
So once more the brief summary:
- We cater to two audiences: more mainstream gamers and the classical community that helped make ADOM great.
- The more mainstream community now gets their full production release in August.
- We acknowledge, that there is still content to come and we want to assure that we will support the game post release as much as possible, but this will also be tied to how well the game performs financially after release.
- The next two milestones are a “bug & performance release in July” and the “magic update & combat fine-tuning release” (with some cool yet unannounced surprises) for the August production release. We changed our priorities here due to your very clear feedback, which we absolutely agree with!
- We probably should have spent a lot more time communicating this two-part vision in a clearer way. Sorry for being confusing or not transparent enough. But sitting in our rabbit hole for some reason we failed to notice this.
Hopefully this somewhat clears up the confusion, explains our thought processes. We welcome all questions and concerns and will try to be as transparent as possible.
Thanks & Axes High!
Thomas Biskup