Fellow adventurers,
First and foremost, with the most recent update we added Load & Save function as well as the ability to adjust the animations speed and fixed a couple of other bugs. Full Changelog here
Today, we would like to address your comments about the state of the Early Access content-wise, including our plans for future updates.
We have a long road ahead of us and being in Early Access brings its own challenges with it. We are fully aware that our game lacks certain features that one might expect at Early Access start. Surely, this can be partly attributed to us working much longer than anticipated on the Load & Save feature as stated in our first statement.
But there’s more to the story.
We went into Early Access, knowingly that the game was missing certain features. Our goal was and will always be to include the community as closely as possible to the development of the title. This has proven to be a great success for ADOM and we are certain, in the long run, this will also prove to be true for Ultimate ADOM.
You may think “So, why not wait a couple of months?”
This time, we don’t want to be in a situation, where people ask for features and we can’t add them anymore, because the games code prohibits it at one point. For example, in the original ADOM we would have loved to add more features, but since the code is in parts very confusing and prone to bugs and errors, we thought we do it right from the get-go this time. This means involving the community as early as possible and presenting a development roadmap, so we stay more flexible when it comes to feedback. We really want to encourage you to share your feedback with us, we are listening on Steam, on the forums, on social media, everywhere! So please keep it coming.
Additionally we spent a long time – longer than anticipated – to develop a “fantasy physics engine” that will allow us to rather easily add features rarely if ever seen in most roguelikes: animating anything in the world and imbibing it with life based on its physical properties is one such example, being able to graft body-parts to gain special powers bestowed by the body of the original monster is another one and we don’t just want to stop there. Being able to combine these things (e.g. animating a plate armor as a living construct, attaching orc arms wielding axes to it and sending it onto a rampage after coating it with poison) will create unique moments for the player. Not to mention the more mundane stuff like being able to burn any wooden thing, freeze liquids or have things float down a river. And that’s just the start. Now that the basics are in place, we will focus on adding more content. Experience with ADOM taught us that you, the community probably is going to have a ton of wild and crazy ideas we’d never be able to come up with. That’s what we are looking for.
Finally, we decided to try a new user interface approach. We strongly believe that roguelike games should not be confined to a niche. But classical roguelikes utilize convoluted UIs and are very hard to “get” for mainstream gamers. So, we decided to deviate from my established roguelike standards in order to widen our audience and the attention for roguelikes in general. We knew that the hardcore fans of ADOM initially probably would disagree with some of our more aggressive changes (diagonal movement, I hear you) but we still believe that the combination of a number of features (four-way movement, automatic detection of secret doors, 90% transparency regarding monster and item stats, etc.) deserve to be tested in-depth. As well as a user interface that really tries to work for keyboard, mouse and controller – or any combination thereof. Such an endeavor requires constant feedback. And that’s yet another reason why we didn’t want to start in a much more complete state: Late changes cost a lot more time and money than changes based on early feedback.
We understand that the initial lack of content might feel underwhelming. The underlying game engine now is in a state that allows for very quick progress and creative ideas delivered by the community are one of our great motivators. Rest assured, you can expect more content, more bug fixes and more quality-of-life improvements within the next couple of days and weeks, as we work tirelessly to deliver an ADOM worthy experience.
Thank you for your support and patience so far.
Thomas Biskup
(Ultimate) ADOM Maintainer