Hello and Happy New Year to everyone in the Distant Worlds 2 community.
As before, Elliot and I would like to thank our players for their patience and support since Distant Worlds 2 was released. 2023 saw our first two expansions for Distant Worlds 2 along with four Major updates (Aurora, Hyperspeed, Discovery and Fleet).
We continued improving DW2 with the Stellar, Game Faction and Maintenance updates in 2024, along with the release of our first feature expansion, Return of the Shakturi. Thus in 2024 customers received faction refreshes and many, many game improvements and fixes for free along with the one big Shakturi expansion.
We hope you have been enjoying Return of the Shakturi and we’re excited to share with you what’s coming next for Distant Worlds 2.
The Current State of the Game
We’ve continued to put a large part of our effort into ongoing free updates for the DW2 community to keep improving the game, rather than just focusing on DLC content or locking everything behind expansions. As a result, the base game is much improved and continuing to improve over time. We continue to improve almost all gameplay areas as well as the AI, which saw major improvements as part of the work on Return of the Shakturi and would run circles around the empire AI at release.
There has been a lot of positive feedback about our free base faction refreshes and I’m glad to say that these will continue, with the next two just around the corner. We have the Boskara and the Zenox due to be refreshed in the next official update by the end of Q1 2025, which includes some texture fixes for the Boskara ships and stations and a major overhaul of the look of the Zenox ships and stations. The Teekans and Haakonish should follow by the end of 2025, leaving the Ackdarians as the final base game faction to refresh, likely next year.
Return of the Shakturi took a great deal of our time, but we think the results were worth the effort. As a result of that, we are already planning our next Feature Expansion while we finish the upcoming Atuuk and Wekkarus DLC, which we expect to officially announce soon. Both of these factions have some very unique gameplay which we think you will enjoy and they also have some unique lore and gameplay that interacts with the Return of the Shakturi expansion.
While we are a very small team, we are committed to both expanding the game with new DLCs and expansions but also continuing to update and improve the base game through our ongoing free updates. We want to make sure everyone who purchased DW2 can enjoy it to its fullest on their system and for their playstyle.
Roadmap 2025
We are happy to share our journey with you, along with the roadmap outlining the next steps for this year.
Our next areas to focus on:
- Update the base factions in the game, one by one, to a similar level as the recently released DLCs when it comes to faction and government gameplay differentiation. Completed for the Humans and Mortalen, Boskara and Zenox are almost finished. Teekan and Haakonish should follow late this year and the Ackdarians are last in line, probably in 2026 to complete the base faction refresh.
- Continuing improvements on fleet and ship behavior. There have been major improvements and fixes for the fleet and ship AI as part of the Return of the Shakturi, which was in the base game updates, though it always seems that there’s another corner case or two to address. We still plan to also add more guidance for fleet and ship tactical settings as well as more detail in the galactopedia to help players understand how to use their fleets.
- Further improvements to pathing issues as well as pathfinding performance. We made some significant improvements here during 2024 and the more recent reports suggest that pathfinding issues are far less frequent now, but some remain especially when starting a path from deep space and near nebulas. Additional improvements are planned after the next official update.
- Improve the AI further. As part of the Return of the Shakturi work, we greatly improved the AI in many areas including economic management and diplomatic/military strategy. As always, there’s more that can be done. We still need to improve the population policy side, specific to slavery but also other policies. We plan to revisit the design of these in the future and also improve the AI’s management of population policies.
- Improve quality of life for manual players further. We have just added support for queued orders in the first public beta update for 2025. We’ve also added a map search function to the exploration menu along with a few other features to help with manual exploration. We have a list of additional improvements for manual play which we will be working through as the year progresses.
- Improve message handling and awareness further. We added a new much more detailed message filtering system with separate message centers in 2024, including a new combat overlay to help with spotting battle activity during wars and a separate message center for advisor messages. We are still working to add the ability to tell an advisor “do not suggest this again” or to tell a Pirate or an Empire “do not contact me again with this offer” to help further reduce message spam.
- Adding a Galactopedia and Galaxy map Search function. We now have a galaxy map search aand a distance measurement tool. The Galactopedia search will be coming in an update this year.
- Modding support will continue to be a priority. We’ve expanded this greatly since release, including the addition of an in-game mod manager, Steam Workshop support and much better handling of multiple mods. We also recently added support for code modding and deobfuscated more methods to better support localization mods for more complex languages.
- There are also other reported issues beyond those above which we will also address as we go forward, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are our current highest priority goals. We have been compiling master lists of all issue reports by category and as our time allows, we work our way through these areas to make sure we continue to improve the player experience with DW2.
Future Expansions
As always, the Content and Art teams are not heavily involved in most of the game fixes we’ve been working through, so they have been spending most of their time working on future releases.
Our first priority is the Atuuk and Wekkarus DLC, which will release in early Q2 2025. Stay tuned for our official announcement in Q1 which will reveal the exact release date and more details about these new factions. Each of them has unique new gameplay features and interesting lore that ties into the DW2 and Shakturi storylines.
The Wekkarus are among the most ancient and mysterious aliens in DW2 with possible connections to the Shakturi. The Atuuk are space lemmings of a sort who were just barely smart enough to figure out FTL. This DLC will work fine whether you have “Return of the Shakturi” or not, but will have some additional features/content related to that expansion if you have it. If you don’t like what the Shakturi psychic abilities can do to you when they show up, you will probably love playing as the Atuuk, who are almost entirely resistant to psychic effects.
We are also in the planning stages for the next feature expansion and I can tease that it will at last bring playable Pirates to DW2. We won’t be announcing that officially until much later this year as we are still working through the design. We expect it to be a 2025 release.
Work has also begun on the fourth "Factions" DLC. All we can say about that now is that it includes the Securans and the Naxxilians and will likely release in 2026.
Update Schedule
It will generally take 6-12 weeks of public beta updates to get to an update that is stable enough to become official. For 2025, we expect to release public beta updates roughly every two weeks and new free official updates every 3 months or so, though there may be a slow down in that schedule once the Pirate expansion work gets into high gear.
Our Thanks
Thank you again if you took the time to read all of this and for your support of Distant Worlds 2. Please check in regularly going forward and try the newest beta updates if you’d like to see how things are shaping up.
Please stay tuned for more information on Atuuk and Wekkarus DLC in Q1 and more on the Pirate Expansion and future DLCs later this year.
Sincerely,
Erik Rutins and Elliot Gibbs
Matrix Games and CodeForce