Hey there, fellow ylanders!
A lot of you have been asking about what will the updates beyond 1.7 bring and so today I would like to give you some information about 1.8, which will be mostly focused on polishing and adjusting.
As you know, we have been working really hard on making Exploration much better and some quite radical changes have been done. So far, you, the players, seem to like where we‘re headed, which is reassuring. However, the game can't be made better just by throwing in massive changes.
So far we have received literally thousands of pieces of feedback. Ideas on how to improve features. What you are missing. What you don‘t like.
You might have noticed (at least we hope you have :) ) that in every update we try to react to such feedback, but it‘s not enough. Because of the major features and big changes, there‘s usually not enough time to fix smaller things. Some may think that these things are not that important, that we would be better off adding feature X or Y. But the truth is that when there are many such things (and there are), the overall experience suffers. This may not be such a problem for a long time Ylands players who are already accustomed to some of our weird quirks, but this is something that needs to be taken care of before we try to attract more players back to our game.
And that‘s why 1.8 will be mainly about polishing. We are going through your feedback and deciding what are the things that you (and the game) need and which we haven‘t managed to fix. It can be a small annoying UI thing or something that a larger game system is missing (how can one have naval battles when ships can‘t be damaged...(sad) ). Just to give you some examples - an easier way to share games with other players, building improvements, being able to carry a torch while holding a weapon and much more.
So what would YOU like us to fix?
With 1.8 released we expect to feel good enough about the game so that we can start actively bringing new players into the game. We consider that a whole new chapter for Exploration.
So, that‘s it for today. I will see you next week and until then... stay healthy and classy, ylanders!