Howdy, partners!
We are very thankful to every Pioneer who joined us in our last playtest! Overall, it's been a good one, and many of you thoroughly enjoyed building your frontier town.
While you were busy increasing your potato production, we were analysing your feedback. Here's some of what we found.
The First Quest
From the data we gathered, we learned that 45% of you have dropped off during the very first quest.
Digging in, we found two things. Quest descriptions and guidance were inconsistent, and players who turned tutorial assistance off were left with very little to go on. So we reworded the first quest, rebalanced it so you can't lock yourself out of progress early on, and added the ability to switch the Tutorial Assistant back on after you've turned it off.
In addition to that, to support those of you who prefer to play without guidance, we have added dynamic prompts. They appear after you're inactive for a while and point you toward the relevant video and written guides - in case you're feeling lost.
These changes went live during the playtest, and we noticed that players progressed further into the game more frequently!
Early Game Pacing
Plenty of you told us the early hours dragged, and the loggers-to-kitchen production chain came up again and again. We hear ya; that set of buildings left you standing around waiting on resources for way too long.
For the Early Access release, we're reducing the cost of every building available in your first two hours of play, and we've adjusted Journey Points and tech tree costs to support this. We are hoping this will make the process smoother. We hope you will let us know!
The Road System
This playtest introduced a new iteration of the road system: updated tools and reworked logic behind how roads connect. Most of you enjoyed this upgrade, especially compared to the demo. What came up as a problem was road deletion.
In the original version, you had to trim the road only from the end. This proved to be quite restricting to many of you. With your feedback in hand, we are now looking into improving the system to support free trimming anywhere along the road, including the middle.
Your Suggestions
Most of them revolved around one problem - way too much clicking around even for simpler tasks. We are still working out the details here, but we wanted to let you know that the team is looking into improving this!
Thank you again to everyone who took part in the playtest. It really does make a difference.
We hope to see you all next week on the 25th for the Wild West Pioneers Early Access release!
