Just dropping in for a quick (not-so-quick) update.
As I mentioned previously we ran into a bit of an issue that caused a delay in the live update "Turn of Tides". Long story short we had some performance issues that required a decent amount of work to correct. While it's ok on a beta branch, we did not feel comfortable putting things out to the live game in it's current state. So we thought it be good to let you all know what's been going on and where we stand.
Things worked on during the delay:
- Put in Retrofitting (Adding new content to old worlds)
- Improving the reaction of land creatures to the water environment. (fixing things like bosses just walking towards the player even though they are stuck on the shore)
- Improved creature pathfinding when dealing with the water. (So they may or may go around a body of water, fly or swim across it if they can, depending on the situation)
- Ocean related stability improvements. (lag)
In progress:
- Making sure controller is properly supported for boating
- Improving the visuals of the water. (Separating biomes, putting an edge to the world.)
- Redesigned the gameplay of boat, mast, anchor and steering wheel for more interesting Ocean navigation.
We have done a lot of work that will prepare for future content so we do not expect upcoming content to experience this type of delay. We expect all future content to come on a regular schedule from here on out. We will have more details on that next week.
Console players:
Because of the complexity in the changes that were made to the game, we need extra time to get this update out to console. We expect this to take an additional 3-4 weeks (hopefully less), and we will update you with the expected date as soon as we submit to cert and have a better handle on what the date will be.
We are very sorry for this and we know this is going to be disappointing, but we believe that given the extent of the changes we are making to the game, we need the extra time to make sure everything is ready.
And More:
We have also been working on a few other things. These things are mostly outside of the content team and doesn't affect the current content plan, but we have something new for you today.
We have been working on a system that will allow you to collect "points" on your account by doing various things like subscribing to our Youtube or following us on Twitter and then use those points to get items. Currently we will be using this to distribute our out of cycle Twitch items rather than selling them as we had previously suggested. This allows players to get what they missed before or just get them without going through Twitch.
The first version of this can be found on our accounts page here: https://accounts.klei.com/account/rewards
In the future we will update the rewards program with new ways to earn more points and pick up cool rewards they may have missed, or even possibly entirely new stuff. Let us know what you think here.
That's all I have for now. Thanks everybody, have fun out there!