Originally posted by Bigfoot on the official forums.
Hello folks,
I’m here to give a much needed update on Through the Ages. Over the last year, we’ve been working on this expansion, and while the team was often pulled to help get Reign of Giants and Caves properly integrated, they’ve been busy developing and prototyping different mechanics for TTA.
One of the most important processes we have at Klei is the process of experimentation. For example, Mark of the Ninja used to be a puzzle game, Invisible, Inc. started life as a mobile game. Don’t Starve itself used to look like this.
This is why TTA has taken so long -- we spent a lot of time trying new things. Some of the things worked, while many of them seemed interesting on paper but ended up not being very good in practice.
One of our biggest concerns has been making large scale changes in one go without the constant feedback of the community. We hoped that a major expansion could provide a lot of the things we all feel DST could benefit from: more creatures, more long term challenges, more ways to cooperate, more ways to manage servers, more lore, and so on. We still feel that the game could benefit from these things, but we are concerned about the impact of adding everything all at once. We decided that doing this incrementally, with your feedback, is the better way to go.
That’s why, starting this Thursday, we are going to restart an old tradition: regularly scheduled updates! In addition, to better represent the content in these updates, we will no longer be using the name “Through the Ages,” this series of updates will be known as “A New Reign”, and it will be delivered to you every 3 weeks for the next 6 months.
We also know that some players don’t want to be forced through the process as we’re changing the game rapidly, so we will be putting the updates in a Beta branch that anyone can subscribe to. Every so often, once the features are stable, we will merge them back into the main branch.
Here’s the first update poster to get us going!
To recap:
- Instead of continuing to work on Through the Ages for several more months, we are going to release content every 3 weeks starting this week.
- The content we’re delivering will now be call A New Reign
- A New Reign will be available on a Beta branch, and merged back into main every so often
- A New Reign starts this week, and will continue for the next 6 months.
Once again, I really appreciate the constant feedback -- game development is never easy, and as a studio we keep trying to push the boundaries, and often that throws our plans awry. Thanks again for being such a great, supportive community. I really appreciate it.