The Road Ahead
Our Early Access development roadmap has been a constantly evolving, flexible plan of action. With the help of the feedback we get from the community, we have the luxury of being able to judge which changes or features are needed most, and which can probably be pushed back to make way for the most critical updates. We evaluate the state of the game on a daily basis, and discuss the general sentiments of our players routinely. While this is great for the flow of valuable content into the game, it's not so great for being able to communicate to you, the player, what to expect by a certain date or exactly when a certain feature is going to be implemented. What we can do, however, is update you on our current plan and what you can expect from the future of Faeria in the broadest strokes possible. So, let's do that!
Free to Play timeline
As previously announced on our Steam store page, our goal is to open the game to all players for free by September – and this will definitely still happen. However, Free to Play does not necessarily mean the end of Early Access. One of the main barriers to opening these floodgates is our overall server stability and infrastructure. When Free to Play arrives, it means we are confident enough in our server infrastructure, client stability, and team size to scale up our testing and gain even more feedback as we work toward version 1.0, also known as full release and the end of Early Access.
What version number is Faeria right now?
If you look at the bottom left of your screen every time you start the game, you'll notice something close to the following number: "0.7.6044.18878". That's a lot of digits - but the first two are the most important for the purposes of this discussion: "0.7". Without going into the technical details of how our versioning system works, you can consider the current big picture version of Faeria to be v0.7 at this very moment.
In order to get to v1.0, we have two important numbers to reach first:
- v0.8 (launched with Free to Play)
- v0.9
Each of these versions will come with an important milestone, feature, or improvement that warrants such a change of the most significant digit.
In the next few weeks we will reveal the exact date Faeria will be going Free to Play. The release of Free to Play will coincide with what we will be declaring to be version v0.8.
Version 1.0 (and the end of Early Access) is expected to be ready within the next 6 months, which places v0.9 somewhere in between.
While we aren't spoiling the specific details of what to expect for each of these version numbers, we can tell you that there will be at least 10 new cards added between now and v1.0. As with Three Wishes, all cards added during the Early Access period will count as part of the "core set" and will therefore be given free to anyone who purchases or has purchased the current Core Set.
After the end of Early Access, the price of the core set (with all of the newly added cards) will change to $75, however if you want to purchase it at the current price of $50 you can certainly still do this until v1.0.
The first expansion cards
Any new cards released after v1.0 will come as part of expansions. Cards released in expansions will not be a part of the core set, and will not be available to purchase directly in the way that the core set currently is.
We know everyone is hungry for more details regarding expansions, and we of course will share more information about these when the time comes closer. For now, please understand that driving expansion content will be one of our primary focuses after release. We recognize the importance of putting shiny new toys into the toy box as often as possible. The first full-blown expansion can be expected within a few months of the release of v1.0.
Pandora
Pandora has, and still is, being vigorously tested and we'll give you news on the upcoming update very soon!
Steam store page update
We have recently updated our Steam store page to reflect the above information more clearly. In the process of doing this, we have shifted around some of the previously listed features we hoped would make it into v1.0, but now are slated as post-release content or features.
In addition to this, a couple things have been removed altogether in order for the Steam store page to match up more completely with our current development plans. Fully integrated tournaments, console, and mobile versions have been pushed to post v1.0 development, while betting in-game currency on matches and server-unique cards have been removed from the list of stops on our roadmap. It's not to say that these two features will never make it into the game, but after understanding more about what our players really need it's become clear to us that these components are not critical features needed in Faeria.
There are some great additions on our internal roadmap that aren't yet announced, but if you have specific feature requests that you haven't already told us about, why not write something in this thread on our Boards
We hope you now have a more complete picture of what to expect for the rest of our Early Access period and beyond. If you've read this far, you clearly have a vested interest in Faeria's future, and we thank you for that. We think it's very important to keep you as up to date as possible in our ever-evolving development schedule. As always: Keep doing what you're doing, and let us know what you think.
The Faeria Team