Originally posted by Ipsquiggle on the official forums.
Hello friends!
We haven't posted a roadmap since before launch, so it's about time we got you up to speed on what the future holds for ONI.
Recap
Oxygen Not Included dug its first lump of asteroid in a prototype over 5 years ago. Since that time it's had tens of thousands of additions and changes, from tiny tweaks to game-redefining sweeps. Systems have been added, systems have been removed, systems have been ripped up and rebuilt. With your help in Early Access, we guided the game from a basic thermal sim to an elaborate asteroid-spanning, fart-collecting epic!
Post-launch, we took time to recover and focused on bug fixes and performance for some time, while we figured out what was next for ONI. We feel like the game still has lots of room for growth and improvement, and there are so many ideas we'd like to try out!
So after a season of prototyping and planning, here's what we're up to:
DLC
Most of the team is hard at work right now building a DLC for ONI!
This DLC is going to be quite sizable, including new game systems and many refinements on the base game. Because we're introducing new systems, we want to take our time to test and iterate our ideas -- and throw out things that aren't working. This approach means that we can't predict when the DLC will be ready, but if everything goes well we'd like to have something to show during the summer, and the release would follow in the autumn after further testing and refinement.
We had ideas for new systems that we thought would be interesting to add to the game for a while, but because of the incremental nature of Early Access as well as the complexity of the game for new players, we decided not to to make these part of the base game. Putting new features into DLC allows us to more deeply integrate new systems, as well as give new players (or anyone!) an easy way to opt in to additional challenges and facets.
Overall we want to emphasize quality over deadlines, so this represents our plan at this moment. If the timeline changes, we will let you know!
Ongoing Updates and Bug Fixes
While all that happens, we want to make sure we're not ignoring you in the community, and continue to tend to the released version of the game. A portion of the team will still work to address bugs, take in feedback, and make sure the ONI that you are playing today constantly grows and improves.
As well, we want to periodically put out new content into the game in the form of free packs. The first of these was Meep's Recreation Pack in December, and there's another one going into public testing next week!
Performance
We know that ONI is a beast of a game, and we think we can still get some significant performance improvements out of it. Improving performance gets more challenging as we make progress, and all the obvious and easy things have been done now. We’re now at the stage where we come up with ideas, run experiments, and if the experiment is successful, try to work it into the game without breaking the gameplay.
The going is slow, but we're still hammering away at it, and look forward to releasing performance improvements to you as they happen!
In Summary
All in all, ONI is still fully in development, even if we've been pretty quiet from the outside! We're balancing live support with DLC development, and working to ensure that the DLC makes the game better and not just bigger.
We love this game and we're so glad that you love it too! Thank you so much for all your support and input over the years, and we look forward to working on ONI together with you from here into the future!