Well! This is a milestone that is... only a year late. Seriously, I was supposed to have my part of the work done for this last May, not this May.
But the wait has definitely been worth it, as the amount of content, and the refinement of everything in and around this release, has grown seemingly exponentially.
Have question, or just want to connect with other players? Please do join us on discord: https://discord.gg/arcengames
Zenith Onslaught
This expansion is the largest in the history of our company, and that's really saying something. It got so large at one point that it had to be split in half, and it's STILL the largest ever for us (admittedly, after the split it did grow a huge amount again).
Willard "Badger" Davis has been the mastermind behind the exciting new features in this DLC, chiefly the very complicated and interesting factions, but also the new AI types, map types, and bringing features like nomad planets into this game.
Zeus Almighty took up the mantle of lead on unit balance and detailed unit design, with major assistance from CRCGamer and ArnaudB, who also had a lot of major new contributions of their own. That has left me more room to focus on art, even though that did kind of triple the artwork load (and make me also want to make some revisions and additions to the art in the base game).
All of this would not have been possible without our awesome testers, who provided a constant flow of feedback for weeks, months or even up to a full year in some cases. Now that we're about to have such a wider audience for this expansion, we are standing by to react to things that people might find that the 20 or so of the rest of us missed, though.
The art in this expansion is something I'm really proud of, and is showcased well in the trailer for it:
https://youtu.be/G3lCUvB5VuE
I made some really major engine extension to make DLC2 possible, both from an artistic standpoint and to support what Badger wanted to do with factions, nomads, etc. And for the new game mechanics that Zeus, CRC, and Arnaud were wanting for their units. I'm really excited to take these to new areas in the future.
Speaking of art in the future, there is more that I plan to make unique in the DLC2 art over the coming weeks, and also in the base game, and potentially a few revisions in the DLC1 area. Now that we have a lot of new capabilities, there's a lot more I want to do with it. The game looks great already, but expect some facelifts in a variety of areas, coming in batches over the next month or so. You can see those early in the watch_chris_art discord channel, typically.
Base Game
Most of the exciting things in the base game have been discussed recently as part of the Paradigm Shift update, so I'll just link you to there. If you're coming back after an extended absence, or you're just plain new in general, there are some excellent video tutorials in there if that's your sort of thing.
Since the 2.8 build a month or so ago, it's mostly been refinements and polishing as we've had a larger group of players enjoying the game.
Coming up in the next few months, we're going to start adding new game modes to the base game:
- Expert Mode, aimed at players who want to be forced to hold more disadvantageous territory (as with the first game), and have permanent campaign consequences for certain types of loss.
- Deathwish Mode, aka Strategic Sage mode, which will dial that up to 11.
- Sandbox Mode, for when you don't want to really participate, but just want to watch all the other factions doing their thing. Or you want to play, but mess around outside of the normal parameters that would be considered balanced.
We're also going to be bringing Interplanetary Weapons to the base game in the next couple of months, as well as Loadouts (basically kinda-sorta like modules). Those will also see some integration into a number of mods, and DLC1 in particular, but also a couple of units in DLC2.
Multiplayer
Multiplayer co-op has been feature-complete for months, but is still undergoing testing. The original intent was a simultaneous launch with Zenith Onslaught, but the novel heavily-multithreaded shared-simulation approach has required more testing time than expected. Please feel free to join in and share any feedback you have!
The multiplayer in this game required some novel design work that we hope can be useful to other developers; once we're past the last of the bugs we hope to present our findings so that other games in other genres can benefit from our work in making self-correcting mod-safe multi-threaded complex simulations of arbitrarily large sizes a reality. We expect no more than 1-2 more months of MP beta, as the bug count falls with weekly updates.
Last night was a major victory over one set of bugs that has been making the MP super unplayable for the last week or two after the MP part of the game had been a lot more stable for months. Go figure. At any rate, early word so far is that it's working great now, though there's still more bits and pieces to tidy up.
I would have loved to call MP done today, and say it's no longer beta right in time with this new DLC's launch, but I think it's more important to be honest there. It's a very late-stage beta, and there's a solid chance that you can play and have not too many issues (after last night's patch in particular). Right now it's mostly in a state of "when I hear about more bugs, I will fix them, but right now I don't know of anything major that is MP-specific."
Future DLCs
We do have two more DLCs planned for over the course of this year. That is more than we would usually do, but we have a lot of volunteers and contractors who have a lot of things they want to do, and overall it's just really very busy around here these days. This feels like a good thing.
All of the DLCs will be optional, fairly priced, paired with major free base game updates, and very meaty.
I really appreciate your support, as Arcen is a tiny company and AI War 2 has been a challenging project that is really blossoming recently.
Thank you so much for your patronage, and we all hope you enjoy the game!
Chris McElligott Park
Founder, Arcen Games