DW2 Updated State of the Game and Roadmap (December 2023)

[Erik Rutins]

State of the Game and Roadmap
As of December 20th, 2023
(Official Version “Fleet” 1.1.8.1)

Season’s Greetings to everyone in the Distant Worlds 2 community,
First, Elliot and I would again like to thank our players for their patience and support since Distant Worlds 2 was released. 2023 saw our first two expansions for Distant Worlds 2 along with four Major updates (Aurora, Hyperspeed, Discovery and Fleet). Throughout this last year, we’ve improved and expanded Distant Worlds 2 in many ways and there is a lot more to come. For the details, please read on.

The Current State of the Game

After the “Aurora” update resolved the worst technical issues with the initial release, the “Hyperspeed” update massively improved performance and the “Discovery” update gave us a revamped Hive and some improved Pirates as well as the first Ancient Guardian Vaults, the “Fleet” update released as official in November with many improvements to automated and manual fleet and ship behaviors. Throughout these updates we have improved almost all gameplay areas and continued to greatly improve the AI, which is now much more competent and challenging than it was at the start of 2023. You can see a summary of all the changes in the update announcements, there are far too many to go over here but if you haven’t updated lately we recommend it!

The feedback on the “Fleet” update so far has been largely positive, but while fleet and ship behavior isuch improved, we have have also seen enough to know we have more work to do in this area. We’ve also seen that we had some performance regressions in the “Fleet” update and a new bug causing Pirate research to be much better than intended. Both of those issues will be address in the first round of beta updates in 2024, leading to a new official update by February per our current plans. In investigating those problems, we have also made further performance improvements which will make the next official update the best-performing to date based on our internal testing.

We also released a DLC for the Ikkuro and Dhayut and a second DLC for the Quameno and Gizureans, greatly expanding the faction choices and showing what we could do to improve faction and government differentiation. The feedback on these has been pretty consistent that players are enjoying them and that each new faction sets a new benchmark in terms of art and gameplay. We do plan to address some issues that have caused the Gizureans to be a bit too powerful and we’ve made various story tweaks over the recent updates, but other than that, we’re pretty happy with how the DLCs have gone as well.

We have also been working to update the base game factions to a similar level as the DLC factions in terms of gameplay – rebalancing some of their stats, adding new conditional events and choices and expanded government options along with a few new illustrations. The first of these, the Humans and Mortalen, should be available in the January beta updates, with the Boskara and Zenox to follow in the next round after that.
While we are a small team, we are committed to both continuing to expand the game with new DLCs and expansions but also to continue updating and improving the base game through our ongoing free updates. We want to make sure everyone who purchased DW2 can enjoy it to its fullest on their system and for their playstyle.

Our next areas to focus on are listed below…

Future Priorities

1. Update the base factions in the game, one by one, to a similar level as the recently released DLCs when it comes to faction and government gameplay differentiation.
2. Continuing improvements on fleet and ship behavior. We plan to also add a tutorial for fleet and ship tactical settings as well as more detail in the galactopedia to help with these issues.
3. Further improvements to pathing issues as well as pathfinding performance. There are long-standing issues which in some cases result in sub-optimal paths as well as ridiculous paths around the galaxy. We plan to review the area of storms and galactic terrain to make sure that they are providing the gameplay benefits we were hoping to see and if not, we will rebalance them. We are also looking into the question of making it easier to plan jumps that do not require star system waypoints.
4. Improve the AI further, especially in the areas of economic management and diplomatic/military grand strategy. We’ve also seen more feedback and suggestions on the population policy side, specific to slavery but also other policies. We plan to revisit the design of these in the future and also improve the AI’s management of population policies
5. Improve the appearance of empire borders, adding a thicker border line at the edges of an empire to help distinguish it from nearby empires with similar flags and colors.
6. Further improvements to ship auto-design and auto-upgrade to better consider nebula/storm defenses as well as existing weapon component categories and sizes for the upgrade system, so that players will find the upgrade tool more generally useful and so the AI empires will be better able to manage your empire and their own when it comes to navigating the galactic terrain. We plan to improve the policy settings which allow players to specify which component families their auto-designer should emphasize. Specifically we want to allow this to affect other components beyond weapons and also to allow “do not use this” to be a choice, so the AI can be guided to specialize its automatic designs more.
7. Improve quality of life for manual players further. We have already made a series of improvements here, but our plan includes returning the full manual play functionality of DW1. While DW2 includes quite a few new semi-automated features which can help with manual play, for example the global queues and fleet and army templates that were not in DW1, we recognize that many players are still missing tools that would make manual play more enjoyable. Next in line as a large task are ship and fleet order queueing as well as a lot of additional minor improvements to various UI areas.
8. Improve message handling further, especially regarding attack notification message spam and repeating advisor messages. We plan to add additional message filters for “all Pirates” and “all Empires” and rethink and improve the message purge system. We also hope to add the ability to tell an advisor “do not suggest this again” or to tell a Pirate or an Empire “do not contact me again with this offer”.
9. Adding a Galactopedia and Galaxy map Search function. A new Distance Measurement tool is in the latest public beta update already.
10. Modding support will continue to be a priority. We’ve expanded this greatly since release, including the addition of an in-game mod manager, Steam Workshop support and much better handling of multiple mods. We also recently added support for code modding and have been working on a new open source tool to make both data and bundle modding easier.

There are also other reported issues beyond those above which we will also address as we go forward, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are our current highest priority goals.

Future Expansions

As always, the Content and Art teams are not heavily involved in most of the game fixes we’ve been working through, so they have been spending most of their time working on two more expansions for 2024.

Our first priority is the “Return of the Shakturi” expansion, which we plan to release before the end of Q2 in 2024. This is our main priority and will finally give DW2 a major end-game threat to pit your fully developed empire against, with a much more developed story and new gameplay options and research areas. This will be a feature expansion, rather than just a content expansion and some future feature support (such as planet destroyers and mega-ships for each faction and certain unique research branches) will depend on features in “Return of the Shakturi”. If this takes longer, we will give it the time it needs to make sure the endgame is fully tested and fun.

We also plan to release a third “Factions” DLC content expansion in the second half of 2024 (exact timing dependent on how much time Return of the Shakturi needs), which will add the Wekkarus (among the most ancient and mysterious aliens in DW2 with possible connections to the Shakturi) and the Atuuk (space lemmings of a sort who were just barely smart enough to figure out FTL) to the game. This will work fine whether you have “Return of the Shakturi” or not, but will have some additional features/content related to that expansion if you have it.

Update Schedule

We will be aiming for a bi-weekly public beta update schedule in 2024. It will generally take 6-12 weeks of beta updates to get to an update that is stable enough to become official. This means we expect public beta updates roughly every two weeks and new free official updates every 2-3 months.

Our Thanks

Thank you again if you took the time to read all of this and for your support of Distant Worlds 2. Please check in regularly going forward and try the newest beta updates if you’d like to see how things are shaping up.
Please stay tuned for more information on the Return of the Shakturi expansion as we get closer to Q2 2024.

Sincerely,

Erik Rutins and Elliot Gibbs
Matrix Games and CodeForce

[thegreybetween]

Awesome news on all fronts! Thanks to the entire team for all that you do to bring this little universe to life. 2024 is shaping up to be a great year for DW! Nice to see the Wekkarus joining the fray, and the "future feature support" coming with the Shakturi sounds like it will lead to some interesting places.

Happy Holidays to all, and thanks for a fantastic 2023. Here's to an even bigger 2024. Cheers!

[Cauldyth]

Thanks for the update, looking forward to it all. And looking forward to the Wekkarus. I have to admit I don't know much of the lore behind them from the first game, other than them being aquatic. And looking forward to seeing the braindead Atuuk again!

[AKicebear]

This is a promising list. In particular, the right improvements to auto upgrade of manually designed ships could get me hooked on this game again.

[Buio]

Thanks for the update. Looking forward to all things, big and small. Return of the Shakturi will be interesting.

[Scott2933]

We talked about this in the beta a couple of years ago - but I wanted to make sure you were considering supporting one of my favorite features of DW1.

So I would set the entire game to full auto - but I would assign myself one fleet (or sometimes one ship in later game). So could roleplay as an rear admiral or even a captain. I would let the AI handle everything else and I would just take my fleet and go to where the trouble was. I would sometimes top off my fleet for lost ships or add a new designed ship - but that was it.

It was extremely fun - almost like playing a different game.

But DW2 automation does not currently support that - it will take over your one manual fleet, attempt to upgrade ships, etc. on full auto settings. So I was just hoping that as per your note above - that you and Elliot would consider supporting this kind of gameplay again in your planned update.

Thanks,

- Scott -

[rxnnxs]

We talked about this in the beta a couple of years ago - but I wanted to make sure you were considering supporting one of my favorite features of DW1.

So I would set the entire game to full auto - but I would assign myself one fleet (or sometimes one ship in later game). So could roleplay as an rear admiral or even a captain. I would let the AI handle everything else and I would just take my fleet and go to where the trouble was. I would sometimes top off my fleet for lost ships or add a new designed ship - but that was it.

It was extremely fun - almost like playing a different game.

But DW2 automation does not currently support that - it will take over your one manual fleet, attempt to upgrade ships, etc. on full auto settings. So I was just hoping that as per your note above - that you and Elliot would consider supporting this kind of gameplay again in your planned update.

Thanks,

- Scott -

I second this, it would be a great addition and I miss this function.

Besides that, I read all of your post and it sounds promising. You addressed almost everything that would make the game a number one and a game that can be played for years to come.

Have nice holy days and regenerate your energy - for body and soul.

Wish the whole team only the best.

[OrnluWolfjarl]

First off, to everyone in Matrix Games, I wish happy holidays and the best of times with your loved ones.

Secondly, this roadmap has great promise and I'm glad to hear many issues are being resolved. Your work has been exemplary so far, and has produced an amazing and thoroughly enjoyable game. Thanks to everyone!

[goromous]

Firstly I just wanted to say thank you so much for making this game and continuing to update and release content for it, I hope you continue to do so for years to come.

Secondly I wanted to mention one of my favorite features of DW1 that I hope makes it's way into DW2 at some point. In DW1 while manually upgrading ships you weren't limited by the number of slots for a particular component. For example if you wanted you could use all of the structure/size possible to add a few sub-light engine, a few thrusters and fighter bays, Energy to Fuel conversion components and as many shields as possible with nothing else, to create a floating platform that didn't move far away from the station/planet and acted as a purely defensive/tank ship.

When I first played DW2 I felt constrained by the upgrade components/slots limits, whereas the original system really allowed me to experiment and become creative. I really, really hope something like this is implemented in the future, it really allowed me to build something as creative and specific as I wanted. That is actually a big reason I keep returning to DW1, to scratch that itch.

I really appreciate DW2 and everything you've done and continue to do to update the game.
Thank you for your time,