DW2 Updated State of the Game and Roadmap (April 2023)
Posted: Fri Apr 21, 2023 3:47 pm
State of the Game and Roadmap
As of April 21st, 2023
(Official Version “Aurora” 1.1.2.4)
Greetings again 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 about one year ago. Time continues to fly and we’ve made some major progress in improving and expanding on Distant Worlds 2, but there is also much more in the works.
(TLDR: We have expanded the DW2 team to ensure the issues with the initial release are not repeated. The massive Aurora update was a major step forward for almost all areas of the game and the first DLC adding in the Ikkuro and the Dhayut which we released in March was well received. We have a major performance improving update in the works which should be released next month. We’ve also made other improvements and fixed many gameplay issues, but many more remain. Our future focus is on more on gameplay fixes and improvements, UI and AI improvements and additional content. We are continuing to release regular free updates to keep improving all areas of DW2 while also working on a second Factions DLC and a major expansion after that)
The State of the Initial Release
We’ve posted three state of the game announcements in the past to apologize for the issues in the initial release, but some have not seen those, so we’d like to address that again.
It’s clear, in hindsight, that while we had over 300 testers (three times what we had on DW1) and DW2 was in alpha and beta testing for a year and was delayed twice internally to try to make sure we would have a solid release, we did not have a large enough testing pool to catch all critical issues related to hardware configurations or even all the gameplay issues. It’s also clear that despite the best efforts of a lot of very good volunteer testers, we didn’t achieve the level of polish that many of you expected at release and that is our responsibility.
Many have asked how this could have happened and we’ll attempt to summarize below. DW2 is a very ambitious release for a small team and Elliot’s first 3D game. Regarding the low level technical issues that caused so many crashes and problems on a lot of systems, we saw only the very tip of that iceberg in pre-release testing and did not realize how big a problem it was. A larger test team would have given us a much clearer picture of this critical problem and we would have delayed the release further to address it if we had realized it’s scope and severity. Fixing that properly has taken up much of the last year of post-release work, a significant part of it to even fully understand the issues which we could not duplicate on our original test systems. Regarding the gameplay issues, too many issues got by us because we were trying to do too much in too short a time. Some issues were missed, others were found and we though fixed but in fact still unresolved, others were reported but missed or misunderstood.
As a result of all this, we have expanded the DW2 team since release with an additional developer who is focused on the more technical side of the engine as well as adding other team members and expanding the roles of still others. We’re also adding more bandwidth on the testing and administration side and changing our procedures to focus more on internal testing. A large part of the goal here is to allow Elliot and I to spend a bit more time on gameplay as we did with Distant Worlds 1 and pass on a few of the other hats we’ve been wearing to others who will wear them better than we have.
The Current State of the Game
With the “Aurora” update we released as official in March, about four months of additional work on DW2 was stabilized and rolled out to all players. This included improvements across almost all gameplay areas and a significantly enhanced AI. 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 this update has been very positive, with many players reporting much improved gameplay and performance. However, issues remain and we’ve been listening to your feedback.
We had in parallel been working on major performance and technical engine improvements, which were not stable enough for the “Aurora” update but we released those in the post-“Aurora” public beta updates for a first public test. These changes increase performance massively compared to previous versions, but they required so many changes that they also introduced many new bugs. We’ve been working through those new issues and hope to release these performance improvements in an official “Hyperspeed” update in the next month or so.
We also released the first content expansion for DW2, a new DLC which adds the Ikkuro and Dhayut as new playable factions. These new factions were the first to showcase increased faction differentiation and the feedback on these has also been generally positive, though some issues specific to the Ikkuro storyline as well as some minor bugs are being addressed. As we stated when we released the DLC, we wanted to make sure players who had been playing DW2 and enjoying it had something new to try out, and there’s more of that coming, but we will be updating the base factions to bring them to a similar level as well in future free updates.
The DLC release and future expansion plans do not change our commitment to continue updating and improving the base game in continuing free updates. We want to make sure everyone who purchased DW2 can enjoy it to its fullest on their system and for their playstyle.
On the gameplay front, we continue to read your feedback and much more gameplay work remains. For example, we can see that there are still some fleet behavior issues especially relating to tankers in manually controlled fleets and we will continue to give more attention to all areas of gameplay.
Our next areas to focus on are listed below…
Future Priorities
1. Complete and stabilize the current performance public beta updates into an official performance-focused “Hyperspeed” update which should resolve all remaining significant performance issues.
2. Update the base factions in the game, one by one, to a similar level as the recently released Ikkuro and Dhayut when it comes to faction differentiation.
3. Improve the AI further, especially in the areas of economic management, population policies and research prioritization.
4. 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”.
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. Continuing improvements on fleet and ship behavior. This especially relates to recent reports of incorrect tanker behavior in manual fleets. The vast majority of issue reports in this area still involve very specific combinations of tactical and automation settings in specific situations, in other words they are now mostly rare, but as this is a core part of the game we’ll continue improving this area until it’s as polished as it can possibly be. We plan to add a tutorial for fleet and ship tactical settings as well as more detail in the galactopedia to help with these issues.
7. Further improvements to pathing issues related to nebula storms and pathfinding issues that still in rare cases result in 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.
8. 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.
9. 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 add policy settings to allow players to better specify which component families their auto-designer should emphasize.
10. Adding a Galactopedia and Galaxy map Search function and Distance measurement tool. This has been requested by many players.
11. As a result of the addition of the Dhayut, we’ve 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
12. 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. Our next steps will focus on better support for code modding and making 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.
Second Content Expansion
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 some new playable factions. We plan to release a second “Factions” DLC content expansion in the second half of this Summer, which will add the Quameno (the ultimate research-focused faction in DW2) and the Gizureans (the most rapidly reproducing growth faction in DW2) to the game.
We also have a major expansion in the works involving the Shakturi, but we can’t share any more details about that yet.
Update Schedule
Finally, let me discuss the update schedule. Our current workflow allows us to release one new beta update per week but it’s typically better for us to release one every two weeks. After the performance betas become official, we expect to shift to a bi-weekly public beta update schedule. It will generally take 6-8 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 after the “Hyperspeed” update and new 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 weekly 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 upcoming expansions as we get closer to Summer 2023.
Sincerely,
Erik Rutins and Elliot Gibbs
Matrix Games and CodeForce
As of April 21st, 2023
(Official Version “Aurora” 1.1.2.4)
Greetings again 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 about one year ago. Time continues to fly and we’ve made some major progress in improving and expanding on Distant Worlds 2, but there is also much more in the works.
(TLDR: We have expanded the DW2 team to ensure the issues with the initial release are not repeated. The massive Aurora update was a major step forward for almost all areas of the game and the first DLC adding in the Ikkuro and the Dhayut which we released in March was well received. We have a major performance improving update in the works which should be released next month. We’ve also made other improvements and fixed many gameplay issues, but many more remain. Our future focus is on more on gameplay fixes and improvements, UI and AI improvements and additional content. We are continuing to release regular free updates to keep improving all areas of DW2 while also working on a second Factions DLC and a major expansion after that)
The State of the Initial Release
We’ve posted three state of the game announcements in the past to apologize for the issues in the initial release, but some have not seen those, so we’d like to address that again.
It’s clear, in hindsight, that while we had over 300 testers (three times what we had on DW1) and DW2 was in alpha and beta testing for a year and was delayed twice internally to try to make sure we would have a solid release, we did not have a large enough testing pool to catch all critical issues related to hardware configurations or even all the gameplay issues. It’s also clear that despite the best efforts of a lot of very good volunteer testers, we didn’t achieve the level of polish that many of you expected at release and that is our responsibility.
Many have asked how this could have happened and we’ll attempt to summarize below. DW2 is a very ambitious release for a small team and Elliot’s first 3D game. Regarding the low level technical issues that caused so many crashes and problems on a lot of systems, we saw only the very tip of that iceberg in pre-release testing and did not realize how big a problem it was. A larger test team would have given us a much clearer picture of this critical problem and we would have delayed the release further to address it if we had realized it’s scope and severity. Fixing that properly has taken up much of the last year of post-release work, a significant part of it to even fully understand the issues which we could not duplicate on our original test systems. Regarding the gameplay issues, too many issues got by us because we were trying to do too much in too short a time. Some issues were missed, others were found and we though fixed but in fact still unresolved, others were reported but missed or misunderstood.
As a result of all this, we have expanded the DW2 team since release with an additional developer who is focused on the more technical side of the engine as well as adding other team members and expanding the roles of still others. We’re also adding more bandwidth on the testing and administration side and changing our procedures to focus more on internal testing. A large part of the goal here is to allow Elliot and I to spend a bit more time on gameplay as we did with Distant Worlds 1 and pass on a few of the other hats we’ve been wearing to others who will wear them better than we have.
The Current State of the Game
With the “Aurora” update we released as official in March, about four months of additional work on DW2 was stabilized and rolled out to all players. This included improvements across almost all gameplay areas and a significantly enhanced AI. 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 this update has been very positive, with many players reporting much improved gameplay and performance. However, issues remain and we’ve been listening to your feedback.
We had in parallel been working on major performance and technical engine improvements, which were not stable enough for the “Aurora” update but we released those in the post-“Aurora” public beta updates for a first public test. These changes increase performance massively compared to previous versions, but they required so many changes that they also introduced many new bugs. We’ve been working through those new issues and hope to release these performance improvements in an official “Hyperspeed” update in the next month or so.
We also released the first content expansion for DW2, a new DLC which adds the Ikkuro and Dhayut as new playable factions. These new factions were the first to showcase increased faction differentiation and the feedback on these has also been generally positive, though some issues specific to the Ikkuro storyline as well as some minor bugs are being addressed. As we stated when we released the DLC, we wanted to make sure players who had been playing DW2 and enjoying it had something new to try out, and there’s more of that coming, but we will be updating the base factions to bring them to a similar level as well in future free updates.
The DLC release and future expansion plans do not change our commitment to continue updating and improving the base game in continuing free updates. We want to make sure everyone who purchased DW2 can enjoy it to its fullest on their system and for their playstyle.
On the gameplay front, we continue to read your feedback and much more gameplay work remains. For example, we can see that there are still some fleet behavior issues especially relating to tankers in manually controlled fleets and we will continue to give more attention to all areas of gameplay.
Our next areas to focus on are listed below…
Future Priorities
1. Complete and stabilize the current performance public beta updates into an official performance-focused “Hyperspeed” update which should resolve all remaining significant performance issues.
2. Update the base factions in the game, one by one, to a similar level as the recently released Ikkuro and Dhayut when it comes to faction differentiation.
3. Improve the AI further, especially in the areas of economic management, population policies and research prioritization.
4. 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”.
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. Continuing improvements on fleet and ship behavior. This especially relates to recent reports of incorrect tanker behavior in manual fleets. The vast majority of issue reports in this area still involve very specific combinations of tactical and automation settings in specific situations, in other words they are now mostly rare, but as this is a core part of the game we’ll continue improving this area until it’s as polished as it can possibly be. We plan to add a tutorial for fleet and ship tactical settings as well as more detail in the galactopedia to help with these issues.
7. Further improvements to pathing issues related to nebula storms and pathfinding issues that still in rare cases result in 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.
8. 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.
9. 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 add policy settings to allow players to better specify which component families their auto-designer should emphasize.
10. Adding a Galactopedia and Galaxy map Search function and Distance measurement tool. This has been requested by many players.
11. As a result of the addition of the Dhayut, we’ve 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
12. 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. Our next steps will focus on better support for code modding and making 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.
Second Content Expansion
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 some new playable factions. We plan to release a second “Factions” DLC content expansion in the second half of this Summer, which will add the Quameno (the ultimate research-focused faction in DW2) and the Gizureans (the most rapidly reproducing growth faction in DW2) to the game.
We also have a major expansion in the works involving the Shakturi, but we can’t share any more details about that yet.
Update Schedule
Finally, let me discuss the update schedule. Our current workflow allows us to release one new beta update per week but it’s typically better for us to release one every two weeks. After the performance betas become official, we expect to shift to a bi-weekly public beta update schedule. It will generally take 6-8 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 after the “Hyperspeed” update and new 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 weekly 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 upcoming expansions as we get closer to Summer 2023.
Sincerely,
Erik Rutins and Elliot Gibbs
Matrix Games and CodeForce
