Campaign: Final observations, and Appeal

AndrewTilley · January 21, 2023, 4:50pm

I’m no developer, but I’ll do my best to provide you with as much developer information about the campaign as I can find.

History of Chapters 10-12

But before that, lets remind ourselves about the history of Chapters 10-12. First, they were not part of the original early access roadmap for the game. These chapters weren’t added to the roadmap until July 20, 2021, though Mike does talk about them on Discord prior to this reveal.

https://i.imgur.com/djOM3sx.png

In the dev blog that introduced this new roadmap format, Judd had this to say about it:

The key words from this being that some items on this roadmap may come after 1.0, with these additional chapters falling under this category.

Developer Statements

June 28, 2021

August 24, 2021

Discord_User: I find it a bit weird that you consider the game fully released (that’s what I’m taking 1.0 as) when the entire story isn’t in the game by that point. Am I misunderstanding something or is that intentional? If the latter, could you explain why?

Mike: We are planning for the game to be an ongoing thing. 1.0 represents the point where we feel confident in it being a complete product that we could be happy with. We have no plans of stopping at 1.0 though. We want to continue to expand the world through new stories and challenges. We want to expand the game mechanics and create new fun things to do. The list of “wouldn’t it be cool if…” that we want to make is massive.

I’m not sure if this is a good example or not but did you know that Lord of the Rings is actually 6 books bundled into 3 parts with 2 books in each part. The movie Return of the King stops at the end of book 5 with a tiny little bit of the very end of book 6 in the montage at the very end. They cut an entire book. That’s not really the point though. The story works and is “complete” with only 5/6 books.

We have a solid story arc planned for 1.0 launch with more stories we want to explore afterwards. And well, it’s a time travel game so we can always work more in very easily.

Source: Discord Link

June 30, 2022

July 16, 2022

September 14, 2022

September 15, 2022

Multiplayer Dev Q&A with Steelmage - Transcribed

Q: This guy’s asking about cutscenes…well, they’ve already mentioned that.

Judd: Yeah, we have a number of cutscenes being developed right now that you guys will experience throughout the campaign, oftentimes at the start and end of chapters, but we have quite a few of them coming along. We’re really excited about getting those to everyone. Those won’t be in 0.9 but we’re hoping to have those in the game by 1.0.

Steelmage: That’ll be awesome. I’m a cutscene enjoyer.

Mike: It’s going to help a lot for just getting the storyline across and getting people immersed in it. I think it’ll help a lot.

Judd: Yeah, there’s a lot of presentational elements to the story being improved right now. A lot of the chapter content that was developed in the game was done early on when we were a much smaller studio with way less resources. We now have a new world and story lead, we have all the dialogue being rewritten, we have NPC portraits, we’re having custom NPC’s being developed for all of the major characters, voice acting across the game. If you look at chapter nine, the latest chapter we have in the game…we call it chapter H internally, but it’s the one – I won’t spoil it in case somebody has gotten there. But if you look at that, every chapter that we go back and retouch we want it to be at least that level of quality.

Multiplayer Dev Q&A with Steelmage - Transcribed

Q: So right now it’s not too clear when one act finishes and another begins. The story is great but sometimes it can feel difficult to care. Any plans on improving how the story is related to the player?

Steelmage: I think I have noticed that, like sometimes I’ll enter a town and I’m not aware that that is now the beginning of a new act.

Judd: Yeah and that goes back to the kind of answers I gave a second ago – just the story presentation that we are touching on right now with the addition of cutscenes, dialogue being fully voice acted, some chapters being completely reworked. I don’t think we’ve actually announced all the chapters that we’re completely reworking, but those of you that are long time players probably can point to a couple that you would suspect and those would be the targets.

October 14, 2022

November 11, 2022

The video should start at the correct time, but if not the question begins at 1:43:20 and answer ends at 1:43:55.

November 17, 2022

December 2, 2022

The video should start at the correct time, but if not the question begins at 5:18 and answer ends at 6:06.

January 20, 2023

Mike briefly talks about future changes coming to the campaign.

TL;DR

There’s a lot of changes coming to the campaign to bring all the chapters up to the level of Chapter 9. This includes the environments, voice acting, NPCs, etc. with additional items like cutscenes, quests, dialogue, and more be added or changed.

Chapter 10 was originally planned to release by 1.0, but that may or may not happen depending on how things go leading up to launch. Chapters 11 and 12 are definitely coming after 1.0.