Hello there, Landmarkians!
As promised, here’s the “roadmap” of what we’re adding to the game, and more importantly, why we’re rolling things out in the order that we’re doing them.
NOTE: There are some categories of things that we are not including in this roadmap. Stuff like new materials, new props, new biomes, new recipes and design tweaks will be rolling out continuously and aren’t part of any single milestone. You should expect to see those changes like that coming in all the time.
ALSO NOTE: The “Phases” we describe below have almost nothing to do with whether we’re calling the game Alpha, Closed Beta, or Open Beta. Those “label milestones” will be determined almost entirely by how comfortable we are letting new groups of people into the game. So (for example), Closed Beta might arrive in the middle of Phase Two. (Again, that’s just an example…not a plan.
And of course, everything you’re reading here is “time approximate”. We’re aiming at the timelines, but software development is…fraught with peril. It may take longer to get things done.
But as far as big stuff, here’s the list.
What is Phase One?
Phase One is what we’re working to accomplish in the following four weeks or so.
What’s the purpose of Phase One? It’s designed to do the following:
Let all you folks talk to each other easily. To form friends, groups, and above all to benefit from having other players around you.
To allow and support cooperative building.
To make building a better experience.
To make the world bigger.
That’s it. Doesn’t sound that ambitious does it? But it is a LOT of stuff coming your way in the next few weeks. Stuff that you may not even realize you’re missing until you see this list.
Phase One includes:
Better Communication
Claim Ratings : Bragging is fun. Getting comments and ratings from people that stop by your claim can also be fun. Having ratings lets us also add leaderboards and let the best of the creators in our community begin to surface. They’re also critical for our Player Studio presentation later on.
Chat: We’ll be improving chat with better channels, customized tabs, and more. Why? Because if you can’t communicate easily, you might as well be playing a single-player game.
----We’re also adding the ability to add links in chat so that you can designate a waypoint on the map and have it show up in chat for other people to click and see.
Key configs: Yes, you need to be able to customize your key mappings. Duh, right? It’s coming.
Voice over Internet : Yes, many folks use Teamspeak servers (or whatever is the flavor of the month). But not everyone has a server to join, and we’ve found that forcing people to use external voice servers often fragments the community severely. So that’s getting added also.
Socialization
Groups & Group Harvesting Bonus: Right now, when you harvest, it’s a race for those resources against other people. It’s almost a PvP-ish kind of feeling. We don’t want that. So the systems are changing so that it’s advantageous to group together when harvesting.
We’re also allowing groups so it’s easy to have a private chat channel and see each other on the map.
-----Friends: Self-explanatory, but you need a way to see who is online from the folks you know, as well as to be able to find their claims and see them on the map.
Twitch/Facebook/Twitter: Some of you will want to brag. Some of you want to stream. And to be honest, the more you folks do that, the bigger the game can become. So we’re trying to make it easy for you.
Moving around the world
In general, the dev team does not want to turn the game into “instant travel”. However, a large part of the game is oriented around being able to drop by and see someone’s claim and buildout. So we’re carefully adding some quick-travel options to make quick visits less onerous, but at the same time still encouraging exploration through the world so you get accidental discoveries as you go.
Plus, keep in mind that you’ll be digging deep now. Walking all the way back uphill to return to your claim may not be the joyous experience you think it might be.
It’s almost certain that most of these options will be somewhat limited in usage by requiring either crafting of an item or requiring a certain amount of time to expire before reuse.
Teleport to Claim
Teleport to Hub
Teleport to Friend