Director Letter 2015
Game Director Letter December 2014/January 2015
Hello all!
Firstly, notice the snappy title. In the interest of my sanity, I am renaming the GD letters to the name of the month that they are most commonly released in. It makes more sense, it (hopefully) stops people begging for them every month and it satisfies my innermost compulsive being.
Welcome to the new year, and thanks for the old year! I hope everybody had a safe and enjoyable break – I’m still recovering from too much juleøl and pinnekjøtt.
Before we launch into the year that is, I want to take a quick peek at the year that was.
2014 began with the Whispering Tide event running while we were chomping away at getting Tokyo ready for a release.
We released the first of our Sidestories packs, Further Analysis, as well as the backend support for community created text adventures.
Then in June we released the long awaited Issue #9: The Black Signal which included Tokyo, the AEGIS system and hours of new missions, lore and achievements as well as dozens of quality of life improvements. With the huge amount of backend work that had been done on Tokyo, we were able to get our development engine spinning up to full capacity again.
In July we celebrated our second Anniversary with the Guardians of Gaia event, with brand new rewards and a new golem in Kaidan Tokyo and at the same time, we released our second Sidestories pack, entitled Love and Loathing.
In early September we released our third side stories pack, The Last Pagan which contained a plethora of new missions in Kaidan as well as a few new gizmos for the astute Secret Worlder.
October saw the return of our Halloween events – and the addition of our brand new event known as The Broadcast.
Finally, we doubled down in December with the release of Issue #10 – Nightmares in the Dream Palace, followed by our holiday event, The Christmas Conspiracy. Naturally Issue #10 was more than just a continuation of our main storyline, it also contained a host of updates, including our new UI editing functionality, the new AEGIS shield system and much more.
So 2014 had a large focus on the storytelling and Tokyo content in the game. The positive trend in content was that we got into a good release rhythm once we were done with the main groundwork for Tokyo. Our production speed increased and we were able to deliver on our internal goal of delivering Issue #10 before the end of the year.
That was 2014, so let’s take a look at what is coming up in early 2015. Currently we have three general areas of focus for the game over the coming months; completing the Tokyo storyline, improving the experience of new players and releasing new multiplayer content.
We’re still breaking down exactly what those things mean for our update schedule, but you already know that Issue #11 is set to contain the final chapter of the story mission in Tokyo, as well as a new dungeon/raid. We are currently evaluating the work involved in delivering both of those features in a timely fashion and considering whether we need to split them into separate updates. If we do this, you can be rest assured that Issue #11 will still contain some form of group content.
There is a significant backlog of planned Tokyo content that we need to evaluate – we have material for a few more side stories, as well as a new scenario map, auxiliary weapon and lair content. We’ll be having a few discussions about this content over the coming weeks and deciding exactly how to handle it.
Another improvement that we would like to make is opening up access to Tokyo to all players. This does not mean that Issue #9 will suddenly become free, but rather that we are looking into opening up the Venice and Subway portions for access.
This means that the AEGIS system will be available to all – and we consider this an important change as we start to add more multiplayer content. The more the merrier, as the saying goes, and once the Kaidan group content is available we want people to be able to easily find friends to enjoy the experience with.
Finally, I mentioned our ambitions regarding the new player experience. This won’t involve dramatic changes to the game that will affect our veterans, but it will involve improving current tutorials and guides to help people take their first stumbling steps into The Secret World. We’ll also be taking a look at how we distribute and display a player’s current power and finding ways to improve the information flow to the player.
So currently we are doing a lot of planning to put everything neatly into our schedule and get everything underway. Once Tokyo is safely locked away, we’ll start talking about the Next Big Thing ™.
But it’s just a little too early for that ;)
It’s going to be an exciting year, and I look forward to sharing it with you all.
Joel
(It is awesome to have fans. Thank you so much TSW-RP and Devil's Due!)