I too am excited by these changes. At first my heart skipped when I saw that all RPG aspects would be stripped away. I worried that you decided to abandon progression altogether and make a task based metroid game. But as I read the whole changelog and also thought of AI War, I realized that it would make the gameplay more compelling that ever before. So, I can quite understand this update taking a few days, and so it's no problem at all.
Thanks for that, glad it's sounding positive to a lot of folks -- that's always rewarding to see, rather than it being something that is divisive.
A question... I somehow got the feeling that I can't shake that you'll discard the new aspect or persona system that you were talking about (can't remember which of the names you used). Is this still planned to come in, or is it actually scrapped?
Yeah, those were scrapped I think in December. Maybe it was more recently, I can't recall; I'm having trouble keeping track of the recent timeline. Mechanically speaking, the sort of progression that we were going to do with them has been accomplished in other ways with all the other changes. Story-wise, it's one of those things that turned out to be too large to fit into 1.0. Some of the better ideas from the whole personas line of thinking might make a comeback post-1.0, but it really depends on what people are interested in.
I get the feeling that there are folks interested in some more story bits, and so we'll try to see what we can work in prior to 1.0 and afterward. But in a lot of respects, given how procedural the game is, the story bits resist insertion. It's kind of like putting a story into a string of RTS pvp matchups -- you can do it, but I'm not sure how compelling it would be. And I'm not really keen to have a bunch of stuff in the game that is half-baked. I'd rather have fewer really good things, rather than a lot of just alright things.
We're still sort of feeling our way along, chipping away everything that doesn't look like an elephant, but I think that the 1.0 state is firming up pretty well (with a target still in March for that). If we try to push too much into 1.0, we're going to run out of funds to keep developing this out at our current staffing levels, and I hate laying people off (having had to do it
multiple times in the past). Arcen really isn't in any danger at this point, but we can't maintain our current staffing levels more than another few months without actually coming out with a new game that is reasonably popular (as popular as AI War, or even less to some extent, would probably do -- though of course we'd like more).
All that said, you know how we like to do things here -- even ignoring the expansions, just the base game of AI War has grown by incredible leaps and bounds since its own 1.0 came out. My intent is to do the same here, unless that's not something that will keep on the lights, so to speak. The goal for 1.0 is to have a focused, awesome-all-the-way down experience, and then for post-1.0 we want to start branching out on top of that base system.
