Hey guys,
I know I've been largely absent except for a few posts here and there the last week. That's because I've been absolutely consumed with some business aspects of Arcen (marketing stuff, setting up more reviews, contracts review, etc), and with the Steamworks integration for AI War. At long last, the Steamworks stuff is all complete, and we've got a tentative release date planned with Valve -- I think I'd better not say the exact date, but it's inside two weeks.
For those who have been wondering, I have talked to Valve and it is highly likely that you will be able to use your existing purchased license keys to activate the game on Steam if you want to have access to the Steam-only features. (And there was much rejoicing)
So, what's going to be going on in that timespan? A whole heck of a lot from me; there's all the list of outstanding bugs and balance issues that I'm going to address, for one thing. That's going to be my big focus next week, and I hope to get things to a pretty stable point where I'm not changing much after sometime next week. That way the release candidate has a good few days to a week of really being playtested by everyone without my messing with it and causing any new problems.
All of Phil's art for 2.0 is now done, and the last of that will be coming out in today's prerelease. As of yesterday, he's moved on to working on the art for the expansion (and let me tell you, it looks amazing). So there won't be any new art, new ships, or major new mechanics in the 2.0 version beyond what is already in place. The sole focus now for 2.0 is polish, to make sure that everything that is already there is as squeaky clean as possible.
The other focus, for me, is going to be yet more contract negotiation and business stuff over the next few weeks, a number of interviews that are coming up, and yet more video production (all of those old training video tutorials have to be replaced). I'm going to be putting together a page that will show the difference between 1.0 and 2.0 (and man is it impressive when you put it all in one place, even in just a high-level sense), and another page that will give some teaser information about the expansion, in preparation for that going on preorder in approximately 2-3 weeks (the same time at which the first playable alpha version of that will become publicly available for those who want to demo it or preorder).
We also have our third and final trailer for AI War nearing completion. This trailer is the best by far, and Pablo is scoring something new specifically for it. Hopefully this will also really aid in getting people excited about the game, who might not otherwise know what it is about or who might give it a miss. This is the final trailer for the base game because we're moving on with the expansion, just to be clear. There will be at least one trailer for each expansion, but those are separate products.
There will still be ongoing DLC on a monthly basis for a long time to come, as has previously been promised, but it will be a lot more slight than what you've been seeing recently. Mostly it will be a new ship or three each month for free, with bugfixes and balance tweaks. Improvements to performance, the AI, the interface, the controls, any art upgrades for existing assets, etc, etc, will all be considered part of whatever expansion is next on the roster at any given time. This is important to us for purpose of reviews, etc -- but since we're going to be using a unified executable system for the expansions, that means that all of those improvements will always be available to customers of the base game, even if you never buy one of the expansions that those features are supposedly a part of. The things you'll miss out on by not purchasing expansions are simply large amounts of new content (80-100 ships at a go), and other cool new features such as the Zenith faction, the new AI Types, etc.
For those who have been wondering, that's the news for now! It's exciting times here at Arcen, that's for sure. The recent silence on the prereleases has just been a mask for the incredible amount of stuff going on behind the scenes here, a lot of which I can't even talk about yet. Stay tuned!
