It’s Roadmap Time!
NOTE: This roadmap is provided to let players know what our current plans are for the year. As a studio, we constantly re-evaluate and adjust as necessary, so this is not a guarantee of upcoming content and these plans may change. We will do our best to communicate these changes if they come along, but we try our best to see our roadmaps through to completion.
2023 Recap
For 2023 our goal was to further build up systems in the game that would allow us to add challenges for existing players but also make the game a bit less opaque for new players and deliver on some common player expectations of a multiplayer game.
We added skill trees for Wilson, Willow, Wigfrid, Woodie, Wolfgang and Wormwood. We added the scrapbook to help players learn more about the world and new end game content with new challenges and equipment.
We also had a fun crossover event with Cult of the Lamb, finished adding shared unlocks for all platforms as well as all of our usual holiday events.
We're pretty happy with the progress we have made but we went through a few pain points along the way that we want to address with this roadmap.
What’s coming up?
For 2024 we are going to continue these, but we have decided to change our update process for this year. We’re going to have longer periods between updates in order to have more substantial and impactful gameplay updates.
We have been working toward this goal for the past several months and this roadmap is where we will start with a newer schedule. With our new schedule we will be releasing 4 major updates; each containing a mix of QOL, content and additional character updates. In between these updates we will be releasing new lore shorts, new skins and occasional news on their own just to keep things from being too quiet for too long.
I think it’s important to make some clarifications here. We have been doing frequent and regular updates since Don’t Starve originally debuted on the Chrome web store in 2011. We believe the cadence of these updates has helped our games remain fresh and interesting but also helps us build strong community interest. We are pretty apprehensive about this change as we are concerned that the time between updates could slow the community down. So we will be watching closely and making adjustments as needed in the future.
This isn’t a massive change, but it is a change and we think the result will be a much more enjoyable experience for players overall.
It’s also worth mentioning that we have not changed staffing or output at any level of production. This is an adjustment purely for providing more comprehensive updates, not an effort to reduce or otherwise shift resources on these updates.
It should be said that less frequent updates mean less update prep which should allow a bit more time working directly on each update, but I don’t want to set expectations too high here. Don’t Starve Together has become a massive game with a lot of moving parts, and it takes us a bit more time to put things together than it did in the past. The point is that you’re still getting the same amount of content in this roadmap, just not as frequent.
Anything else?
This is going to take us a little bit of time to get into the swing of things, but also going to try to do a bit more to communicate future updates to players while you're waiting. This may come in the way of forum posts or streams, but you will see a bit more information as we near release so people can see the game is being worked on.
This will begin after our update in February.
That’s it for now
We have the Year of the Dragonfly coming February 8th and after that we have a QOL+More update coming at the end of March. We’ll share more information as soon as we can.
See you soon! - https://accounts.klei.com/link/2024Roadmap
