Hello everyone. Earlier this week Paradox officially announced that the 2.3 Wolfe patch, and the new Relics DLC, will drop next week – on the fourth of June. With that in mind, I wanted to use this chance and update you all on our schedule for the next few months.
For a while now, there is has been an intense internal debate in our team. One side favors us focusing on large, major updates that are released every few months. The advantage of that approach is that we can focus on beta testing as well as marketing and advertising our updates as much as possible. The other side favors focusing on smaller, more frequent updates, with the idea of increasing transparency and getting content as quickly as possible to the players.
While this debate won’t be solved here (it might be a good idea to do a survey, with of course the usual risk that surveys bring with them… read my previous blog post on that issue here). What both sides do agree, however, is that we need to minimize the number of releases that require players to start a new game, and in general, try to advertise such updates are coming in advance.
So, let me start by clarifying our schedule:
Next week we will release a day 1 compatibility patch that includes support for 2.3 Wolfe. Previous experience shows we could probably release the patch in less than a day, but that is not a promise. This patch would most certainly require a new save game, as it overhauls the entire backend of the Stellaris ecosystem (about all of that, and the transition to 64-bit, you can read about it here).
For the most part, this is intended to be a rather small patch, including the backbones of compatibility to the new Wolfe archaeology and relics event story chains. It will still be counted under ‘great material continuum’ patch. It will not include the various new features and economic overhaul you have been reading about the last few weeks. It will also not include any huge changes or a vast amount of new assets, even with the 64-bit overhaul. It will almost certainly have nothing to do with the DLC since that is mostly a story pack that has little to do with new mechanics.
You may be asking yourself – what is taking so long?
Well, the first answer is that I’m simply swamped. We are recruiting more people, and everyone is more than welcome to join, but with everything going on in my real life, some parts of the active development have slowed down. Others are moving very rapidly – we actually have a lot of very good-looking models ready to be shown to you all. But the econ overhaul is taking some time.
Another reason is that I wanted to wait until 2.3 released before I started our internal testing and implementation. 2.2 painful release schedule showed me the problem of trying to work on major economic changes in an ever-shifting quagmire of bugs and production woes. At times Paradox released a new 2.2.* patch every week or so. Since 2.3 is going to change much of the backend, there is a possibility the same situation will happen again… and thus, it’s prudent to wait.
Finally, it’s simply a huge update, and I rather test and fine-tune it properly.
So, what is going on after next week?
You can expect a major patch to come somewhere around late July-early August (maybe later, but that’s the goal so far). That one will include everything you’ve read about in the blog – a new economic overhaul, more fighters, new resources, a lot of new ships, a lot more relics and transformed events, and a major new species that is going to be a blast to play. It MIGHT include some new assets that enjoy the 64-bit overhaul, but we are, for now, going to try to be conservative and monitor closely how the 64-bit overhaul effects overall performance.
This patch will also most certainly require a new save game, mostly due to the massive changes in the economy. However, between next week and that patch we are not planning – although it might not be up to us – to release any patch that requires a new save game, and to focus on bug fixes and polish until the work for is done for the next update after that.
Hope you are as excited as us for everything that is coming up to Stellaris and New Horizons. Wolfe opens up a lot of very interesting narrative tools for us. This is the place where I want to remind everyone that we are actively looking for people to write more events for New Horizons and that we have a weekly workshop that helps teach you the ropes. This is something EVERYONE can do, requiring almost no skills in coding, scripting or programming, so come on over!