This month's dev update has been a bit delayed as we've been working on Milestone 5 patches (more below), but now that it's out the door I'll be taking this opportunity to talk about our plans for further updates and the eventual 1.0 release!
[h2]Milestone 5 Public Release[/h2]
Almost all of last month was spent working on the long-awaited Milestone 5, and we finally released it onto the standard branches for everyone to play at the end of March. This is a major update that adds a lot of new content to the game, but also allows players to unlock the final mission and win a campaign (the full changelog can be seen
here).
Overall, we're pleased with the way Milestone 5 turned out. I personally think that the addition of the Geoscape Supporters / Strategic Operations and the new Phase system have made the strategic layer a lot more engaging than before, and the new "UOO" missions add more variety to the second half of the game. We hope you all enjoy the update - many of these new systems are "extra" content (beyond what was in our original roadmap) that we've only been able to add because so many players have been willing to support an Early Access product!
The past couple of weeks have been focused on fixing problems that people have encountered in Milestone 5, and we'll likely continue doing this for the rest of April -- please keep reporting any bugs or gameplay issues you encounter and we'll do our best to fix them quickly.
[h2]Milestone 6[/h2]
In the meantime, we've also started work on Milestone 6. This was originally intended to be a single large update that would bring the game all the way to final release, but Milestone 5 had such a long development cycle that we've changed our plans so players don't have to go so long between updates.
The key goal for Milestone 6 is now to finish all the missing gameplay content - e.g. adding the final victory cinematic, adding all remaining research art, revamping the Air Combat to have an updated UI and a proper tutorial, and adding the Soviet Town biome. Essentially this represents completing the remaining content on our roadmap and finishing the areas of the game still marked as incomplete.
We're also going to be adding some new content that we've already completed but never made it into Milestone 5. For example, we've got a full set of updated Sebillian models that we need to set up, and we're currently working on upgraded models for the Cyberdrone and Heavy Cyberdrone that make the two types more visually distinct. There's also a lot of new terrain tiles that we need to set up and add into our existing maps.
Hopefully this means Milestone 6 will still feel like a substantial update, despite the changes to the game systems being largely limited to the air combat. Our aim is to have this update released on the public branches in three to four months.
[h2]Road to 1.0[/h2]
We'll then spend a few more months polishing up the game as we transition to our final 1.0 release, as there will still be plenty of things we want to improve. We'd like to spend some more time testing and improving the AI. We'd like to do a pass over all the maps. We'd like to optimise performance and load times a bit more. We need to build the mod tools. There's also a lot of sensible and relatively straightforward community suggestions that would improve the game. We probably won't have time to do everything we want, but we'll get as much in as we can!
This means we're unlikely to add any major new features to the game beyond those already planned for Milestone 6, nor any large content additions like new mission types, aircraft or alien species. While it may still be possible to sneak in a few smaller pieces of content (such as a new weapon or two), with the second anniversary of our Early Access launch approaching we need to shift away from adding new content and focus on polishing what we have.
We're aiming for the 1.0 update to drop before the end of the year, but as always, we'll keep you posted. We'll have a better idea of the timetable once we're done with Milestone 6.
Thanks again, and we hope you're enjoying Milestone 5! Please do consider leaving reviews and feedback, as we're always reading them.