Shards Of War

Dear Shard-Keepers!
This is Nina aka. BP_Nyome, Producer of Shards of War writing to you.
2016 has started and we all have settled back into the office and picked up work on Shards of War again. The roadmap is set and we have a plan for the next few months, and I would like to give you an insight into how we are going to tackle updates and releases in the near future.
 
Changing pace

We have been aiming for quality since the beginning, be it technical stability, optimization or balancing. However, 2015 has been governed by swift releases, large amounts of content and new features to “complete” our game, and in the wake of that some issues were left behind and older imperfections and ideas buried. Now we have finally found the right time to slow down with production of new additions to the game and instead take a step back to reevaluate the problems of the game and how to take them on.

For the next few months we will shift the focus of the team towards balancing, bug-fixing, and polishing. This means that you can expect to see fewer new features and Sentinelsupdates being released per month than in 2015last year, but the content put out will hold up to higher quality standards or address issues that have been in discussion on the forums and in the team for a long time.

On the other hand, this new focus means taking away resources from Sentinel production, which means that there will be no new Sentinel releases while we are working on catching up with old issues and implementing new featuresexpansions to existing features and many improvements. Instead we will focus in rebalancing and improving the existing set of Sentinels for the time being.

Some of the new content you can expect within the next few months are highly polished skins with custom effect animations that are handcrafted to fit their themes, reworks of old skins to receive updated effects, a pause feature for custom game draft mode and Alliance Wars, our way of supporting 5v5 gameplay in Shards of War.

Also there are some changes to our Prime Shard map on the way, as we feel our second map was never accepted as much as Empire City by our players. Therefore we are preparing some changes for the Mechsuits and adjustments to the overall mechanic of the map, to make the map more fun and easier to play.

Additionally we are happy to hear positive feedback about the Draft Mode we released last year and want to implement this feature in Custom Games, so you can benefit from it there as well.

All of these features will be revealed and explained in more detail as soon as they are ready, and we hope to receive your input on our new take approach at developing Shards of War.

Other topics we are discussing at the moment are things like an improved matchmaking based on the player skill to better cater your individual performance in matches, streamlining achievements and quests to make this more interesting and rewarding, and adjustments to our Crafting feature.
Everyone in the Shards of War team is grateful for the support all of you out there have shown us in the past, and we are looking forward to making 2016 another exciting year for Shards of War.

See you in the Shards,
Nina / BP_Nyome