Currently, we are preparing for the first major content update for Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos, after having entered production roughly four weeks ago. For the upcoming release 1.1.0 we are focusing on three areas:
- Completing more features that are present in the original ADOM. [list]
- For this release we will level up the racial choices for your player character: Mist Elves, Gray Elves, Gnomes, Hurthlings and Drakelings will return – each with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. Enjoy the new flavorful races and the difficulty levels they imply.
[*] We continuously work on improving balancing.
- Ultimate ADOM is a game with many moving parts and components and the added inherent randomness of roguelike games make “fun balance” an interesting challenge – especially as neither races nor professions in ADOM ever were designed to be balanced, but rather the combinations you choose are representing inherent difficulty levels. We are going to address a lot of areas, among them item drops, better balancing for skill points and adjustments to level progressions.
[*]Quality of life enhancements.
- There will be a lot of these and this probably is a never-ending story (even in ADOM after more than 25 years of development there’s always a backlog of enhancements to make controls better). New features will include traps now being visibly marked, enhanced gamepad support, random character creation options, smarter auto-exploration, more intelligent combat support from summoned monsters, extensive bug fixing and a lot more.
As we intend to work on the game for a long time to come, this also marks the pattern we are going to use for upcoming releases.
As explained in https://steamcommunity.com/app/1266820/discussions/0/3050608452021165961/?snr=2_9_100003_ the production release of Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos on Steam marks our milestone defined as having provided a much more accessible roguelike dungeon crawler that works much better for a more mainstream audience than the original ADOM ever did.
Now we are at the beginning of the second leg of our journey:
Complete Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos with the many features still missing from ADOM, among others, but not just limited to:
Adding detailed story lines and many more means of interacting with the denizens of the caves.
Adding a religion system and so on and so forth.
This will be a far longer and more extensive journey than the first part.
While the first part also was structured with predefined milestones, we intend to return to a more creative and secretive way of working on content for future releases as we had to learn that a long series of milestones at some point becomes harmful to creativity.
To account for that from now on, we are going to work on whatever next feature seems to most fun to us (both to work on and to play with), based on the overwhelming amount of suggestions and comments from the community.
We’ll announce new features step by step when they arrive, instead of continuing to chase short-breathed milestones. Future releases will happen when enough interesting features and additions are done. So they might come in any kind of timing, from days to weeks to months. During these times, we’ll try to highlight upcoming developments and initiate discussions about them here, in the community hub.
Thanks for the support and feedback so far – we are looking forward to the future and continuing to work on the game.
See you with the next release soon, most likely in the second week of October. Axes high!
Thomas Biskup
ADOM & Ultimate ADOM Creator & Maintainer
Together with Team ADOM & Assemble Entertainment
