Original Post by the Creator of ADOM: Thomas Biskup himself:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1266820/discussions/0/3050608452021165961/ Dear community, Our recent announcement of moving the production release date forward to end of August has raised questions and concerns. Only now we start to understand that we probably failed to communicate our strategy for Ultimate ADOM clear enough (although – after looking through older posts – we did communicate it from the very beginning). Let me once more summarize our vision for Ultimate ADOM which basically is twofold: [olist][*] Our short-term goal was to create a new audience for a sequel to ADOM by addressing a more mainstream audience (people who regularly play RPGs but are not really into roguelikes). We felt that this move was an absolute necessity to be able to sustain the development of a modern graphical game worthy of a 21st century audience. Doing so requires higher investments compared to building a simpler pure ASCII based game. We always had the vision to prove that even a complex game of the nature of ADOM is mainstream-capable and can provide exciting new venues to players accustomed to such more classical RPG games out there. [*] Our long-term goal (and this mirrors in the name prefix “Ultimate” we chose) was to build a much deeper ADOM that surpasses the original in every aspect: More stories, more complex story lines, more character options, more skills, more spells, more items, an extensive surface world and so on and so forth.[/olist] [u][b]Our decision to move to production status is related to the short-term goal:[/b][/u] We feel that Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos is very nearly complete enough (and detailed enough) for the needs of more mainstream gamers. Already now Ultimate ADOM in many areas (though certainly not all) by far surpasses ADOM Classic/Deluxe (and for the sake of completeness I will do an extensive comparison of where Ultimate ADOM already today has far more depth than the original ADOM had… and of the areas where it still needs to grow – expect it to show up in a day or three on our blog, we’ll announce it here, too). For sure Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos is on a certain level a much simpler game than ADOM: It’s more focused on roughly 20 levels of play, you probably can win it within 3-6 hours based on your level of experience and it still has a wide variety of options to choose from and a wide variety of surprises waiting for you. It’s not quite yet where we want it to be for prime time but close enough according to our estimate. Three areas needed improvement:- Melee
- Magic
- Overall balance, stability, performance and pacing
- We want to continue developing Ultimate ADOM for an infinite amount of time if this is sustainable by any means.
- We want to release a lot more content updates addressing all dimensions of the game the old community craves and loves.
So once more the brief summary:
- We cater to two audiences: more mainstream gamers and the classical community that helped make ADOM great.
- The more mainstream community now gets their full production release in August.
- We acknowledge, that there is still content to come and we want to assure that we will support the game post release as much as possible, but this will also be tied to how well the game performs financially after release.
- The next two milestones are a “bug & performance release in July” and the “magic update & combat fine-tuning release” (with some cool yet unannounced surprises) for the August production release. We changed our priorities here due to your very clear feedback, which we absolutely agree with!
- We probably should have spent a lot more time communicating this two-part vision in a clearer way. Sorry for being confusing or not transparent enough. But sitting in our rabbit hole for some reason we failed to notice this.
