Hades' Star roadmap - May 2018
Bringing in more players and help them stay longer
Hades' Star becomes a better game as more people play it. Healthy Corporations that help lower level players with Red Stars, organized White Stars, and an overall healthy community that welcomes new players are very important for ensuring the game has a long life. While there will still be later game content coming in (especially in the form of new modules and Red Star improvements), expect to see more changes targeted to new players. Thank you for your help creating a positive community so far - it really makes a difference in creating a sustainable game.White Stars and Corporation progression
As the most team-based mode in the game, White Stars remain very important and will evolve over the coming years with special events, map tweaks and perhaps secondary objectives. White Stars will also become the main way of giving the Corporation a way to advance. Relics collected will allow the Corporation to be upgraded to higher levels, giving its members special bonuses. While not earth-shattering, these bonuses will allow their members to progress a bit faster in the game, and also showcase their progression to all other Corporations in the game. Later they might also allow unlocking visual customizations.We will also be looking to improve matchmaking and the overall experience for someone playing White Stars regularly. It is very likely that the 5vs5 and 15vs15 White Stars will be removed later this year. 5vs5 can be very fun because individual actions matter much more. In practice however, many 5vs5 matches are very unorganized and give newcomers to White Stars the wrong impression of what the mode can be, turning them away from it. In addition, the maximum amount of relics that can be collected in 5vs5 matches is extremely low compared to 20vs20, making it hard to balance progression. We will definitely be looking for opportunities to bring back the 5vs5 mode in special events for highly skilled players.
The other big advantage of eliminating 2 brackets is that matches will be more balanced. Currently the low search volume especially on 20vs20 is creating mismatches, as the system prefers to give a match to two Corporations of very unequal strengths, instead of not finding a match at all.
There are also a lot of thoughts for new White Star events. The Battleship Leaderboards event will be coming back later this year, except this time for bolder participants: Losing a ship will always reset its XP, even if it has Sanctuary installed.
Progression beyond the yellow star
Along with Corporation progression, Hades' Star needs more personal progression after the Yellow Star is fully explored if it is to stay a viable game for many years. Expanding the Empire beyond the Yellow Star in some form is something we want to do. There are countless ways in which that can be done, and we don't know yet what the best one is. This will probably be the biggest feature coming into the game, and we won't rush it. I find that having a vague goal ("expand the empire beyond the yellow star") and letting it sink for a *long* time, while other things are changing about the game, and more insights are gained from other related features, really helps the goal eventually turn into a solid feature.So expect more news and thoughts on this over the next months/years, and of course feel free to send in your own thoughts and ideas as well.