Hades' Star Roadmap - October 2019

Hades’ Star has been live for more than two years - almost 3 years if you count the pre-launch public beta. During that time we have been constantly improving the game. When we first launched there were no White Stars or Blue Stars, Red Stars had just 4 enemy types, the number of modules to equip ships with was about half, and there were no warp lanes or options to automate shipments.

Today I’m sharing thoughts on what the next 3 years *may* look for the Hades’ Star universe. These are not feature promises, and there is also no promise that the game will keep getting updates for 3 years. They are my current thoughts on what the
future may look like, should we continue to be lucky enough to have a passionate, sizeable fan base that continues to support the game and keep development sustainable.

Focus on improving existing activities

Hades’ Star is a game that offers diverse activities. Some people play just for the ritualistic daily shipment routine. Some play for the PvP that Blue Stars offer. Some love progressing technology or helping others in Red Stars. Some are only in the game because of their Corporation and White Stars. And some players enjoy the variety of participating in multiple activities daily. Going forward, the focus will be on improving the existing activities instead of adding new activities. There may be space for one more star type players can access once they finish exploring their own Yellow star, or perhaps that star type would be a variation of an existing star type. But other than that, there will be no more new star types in the game.

There are a few reasons for this. First,  I’d rather have a game with the existing 4 star types done exceptionally well, instead of a game with 8 star types, some good and some mediocre. Even if done perfectly, the 8 star version would require players to learn even more game types and choose which one they want to play each day and which ones to skip, whereas with the existing 4 star types it's possible to play a little bit of everything each day. And any new star types would split the players even more between activities, negatively impacting the matchmaking experience.

There are a lot of potential improvements that can be done to improve the existing star types and have them better meet their goals. Red Stars could benefit from random events and secondary objectives that add variety, give more opportunity to work together and break up repetitiveness. Blue Stars can become more exciting with more viable strategies and module layouts, more Cerberus ships, more dynamic maps and special events. White Stars could be suitable to a long term territory capture meta game. These and similar improvements will be explored in the next years, and will be much higher priority than adding completely new things to do.

Module design philosophy

Like with star types, there is work to be done to improve existing modules in the game. Expect to see reworking of existing unpopular modules - some will just have their numbers tweaked and some will alter their functionality in small or big ways. It's also possible one or two modules will be completely replaced if there's no clear way to make them useful and increase their use rate.The eventual goal is to make all modules useful in a dynamic way, especially for White and Blue stars. That means that whenever the Blue Star or White Star meta starts to settle towards specific modules, it should always be possible for an advanced enough player or team to pick combinations of less popular modules to successfully counteract the popular ones. New module ideas are more likely to be considered if they also help us move toward this goal.

New game in the the Hades universe

As Hades' Star is focusing on polishing what's already there, a new game (currently very early in development) will focus on tactical real-time combat between massive Battleships and their support fighters.

Why create an all new game, instead of applying the extra polish to the existing combat in Hades' Star? Two main reasons:

- Some of the things we want to do with combat do not suit the existing Hades' Star game - not without breaking existing progress people worked for years to accomplish, and not without a huge amount of work to make sure everything is balanced across 4 different star types/game modes. A new game in the same universe gives us the opportunity to start fresh and explore more radical ideas without constraint.
- A new game is a second chance to market the Hades universe to new players. While the Steam version brought many new players to the game, it has always been difficult (and is becoming more difficult as time goes by) to direct new players to an old game, especially a game like Hades' Star that takes a very long time to show a new player what its strengths are. The new game will be an opportunity for us to apply the lessons of multiple years and create a game that better brings and keeps players into our world, and to the original Hades' Star game. It is my belief and hope that the two games together will allow us to grow the overall audience to more than twice of what each game could accomplish independently.

The new game will have some sort of alpha testing in 2020, for existing Hades' Star players that want to provide feedback and help shape its future.