In a few weeks, it will be 5 years since Hades’ Star launched. During that time, we’ve had 3 million players creating an account. Collectively, all these players have discovered over 30 million stars. There are thousands of players that are still active more than 4 years after they first downloaded the game. Far more important than any numbers is the quality of the community that has formed around the game: welcoming to new players and helpful, without aggressive and abusive elements found in other online games that have competitive elements.
I have no
doubt these qualities of the game will allow it to thrive for many more years
in the future.
Up until
now, we’ve been improving the game with updates small and big, and this will
continue in the future. But after 5 years of development, the time feels right
to try something bigger than any update we’ve done before. The upcoming DARK
NEBULA update, which we announced late last year, will feel more like an
expansion pack than a regular update. It will bring a lot more content for
existing star types, a new star type, a visual refresh for some game objects
and parts of the interface, and new features means to strengthen the core
economic and combat activities in the game. It will also attempt to address
problems that exist in these core activities.
This post
is an attempt to describe these problems and discuss ways we’ll be involving
the community in solving them together as DARK NEBULA goes through development.