Tuesday, February 8, 2022

The future of Hades' Star

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.