The Party Update has arrived on Steam!

Hey everyone, the long-awaited Party Update is now here!

Here’s what’s new:

• Players now form parties!

  Your Subscribers can now form parties of up to four players to take on your MMO together! If you’ve developed the ‘Parties’ technology, you can enable this feature from the ‘Design’ window’s “Features” tab, and then players can group up around Taverns to form parties.

  

• New Artist, New Buildings!

  Adds a whole bunch of new building model variants. Almost every type of functional building now has two or three new versions of the standard model.

  We now have a new artist on the team, working on making heaps of new buildings and game assets, and this is just the first drop of those new assets; we’re planning to continue with more regular art updates over the coming weeks!

  

• Unsubscription Report!

  There’s now a new “Unsubscribe Reasons” Report, which can tell you what players have given as reasons for unsubscribing from the game (along with tracking the total number of unsubscribers over time).

• Subscription Savings Plans!

  Previously, a lot of subscribers would unsubscribe when their subscription fees came due because they didn’t have enough money in their daily entertainment budgets to pay the whole fee. Now, they’ll save up toward the subscription fee in advance, so this should be much less of a problem!

• Solid Walls!

  Players should no longer walk through walls (or over mountains or etc), if you’ve completely walled off the place that they wanted to go to. (previously, if there was no legal way to reach their desired destination, they’d ignore obstacles in order to get there. Now they’ll just fail to go there, instead)

• Littering is Bad, M’Kay?

  Fixes the infamous “dropped weapons” bug, which would sometimes result in dozens or even hundreds of pure-white weapons being randomly strewn about on the landscape. (This mostly happened on larger games, when players bought weapons while out of view of the camera; the weapons were appearing wherever the character had last been visible on-screen, and stayed there until the next time you looked at the player who owned each weapon)

…and a whole bunch of other bug fixes and more minor improvements!

I’m really happy to have this update out for everyone to play with! Getting our AI systems to work reliably in parties was surprisingly tricky; this one is literally the third full implementation I did of the Parties feature, and the first one that doesn’t terrify me to think about trying to maintain or extend in the future!

Please let us know if you encounter any issues with the new Parties functionality or with the new game assets, or with anything else in this update, either on our Discord server or on our community forums. Thanks so much for your patience and support, everyone!

Next stop, the Combat 2.0 update!