When we announced Humankind, we often stressed that this was the dream game Amplitude was founded for. We were overjoyed by the positive reception our dream saw, many players expressing their excitement for a new entry into the historical 4X genre. Yet we knew Humankind was an ambitious dream, so we looked for help from our eager community.
Through the OpenDev program, you have given us invaluable feedback on the game. While Humankind is already a great game, many of you think it could be even better, and after analyzing all your great feedback, we realized that we could make even further improvements to make Humankind the best game that it can be. These improvements take time, however, so we have decided to move the release date.
Humankind will release on August 17th, 2021.
This will give us time to further polish the game for a great day one experience, address the feedback from the OpenDev scenarios, and keep working with our community to improve the game. We want to thank you all for your passion for our dream, the feedback you have given, and the support for this decision many of you have already expressed:
Hello everyone!
In the weeks since the Lucy OpenDev, we've been reading a lot of feedback. While many players told us they see great potential in Humankind, they also offered a lot of constructive criticism, and often expressed concern if the game could live up to this potential in the time until release.
After taking stock of your feedback, of where we are with the game, and where we want it to be when we release, we have decided to postpone the release until August. We agree with you all, the game will be incredible with a little extra time, and we think we are lucky to have passionate fans like you who support us up in that decision.
At times like these, I am also reminded that we made the right choice when joining SEGA, who has been incredibly supportive of this decision. They believe in Humankind as much as we do, and they have been a great partner in realizing our vision of the game.
Thank you all for your support.
Cheers,
Spacetroll
We are immensely grateful to all our passionate players who gave the game a try and let us know what they thought, what they liked, and what they didn’t like. Your feedback is crucial to improving the game, and to thank everybody who has shown us their trust by pre-ordering, we are adding two more Avatars to the preorder bonus: Lucy, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Once upon a midnight dreary,/ As I pondered weak and weary,/
If I have more time to burn,/ Proclaimed Lucy: One more turn!
So, what is all the feedback we are talking about? What did our players tell us about their experience with the OpenDev, and what are we doing to address their concerns? We’ll be working to address pacing, balancing, diplomacy, accessibility, and AI (among others), but let’s take a closer look at some of the most common points of feedback and our plans for them:
- Pacing and Balancing:These were two of the most discussed topics in the OpenDev Feedback, and the general consensus was that the game progresses too quickly, and all basic resources are too abundant. Here are some examples of what we are working on to address these issues:
- The New Growth System: Since the growth model we tested in the Lucy OpenDev (based on current population and population capacity of the city) turned out to be difficult to understand and balance, and potentially frustrating with newly founded cities, we've swapped back to a growth rate based on surplus food. Of course, this still needs to be tested and balanced.
- Food and Influence in the Neolithic Era: Since many players performed quite a bit better than expected in the Neolithic era, we're rebalancing the food and influence gains and are keeping an eye on this with our internal tests.
- Neolithic Era Variety: Many players found that the Neolithic era lacked variety, so we want to implement additional narrative events.
- Research Costs: We will rework the research costs of technology to create a smoother progression that should roughly keep pace with the intended era progression.
- Stability: Stability should be a limiting factor on City and Empire growth that creates interesting situations for the player to tackle, but in Lucy OpenDev many players found it too easy to reach a point where they could ignore stability. We’re examining and rebalancing the various factors of stability to reach a point where it can create interesting challenges without being punishing or frustrating.
- Money and Influence: As many players found that as the game progressed they stockpiled an abundance of Money and Influence with little to spend it on, we are working to balance the income and spending of these resources.
- Market and Research Quarters: Market and Research Quarters were often seen as not worthwhile compared to additional Farmers or Makers Quarters, so we want to improve their value compared to these.
- Cultures: As expected of such a test, some of the Cultures in the game emerged as particularly strong, some to the point of overshadowing other cultures. We’re working to address this by rebalancing their Legacy Traits, Emblematic Quarters, and Emblematic Units. Most Emblematic Quarters will now also be limited in number per territory to preserve their uniqueness and avoid direct competition with generic quarters.
- City and Army Cap: To strike a better balance between size and number of both cities and armies, we are working on imposing a limit on the number of both, after which players would incur penalties.
- Sieges: Many players found that it was too easy to conquer the cities of other players or Independent People, and we are looking into how to address this.
- Era Star Requirements: With all the other rebalancing, we are also keeping an eye on era star requirements to adjust them if necessary.
- Diplomacy:While a lot of OpenDev players liked the underlying system of Diplomacy in Humankind, many also found it confusing due to the interface and feedback. Here are a few points we are working on:
- Diplomacy notifications: We are rewriting many of the notifications, grievances, demands, and surrender terms to make it clearer who did what.
- Improved Dialogue Flow: We're improving the avatar dialog flow to reduce the number and duration of pauses, so it flows more naturally.
- AI Attitude Changes: We are also working to clarify the "mood messages" when AI change their attitude towards you with additional text.
- Trade View: We're still working to polish the trade view in the Diplomacy screen, so you get a better understanding of your trade network, including incoming and outgoing trade routes.
- User Experience Flow and Feedback: We're working to improve the clarity of the UX in the diplomacy menu, for example clearly highlighting when an AI has accepted or rejected a treaty.
- Onboarding:Some of Humankind’s systems were difficult to grasp for players, especially new players, so we are hard at work on the onboarding experience, including:
- In-game Tutorial Videos: A set of short videos explaining basic concepts, accessible through an in-game menu.
- Tooltip Polish: We're working to improve the readability and clarity of the tooltips.
- Hints: We'd like to have a better hint system to help players figure out good strategies, for example suggesting useful Infrastructures to build.
- User Interface/Experience:We're working to improve the interface and user experience in various areas:
- Territory names: To help players locate events and demands on the map, we are going to add names to territories. Trade routes passing through uncontrolled territory will also create a label showing the name and number of trade routes.
- Fame Objective Pop-ups: When you get close to achieving an Era star, your progress will be shown on the main screen so you can easily keep track of your objectives without checking a separate screen.
- Notifications: As many players found that the messages in the notification ribbon did not contain enough information, we are including more dynamic information in them, for example in which category a star has been earned.
- Management Screens: We're still polishing the city management and battle menus.
- Ideology Changes: We’re working on a clearer display of the ideology changes and its effects in the Civics menu and events.
- Splitting regions: We are working on an option to detach territories from a city.
- Battle Prediction: We'd like to improve the battle prediction to not rely solely on the relative unit strength.
As you can see, we got a lot of feedback from the different OpenDev scenarios, in particular the Lucy OpenDev. Participation was great, so we received not only a lot of detailed, constructive feedback in our forum, but also valuable data from the survey. You certainly pushed Humankind as far as you could, as you can see from the stats below:
Of course, as we continue to work on the game, we may want another round of feedback from our passionate players, so keep your eyes peeled for future opportunities to try the game!
UPDATE: Our Studio Head Romain has confirmed that we are aiming to launch the next OpenDev around the original release date of April 22nd. We will release a blog with further details on when, where, and how to participate once the specifics have been settled.
The Amplitude Team
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