Enter the Roadmap

Posted by remi 4 years ago

Many of you have wondered what goes on behind the scenes, and what our long term plans are. In the earlier phases of this project we only had a 3 month contract and so we didn’t have as much freedom to “think big”. Now we are unchained. We have been given the green light to continue developing NS2 and it looks like we will be able to do so for at least another 6-9 months.

In the past the goals we communicated were more focused on discrete metrics: player retention, number of concurrents, and the number of copies sold. But those are just tools to measure our progress. Our aim for NS2 has always been larger than what those metrics encompass.

Our goal is to reinvigorate the game and bring about a new “golden era” for NS2 gaming, and in doing so to contribute to UWE’s overarching goal — to unite the world through play.

But how can we achieve that? Our current Trello boards give a good view of what we are working on, but is focused only on the short-term. Enter the Roadmap:

Roadmaps are used for communicating a high-level plan and the general prioritization of large features. The first thing you may notice about our roadmap is that there are no dates on it. This is because it’s not meant to be a promise as to when a feature will be completed, but it is a useful tool to communicate what we want to achieve, and in the order we think we will be able to achieve it.

Our Roadmap is also not an inclusive list of everything we plan to work on. It’s focusing on only the large features and doesn’t include work we will continue to do on balance, gameplay, bug fixing, performance improvements, stability, data collection, and much more. Between every patch, we are also looking for “quick wins” — tasks which will give large payoffs relative to the amount of time that would need to be invested. Tasks where the amount of work required is very small compared to the amount of value they produce to the community.

There are many things we could highlight from our Roadmap, but I’ll just highlight one: converting the engine to 64 bit. This is something we’ve said in the past is likely never happening… until the fates conspired and it’s now actually become a possibility.

We’re very excited about the potential that all these features will bring to the game. I’m sure this roadmap will inspire even more questions than the number of answers it may provide. This is why we’ve decided to write this post and unveil our roadmap before recording a Q&A video. Please visit our reddit page to submit your questions and upvote others’.

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