As the title says, we’ve opted to extend our Early Access by a few months, so our planned window for launching 1.0 will now be in the first few months of 2025. The short answer as to why is that we are expanding and changing the game extensively. Two important notes right away:
- We are still launching co-op on PC in 2024. The exact date will be decided based on the beta tests.
- We are still aiming to release 1.0 on PC and PS5 simultaneously.
Since the start of Early Access, we’ve been listening to community feedback and shaping the game accordingly. Many of the changes and evolutions we’re adding are a direct result of this feedback.
Here is an overview of what to expect:
Major Progress Overhaul
First and foremost, we’re changing how players progress through the game. As it stands, there is a certain path players naturally follow to unlock specific technologies and upgrades. The shift we’re making will allow players to become much more self-sufficient, especially in the opening hours, while putting more focus on surviving aboard their airship instead of hopping from location to location. We want to ease some of the regular resource bottlenecks and provide more options for players. Some key examples of these changes include:
- Handcrafting, allows you to craft certain items and components via a built-in Suit Fabricator, enabling crafting while exploring instead of being tied to a fabricator.
- A complete overhaul of the hand extractor's design and accessibility. The tool will now be part of your suit from the start, with a self-recharge function in emergencies. We’ve also adapted our level design to provide more resources in the air for extraction, puzzles to solve with the extractor, and a range of modules players can research and attach.
- Ensuring players always have access to basic resources and the ability to harvest them, designed to alleviate bottlenecks and give players the ability to recover even in dire moments.
- Quicker access to tools such as the build tool, allowing airship expansion earlier in the game loop.
- The Ship Workstation’s name changed to Decoration Fabricator and will be made available just after the tutorial. We want players to start customizing their ships and relying on expansion for survival closer to the start of the game.
These changes and many others we have ideas for will also have a knock-on effect, wherein much of our mid and end-game progress will now be reordered or redesigned.
Our World Will Be Divided into Biomes
We’re moving away from relying entirely on procedural generation to place locations across the map. Instead, we’re creating groups of biomes that will only spawn certain locations within them. While procedural generation offers variety and unpredictability, it can sometimes lead to disjointed or chaotic landscapes and progression.
By designing biomes with specific rules and defining what locations can spawn within them, we can create a more cohesive and believable world while still allowing some procedural variety. This enables us to craft environments that tell a collective story, guiding players through more thoughtfully organized and interconnected areas.
In essence, we’ll have greater control over the atmosphere, pacing, and progression of the world, allowing us to build a more structured and meaningful story and exploration path.
On top of the new biome system, we are also creating and adding new locations that expand on the variety of places you will explore and scavenge.
Altitude - Restoring the Importance of Height
In addition to biomes, we want altitude to play a more significant role in exploration, resource locations, and the overall narrative. While we’ve established a distinction between the world above and below the dust, we feel there’s more potential to encourage players to fly higher or lower for different reasons.
We’re currently prototyping systems where different altitudes will present varying threats, unique resources, and specific locations. While we already have an upgrade loop encouraging players to ascend, there’s little motivation to return to lower altitudes, aside from landing at specific locations. We’re aiming to change that.
The Need to Take Care of Your Airship
We’re introducing a more advanced and overhauled damage system for your airship, making it more meaningful than the current version. We want to give players a compelling reason to maintain and repair their airship, as neglect will now have greater consequences—such as reduced performance, increased vulnerability, or even a total loss of equipment. This adds depth to the gameplay, moving beyond the current system, which many players feel is just a visual nuisance without real consequences.
Rest assured this will all be thoroughly tested and balanced so that upkeep feels fair and meaningful vs tedious and constant. We’ll also be introducing more tools and solutions to avoid or minimize the level of damage your airship takes, thus adding a new layer of progress or upgrades that you can push toward.
Basically, we want you to become more attached to your airship and feel motivated to maintain and upgrade it to the point where it feels like you can conquer all the threats our world throws at you.
Dynamic Random Encounters
To add variety to the world, we’re introducing random encounters while exploring above the dust. These events will add spontaneity and unpredictability to the game, making each session feel fresh and exciting—especially in co-op. Instead of following a predictable path, players will face sudden challenges or rewards at any moment, including:
- Hostile creatures attacking your airship, forcing you to defend it, repair damage, and safeguard against future attacks.
- Supply drop capsules sent from the Ark Space Station, which land unpredictably and must be retrieved quickly before they disappear into the dust.
- Colossal lifeforms at the apex of the evolved food chain. These rare creatures are far beyond your means to fight, but getting close enough might reward you with rare loot or new areas to explore.
The Addition of Co-op To All of This
Everything we mentioned here along with other smaller changes we have planned all need to take into account that the game will be played not only in single-player but also in co-op.
We are going to start our first beta tests for co-op soon which is a big moment for us, so you’ll be able to see how some of these changes actually play together. From there the team will need to take on feedback, do tweaks and then run more tests on top of adding in more and more of these mentioned features. All that takes time and effort which our team will need to do this right.
Remember, you can still sign up to our co-op beta tests using this link:
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When To Expect These Changes?
All these changes we've outlined as well as the final story chapters will be added sometime between now and the final release of the game. To ensure these changes are properly prototyped and tested, we're not committing to an exact timeline for each.
However expect many of these to be introduced with the release of co-op mode still in 2024, while anything else we still need time on will be rolled out during the final early access update, if not before that.
So that’s it from our end on this. We hope you understand our decision to use this precious time in Early Access just a little longer. We’ve always said from the start, we’re doing our best to create the game that our community wants and with these changes, we’re aiming to get even closer to that promise.
- Team Forever Skies
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1641960/Forever_Skies/
