RimWorld planning to add more to Royalty

New psychic combat abilities and new quests are among the features that might be added to RimWorld's Royalty expansion, lead developer Tynan Sylvester has said. Today he issued a wee update on plans for the sci-fi colony management sim's first expansion, which launched last week alongside Update 1.1. He explained that while he's tended to operate quietly before rather than raise players' expectations and risk dashing them when plans change, now he's going to be a bit more open. He also noted that big-numbered updates for RimWorld aren't over, with at least an Update 1.2 coming at some point.

"In the past I've rarely written about the future because release dates and game designs often change unexpectedly during development. I can't tell you how many times in the past I had a firm expectation of some development outcome that was totally wrong in the end. Not talking about the future avoided the risk that something would change and people would get angry because they perceive some promise to have been broken. Talking less also allowed me to focus on making the game great instead of spending time managing public expectations," Sylvester said in today's blog post.

"Now, though, I think it's time to give a bit more info of what to expect to to help people in the community make their own decisions and to help modders be ready for what's coming next."

So! A few hotfixes have already come for Update 1.1 and Royalty, and more will follow "as needed." He says these shouldn't break savegames or mods, and they hope to be done with the hotfixing "in a week or two." After that, they plan to make "a content add-on mostly focused on expanding Royalty content."

Stressing that none of these will definitely happen, he says he's considering changes including a way to renounce royal titles, more bulk production recipes for things like drugs, extra combat psycasts for technopsychic warriors, some mech cluster changes which might make it sensible to leave them dormant rather than just squishing them ("The dramatic tension of having a mech cluster present on the map, but not yet fighting it, seems valuable," he says), and maybe extra quest content to produce more quests variations. Such new Royalty features should also be compatible with old savegames and mods.

Sylvester confirmed Ludeon Studio "will be updating the game further" after that content add-on too. At least a RimWorld Update 1.2 will come "some day", he said, though what might be in it is a mystery. What's important is that we'll find out it's coming more than one week before it goes live.

The thrill of Royalty and 1.1's surprise launch was somewhat dampened by the update breaking compatibility with older mods. Many folks play RimWorld modded to the nines and were faced with the decision to either bail on their favourite mods and update or skip 1.1 and Royalty until modmakers updated everything (and, inevitably, not all mods will be updated). With more notice, modders will have more time to prepare and modfans will get to steel themselves and wrap up saves or whatnot. And hopefully breaking compatibility will be less of an issue in future.

"We're going to try hard to avoid unnecessary code breakages and keep documents about changes for all future updates, and without such a big Unity update I hope mods in general will be easier or trivially easy to update than the 1.0 -> 1.1 shift." Sylvester said. "However, things will still inevitably need updating."

We recently declared RimWorld the very best of the best management games, you know.