June 4 - Accidental reveal & our decision!

I'm not in the office today but it has come to my attention that someone may have accidentally revealed some of the content currently being prototyped. So instead of trying to cover anything up we have decided to expand this into a full teaser of some of what I promised some time ago with "Sweeping Changes". 

So some of you who have interacted with me recently know I have been spending many nights awake recently working on the game, and I know recent developments in the arena and other places aren't reflective of this - yet. While it may look to some we have kicked up our feet, I can assure you that is the furthest thing from the truth. Truth is - That game-wide content rework is well underway, with some parts rapidly approaching finalization.

We're ready to introduce of the lore behind "The Fifth Family". 

The first thing I want to mention is the families themselves. I've spent a lot of time trying to make every family feel fresh yet familiar, inspired from real life crime organizations from around the world, with little spins to add flavor, or diversify where people are from. With even more than this current wave of changes in mind, we have named this big project of reworking everything Phase 1.  

As the name suggests, this is the first in what I hope will be at most three waves of changes coming to the game.

However this Phase will be the most disruptive to how we currently know and enjoy the game.

Here are just some of the effects of Phase 1 on systems projected:

- Complete Career overhaul to align careers with lore and families, and create five independent career branches.
- Crime overhaul so that every district has ten distinct crimes, two per family, per district. Oh and did I mention the two new districts?
- Five families with different stat balancing, which will be brought to Item/Crime/Career alignments to allow fuller build customization.
- Chop Shop upgrade with a full car parts system so even your ride will feel your own and have an independent progression you can enjoy.
- Travel System which will be modulated by newly implemented Traffic (Time of day matters to your travel now), and Weather (Yup that too).

So the importance of travel buffs, will be magnified. But Phase 1 has other forms of time-dependent content this needed.

Now Phase 1 reaches over almost every aspect of the game, but as of right now these elements are close enough to release-worthy that we can safely say that most of it should be happening. But I'd like everyone to remember that due to the scope of the Phase, it is difficult to predict exactly how it will shake out in the end. So far every system has taken no less than three full revisions to get to somewhere workable, and the same degree of attention is being paid in trying to make the game feel more engaging, and more cohesive as a whole.

A prototyping page has been created for each of these new game aspects discussed above for your perusal. I hope you will enjoy the direction content is going, and the scale of the Phase 1 project. I have been so excited to share this with you all. I would like to warn ahead that the rebalancing of which districts are which levels, the addition of crimes, alongside the inclusion of two new districts in the game will require us to "Reposition" where you are in the game when Phase 1 launches. Please do not expect to be in the same area of the game post Phase 1, but do expect to have the same amount of progress, we are actively working out how to transpose your progress to the new systems. This is the first, and last time you will be moved this way if I can at all help it, as I understand it breaks the perception of your journey, and I want to apologize for it in advance.  

So I hope these prototypes give you a feel for the direction the lore and its integration into the game is looking so far, and I hope to see lots of you telling me what you think (Respectfully please). I'm here almost every day and eager for suggestions and feedback!

In conclusion, this is your time to voice how you feel about the prototype systems, any inclusions you would love to see. We are still deep in the planning stages of Phase 1, but building systems as we plan, so we expect Phase 1 to be ready soon. No, I don't know exactly when, that will depend how many nights Ruler and I actually sleep.   

You can view "The Five Families" in the "More" section on your bottom navigation bar right now. You can also view V2 of Travel and Chop Shop within their respective pages where you'll find a tab. Crimes & Careers V2 teasers will be live soon.

Now I go back to my day off,

Content Head Chary