Statement of the Creator

Original Post by the Creator of ADOM: Thomas Biskup himself:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1266820/discussions/0/3050608452021165961/

Dear community, Our recent announcement of moving the production release date forward to end of August has raised questions and concerns. Only now we start to understand that we probably failed to communicate our strategy for Ultimate ADOM clear enough (although – after looking through older posts – we did communicate it from the very beginning). Let me once more summarize our vision for Ultimate ADOM which basically is twofold:

1. Our short-term goal was to create a new audience for a sequel to ADOM by addressing a more mainstream audience (people who regularly play RPGs but are not really into roguelikes). We felt that this move was an absolute necessity to be able to sustain the development of a modern graphical game worthy of a 21st century audience. Doing so requires higher investments compared to building a simpler pure ASCII based game. We always had the vision to prove that even a complex game of the nature of ADOM is mainstream-capable and can provide exciting new venues to players accustomed to such more classical RPG games out there.

2. Our long-term goal (and this mirrors in the name prefix “Ultimate” we chose) was to build a much deeper ADOM that surpasses the original in every aspect: More stories, more complex story lines, more character options, more skills, more spells, more items, an extensive surface world and so on and so forth.

Our decision to move to production status is related to the short-term goal: We feel that Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos is very nearly complete enough (and detailed enough) for the needs of more mainstream gamers. Already now Ultimate ADOM in many areas (though certainly not all) by far surpasses ADOM Classic/Deluxe (and for the sake of completeness I will do an extensive comparison of where Ultimate ADOM already today has far more depth than the original ADOM had… and of the areas where it still needs to grow – expect it to show up in a day or three on our blog, we’ll announce it here, too).

For sure Ultimate ADOM

Caverns of Chaos is on a certain level a much simpler game than ADOM: It’s more focused on roughly 20 levels of play, you probably can win it within 3-6 hours based on your level of experience and it still has a wide variety of options to choose from and a wide variety of surprises waiting for you. It’s not quite yet where we want it to be for prime time but close enough according to our estimate.

Three areas needed improvement

• Melee

• Magic

• Overall balance, stability, performance and pacing

Comparing the player behavior from ADOM shows that Ultimate ADOM is already a much more accessible game than its predecessor. Especially new players make it deeper into the dungeons than ever before.

The plan so far has been to address melee aspects by 95% with the June release (which is out – and the game has become a lot more challenging although we still are fine-tuning some areas like critical hits by monsters), address magic with the July release and do the final tuning and polishing in August before production.

We’ll (again) slightly adjust this by focusing on performance and bugs for the next couple of weeks to prove that the game foundation is rock solid and then finish the content aspects mentioned above before production release.

I have to admit that we probably kind of fumbled communicating this vision clearly enough because the name “Ultimate…” already insinuates