Stoneshard Update – Current Plans

Now that Ink Stains Games is done tinkering with the Way Forward content update for their challenging turn-based RPG Stoneshard, we get this Steam announcement that outlines the team’s plans for the foreseeable future.

First, we’ll get a new content update that will expand the game’s arsenal with two new types of two-handed weapons, and then, around Q2 2021, the City of Gold update will go live, introducing the first major city, an early iteration of the caravan system, and plenty of new features.

Here’s more on that:

Hello everyone!

The work on follow-up patches for the “Way Forward” update is complete, so in today’s devlog we’d like to give you more details about our future plans.

The current state of the game is such that we can no longer add new content to the existing map: there’s simply not enough space for it anymore. The small scale of the game world creates a number of temporary restrictions, which overall render the experience less enjoyable, such as randomized treatises, instantly respawning dungeons, skewed gear and character progression, sudden difficulty spikes, caused by the lack of area for more starting dungeons, and so on.

Therefore, our top priority is to expand the map and add the first major town, which will finally allow us to resolve most of these issues. This task will take a lot of time and effort, but it will most definitely pay off – our game will finally work as it was initially intended, paving the way for many long-awaited features, from the trait system and character generation to the improved economy and a new enchantment system.

Other than that, the global map will also require implementing a large number of accompanying, closely linked systems: a foundation for the caravan system, new points of interests, new enemy factions, significant changes to the progression, and more. All of this will be a part of the next major update, “City of Gold”, which will be approximately released in Q2 2021.

In the meantime we also plan to release a large content update before the end of 2020, which will help you pass the time while waiting for the upcoming major changes. This update will include two new weapon types: two-handed axes and hammers, their skill trees, new gear, new traps, new combat consumables (including nets and placeable claw traps), and a few other things. There’ll be more details about these additions in the following devlogs.

For now, we’d like to share some of the results of our recent work[…]

Until next time!