Worlds Adrift Dev Tracker

Imagine this: you hear about a new MMO on the web. You get interested, the game is launched, you buy a copy of it and perhaps a subscription.

For a couple of years, said MMO goes from its early stages, full of exploits and bugs (like most MMOs under the sun, ever) and a year or so in, it stabilises and start to get better. Not perfect, not the final article (because no live MMO is ever the final article, as it keeps forever evolving). Devs continue to work on it.

Yet, not many players buy the game. Eventually, after a couple of years, dev announces it can no longer keep it going, and it's going to shut it down. It stops charging you a subscription, and will keep the game alive for another two or three months for you to play.

This has happened before. A lot of times, to a lot of MMOs.

Now, how's this different from Worlds Adrift on Early Access? We didn't charge a subscription. That's the difference. The only difference.

Case in point, ... Read more

Hey there,

Please see what our CEO had to say about this here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/322780/discussions/0/1644290458825499424/?ctp=3#c1644290549103897239

Just locking duplicate threads in order to focus discussion in one ...

Answers about open source / p2p / selling the IP can be found here (at the bottom of the pinned FAQ)

https://steamcommunity.com/app/322780/discussions/0/1644290458825499424/?ctp=3#c1644290549103897239

Hey,

Please see our CEO's answer here:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/322780/discussions/0/1644290458825499424/?ctp=3#c1644290549103897239

We negotiated a 1 month refund policy with Steam which is outside of their normal procedure.

You should not be denied a refund in that case.

If you have been automatically denied please contact us with your Steam details and proof of purchase at support.bossastudios.com and we'll chase it up.

We are considering what we will do next, once we send Worlds into the sunset in late July. We are sure to update the Island Creator to allow it to export the islands into an open format, and that will include assets.

Afterwards, an idea would be to pick up the best parts of the game and take them to the original concept of a 16-32 players survival type of game. Removing the massive aspect of it would allow us to work on features to make the game better, rather than just spending time making it work as we were up to now. But we need time to wrap it all up before looking into these possibilities. Goes without saying that if we do it, players get it.

So far, I've been mostly replying to people's questions, adding more detail where we can, but the EA issue seems to be one in a lot of people's minds at the moment, thus I'll address this here with a perspective I think it's worth thinking about.

The 'MMO on Early Access is a bad idea' concept is such a red herring.

The majority of MMOs, regardless of where or how they were released, had a bumpy launch and only found their feet a year or so later. This applies to MMOs small and large, from indies to large corps, the list is long.

These games, they all went through huge changes, fixes, exploits, rebalance, you name it. They dramatically evolved over time, particularly in the early days, just like Worlds Adrift did.

Most of them are no longer around regardless.

How's that any different from Early Access?

By the time Worlds Adrift hit Early Access, people could play it for hours on end. Today, average playtime exceeds 20+ hours, wi... Read more

Hi there,

I mentioned this in another thread but the reason why Worlds Adrift (and many large games) don't go Open Source when they are sunset is simple: they are in part built with third party tools, plugins and licensed code we cannot share or open source ourselves. Without these the game doesn't run nor compile. Going over and removing all these instances is a huge undertaking as well. This is why it's rare for a game going Open Source, it has little to do with willingness to do so.

I hope that sheds a little light on why we can't do this as much as we'd like to.

Hey there,

Sadly we can't make the game single player, we have the Island Creator which does not require SpatialOS to operate.

Unlike our other games, Worlds's network is built on top of SpatialOS, a proprietary tech. Worlds does not run without it, nor can it be hosted outside of SpatialOS's infrastructure. It stops us from both making it P2P or allow anyone to host their own servers, unfortunately.

Please visit https://www.worldsadrift.com for more information.

Why is Worlds Adrift shutting down?

Making such an ambitious game was always going to be a challenge and we love the game we’ve built together with our community. However,  Worlds Adrift has not captured the imagination of as many people as we needed to make it commercially viable.

When is Worlds Adrift shutting down?

Worlds Adrift will be closing in July 2019 with our End of the World Party. The exact date and details of this event will be announced here and on our other community channels (Twitter, Facebook, Steam Forum and Discord) soon.

What’s happening with the game until then?

You will be able to play as normal but we’ve made a few changes to help players get the most out of the game during these final months. To provide a... Read more

The best advice I can give you, or anyone is to go to http://www.gcping.com/

Look for Iowa and see your latency there.

If it's higher than say, 150ms, you might experience sub-optimal performance.

The last time we wiped was back in October 2018. They're not as necessary as before and as we develop the backend tech we can be more granular with what we reset.

The next planned wipe is for Update 31 which is a way off yet.

Head to our Support Site [bossastudios.zendesk.com], make a ticket, and we'll take a look. :)

Worlds Adrift is built on new and upcoming server software SpatialOS - In fact, Worlds is the first game to be released with SpatialOS (and very few have followed). SpatialOS itself is still in development, and that means a beta game is being built with beta software. There is no "handbook" for problems that may arise - Improbable are giving Bossa loads of support of course, but that's all they have and so things will take longer.

Judging from the tone of your message I assume you yourself are also a games developer? If so, it might be worth checking out SpatialOS to see the benefits it can offer - but also understand why some things may take a little longer. It has a free trial :) https://improbable.io/games

Hi all,
Things did not go as planned today during our routine maintenance as explained in this post[https://forums.improbable.io/t/incident-deployment-sizes-being-inadvertently-limited/5419] by improbable, and when our servers restarted, the behavior was weird and unexpected. As you can see Worlds Adrift is still pushing the boundaries of SpatialOS in unique ways. But the issue is now resolved and the worlds have been reset to their status from before maintenance. We will work with Improbable to understand how this happened and understand how to avoid similar issues in the future.

It cannot always be, but may your sailing be smooth.

You will still be free to logout your character and your ship will continue to log out like it does not, but if you wish you can sit and wait the 3 minutes knowing the ship will logout as your character does. This only occurs if you are the last owner of the ship to log off.

The blight can be overly aggressive right now, and we are completely rewriting it for the next update, the current advice is to keep your ships quite simple and avoid high populated areas.

All Founders have been given a key to give to a friend. You can read more information here:
https://www.worldsadrift.com/community/the-key-to-our-success/

Hi there Talo,

Please check out support.bossastudios.com and submit a ticket!

Thank you,
Julia

HI Chrissof!

If you contact our support team from support.bossastudios.com we'd be happy to help you out with this.

Thanks!