Posts: 6,067
Threads: 304
Joined: Aug 2007
Staff roles: Story Dev Economy Dev
Hello! I'm putting this post together to let the community know what the current plans are for the story and infocard teams, and what this will look like in the coming weeks.
I've regrettably been asked to fill in as story lead for the time being. My first directive has been to stop work on story development. I am kidding, but it is true that we are going to be deprioritising work on big, new plot arcs for the time being.
Instead, I have asked the story devs and infocard contributors to focus on what we are calling the Regional Review Project. This will aim to systemically review every infocard in the game, with a view to making sure everything reflects the current status quo for 5.0.
This means updating retconned or inconsistent material, refreshing infocards that have been long neglected, and rewriting low quality infocards that no longer meet our style guide and submission standards.
This may also involve segregating out information from existing cards, and instead introducing 'historic' news articles about relevant events instead. This should hopefully provide players with a better way to access details about the mod's history and plot simply by playing the game, rather than relying on word of mouth or Wiki articles of dubious accuracy.
The main objective here is to ensure that the mod is polished and presentable - currently the tangled web of outdated or missing information can make it very difficult for new or returning players to immerse themselves in Discovery's setting and lore. This also means we'll be building a rock-solid foundation for future developers to work off.
This is going to be a big job. The current plan is to focus on a particular region, complete it, and then push those changes out in the next hotfix. This means the project should start to bear fruit fairly quickly.
We're going to be starting with Rheinland, as one of the longest neglected and most inconsistently updated Houses. From there, we will cover the other Houses, then moving through different regions as defined in the server rules. You will be able to track our progress through the published tracking documents that will be listed in this thread.
Now, we will still be hosting official server events to keep the server feeling fresh, and minor plot updates will be implemented via ongoing hotpatches, alongside forum CNS posts. This means we won't be pushing forward with big narrative arcs as quickly as we would like, but I hope you can all understand why this work is necessary.
If you have any questions, by all means feel free to ask them here.