Blog: Steam Wishlist Live + Game Update!

2024/06/07

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Turug Durin!
Durin’s Beard!

The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria™ is coming to Steam in Fall 2024 and the Steam store page is now live - Wishlist now! and check out our announcement trailer:

On Friday May 31st members of the RtM Dev team got together for a Forge Talk in our Official Discord to celebrate the Steam announcement, discuss what they've been working on and take questions from the community.

You can listen back to the recording of Forge Talk Episode 4 via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qngq-h9W6BI and we've also included a copy of the transcript below for those who want it. ‍‍

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‍Transcript for Forge Talk Episode 4:

Please note: Some aspects of the transcript have been edited and it is not a 1:1 match to the audio, our aim is to capture the conversation as closely as possible while ensuring clarity for those reading without the audio. -Clare

Clare Byrne, Community Manager: Hi, everyone. Well, you're very welcome. This Forge talk is going to be, I suppose, a bit more casual. We don't have a blog as our focus, so we've just got some recent news and then we haven't had one of these since Sandbox came out. So it's going to be a bit of a chat around that and maybe some Q&A at the end.

So if you have any questions, feel free to drop them in the chat and we'll be keeping an eye and hopefully get some of your questions answered. So yeah- Oh! and I thought spoiler warning, maybe if we're talking about sandbox and some updates and stuff, it's more of a proceed with caution, I guess, rather than like we're explicitly going to talk about the end game, but just yeah, just be careful just in case something gets mentioned.

‍Jon-Paul Dumont, Game Director: It's like a note for us too, to be careful.

‍CB: Yeah, exactly. Don't go spoiling loads of stuff. So for people who haven't been here before, will we go around and make introductions?

‍JD: Okay, well, do you wanna introduce yourself first?

‍CB: Oh, yeah. Okay. Hello! I'm Clare. You'll often see me in the Discord. I'm the Community Manager, and I'm semi emceeing this Forge Talk.

‍JD: Hey, everybody. I'm Jon-Paul. I'm the game director at Free Range Games

‍Bradley Fulton, Art Director: Hi everyone, I'm Bradley Fulton. I'm the art director here on Return to Moria

‍Genie Hyatt, Lead Gameplay Engineer: I'm Genie. I'm the lead gameplay engineer on Return to Moria.

‍Ryan Mattson, Lead Level Designer: And I'm Ryan and I'm the lead level designer and also our sets game designer on Return to Moria.

‍CB: Nice! So I suppose the biggest news lately has been we announced is Return to Moria is coming to Steam! Which we've all known for a while but it's great to be able to share that with the community that yes, you can go wish list it now!

‍JD: The amount of times I've been tempted when someone's like, “Hey, is this coming to Steam?” And I want to just reply like, “Yes, it is!”. Now it's announced and we can say it is and we're very excited about that.

‍CB: Now it's official and the page is up and please wish list and tell your friends! It's Fall 2024 - this year. I suppose the two questions people have been asking is… Will it be cross-play between Steam and Epic? I've seen that in the chat a few times. The other question is any news on the Xbox? Because I know some people are waiting for that news as well.

‍JD: Yeah, well I can answer at least for Xbox. We are going to have that page up pretty soon. So for Xbox our intention right now is the same timeframe as Steam, so Fall. We're going to be doing our best to get it out all around the same time, along with an update to the ps5 and that will get Sandbox on all of the console versions that will get it out on Steam and there'll be an update for Epic as well.

So we're hoping for all four versions updated or releasing somewhere around the same time in the Fall. Very excited about Xbox, wish we had a big fancy thing for it today, but it is coming and we're pretty excited about it.

‍CB: And once we have that page live and you can wish list on Xbox and all that jazz, I'll be sharing a post in the announcements channel [on Discord] so people want to keep an eye on that, as soon as it's live we'll be sharing it there. So have you had fun or any unforeseen challenges when developing, for Steam? I assume it's, it's fairly similar.

‍JD: Yeah. Well one of the things we- I mean to answer your first question, we wanted to make sure that Epic players who have been playing - and so many of our dedicated players who have like insane bases and have been playing the game like 5, 10, 20 times, are on Epic - we want to make sure that when their Steam friends show up, they can go give them a tour of their bases.

So probably the biggest thing for us is making sure- we wanted to make sure that the steam version feels natural. On Steam you can invite your friends, use the overlay and that you can also play with your Epic friends. So yeah, Epic Cross-Play, Epic-Steam Cross-Play is absolutely going to be there when it launches.

‍CB: Nice! I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people enjoying showing off their amazing bases and the potential to players who join from Steam as well. So, do we have any other news around that at the moment or is it kind of a watch this space? I know the exact date is still like “The closer we get, we’ll be able to say like these are the dates that we have” and we're just aiming for Fall. But is there any other news or is that kind of covering it?

‍JD: Yeah, I mean, I'm the obvious question is “Well, when is fall?”

‍CB: [laughs] Yeah!

‍JD: And so we can only talk about our personal point of view on when it is. I would say for me July is still summer and October is definitely fall. That's about as far as I could go, so…

‍CB: So, watch this space! Yeah.

‍JD: Yeah, yeah. I mean in terms of other announcements, I mean we don't have a visual today. I mean we basically were like “Steam! We should tell everybody! We should talk and take some questions!” and we really haven't had a chance to talk too much about the updates that we did in April and the fact that it just went out on PS5.

So definitely a lot of things that, like, certainly topics we can have questions about. And then we'll have a blog for it sometime soon, but we can probably also talk about or give like, kind of a sneak preview of some of the updates and upgrades that we're going to be doing for the next big update. Because when Steam comes out and Xbox comes out, there's going to be a couple of new improvements and features. And probably the biggest one is pulling that alpha tag off of Sandbox and getting Sandbox onto the console versions. So that's going to be pretty exciting.

‍CB: Yeah, that'll be very exciting. I know there's a lot of like, PlayStation 5 players especially, who've seen what PC has had with trying out the alpha and people are really excited to get involved.

‍JD: It's been great also, I mean one of the reasons why we put the alpha tag on it is we knew it was going to have some rough edges and we wanted to get a chance to get it out there, get feedback on it and so I'm kind of glad we did.

Thank you to everybody in the community who has been so positive about giving us feedback on Sandbox, helping us when they see something weird and, Bradley or Ryan, there were definitely some weird stuff that we saw coming out, like environments that had doors to nowhere and things like that.
So we're pretty glad we did the alpha part of it so that we can clean it up and have it sort of in a full release for everybody.

‍RM:  It feels like it was our own version of Early Access. I mean, you know, didn't get to do that with the original game or the campaign that the original release, but it was really nice too. Yeah I agree like, just kind of echoing what you just said one of the one of the great things has been seeing people talking about it, in the Discord, on the Reddit for the game, and people pointing out issues, things that they like, which is always nice to see, but also things that they don't like.

The purpose of the alpha for us is to be able to respond to that kind of feedback. So it's a much better version that we can release when we do the update for it. It's been exciting to see that feedback to you and I have talked with some players too in depth about it. I see some familiar names here [in the audience], which is great!
And so yeah, just being able to respond to that and we fixed a couple of really good bugs that people pointed out too. So I'm happy about where it's been going.

‍JD: Yeah. So one of the weird things about development is by the time it gets out to everybody, you know, we go through QA passes and publishing passes and by the time it gets out to to the players, we've been living with some of those changes for a while. So sometimes I end up going like, “Oh, that just went out?”

I think when we put out the PS5 update was, I think, when we finally put in the up on the D-Pad on the PS5 controller as a shortcut to build in, which is something we've been playing with for a while and so I kind of had forgotten that that was a new thing.‍

RM: Wait, that didn’t ship in release?

‍JD: No, that wasn't a release. We've had that for a while, we were prototyping that in January. 

GH: I think, if I recall, there was a time when you like, stopped playing your PS5 retail for a little while because you were like, “I can't do this without Hoover. I can't play like this!”

‍JD: Yeah, yeah, yeah! There were things that I had been playing in the development version and I was like, I can't because I've been playing with my daughter in retail and I was like, “let's just-  we've got a couple of big updates coming, let's wait.”

‍RM: Can you tell your daughter when the release dates are for those things or do you even keep that from her?

‍JD: Oh no, because she might leak it on Reddit.

‍RM: Yeah, that's a good point.

‍JD: I'm just kidding. [laughs] No, she's not on Reddit.

‍RM: That’s the worst.

‍JD: Nah, she's fine. She on to, like, if there's an indie game that comes out on Xbox, she's like, on it right away. So she's moved on.

RM: Oh, that's good.

JD: Yeah. So when we think about- and Clare, feel free to jump in with any questions or anything you want to take that we want to talk about. But I was going to just kind of keep talking about Sandbox and some of the updates from the last changes for the last update.

CB: Yeah, that makes sense. Just one I spotted from DurinDeathless there. They're asking about mods on Steam, but I haven't heard anything about it myself, so I assume it's similar to the Epic one, which is there's no dedicated support, but there's no blockers either.‍

JD: Yeah, and that's the approach we've taken. You know, there's a nuance to making a game with licensed partners, where we have a really good relationship with Middle Earth Entertainment and they've been really supportive and part of that relationship comes from, they trust us to make things that we feel like are authentic in the world, in Professor Tolkien's world, but we also run everything that we do by them

So mods, there's that area where we go, like, it's really positive for players to have mods, but if we were to support them in a very official way, our partnership would, you know, to be in good faith, we would need to run everything that a mod does through the license. And that's just not, not fair to the mod developers or the players.

So where we're at now, where we go, “Hey, we can't do much to officially support it, but we're not doing anything to stop it” and in fact we love looking at the mods and play with them too.

CB: And there's another one there from Mr. Biggles… oh, the Crossplay between console and PC. We don't have any info really on that at the moment?

JD: Well, we're working on it. So the reason why we haven't talked too much about it is, you know, crossplay, for a team our size, is just one of those things that is a little hairy. But we've had some very successful tests lately that are pretty exciting. But we need to get a little further in to be able to be confident and we don't want to promise anything that we can't deliver. But I think we've moved from investigating to planning and a little bit of work on it. And so hopefully we'll have more to talk about with that when we get a little closer to the release date.

‍GH: I will say, at the office. I have two desks that I set up with two PCs and three consoles for reasons.

‍JD: Yeah.

‍CB: Investigations are ongoing.

‍JD: That is true. And that's the nice thing about the Unreal Engine too.

‍CB: And Sard le Rouge is asking about dedicated servers. Are investigations still ongoing there as well?

‍JD: Yeah, we actually did a lot of poking at doing dedicated servers, and we decided for this Fall release with all the other things we're trying to do, it's not going to be in that release. We're going to keep investigating it. And it's not that it's hard, it's that it just touches a lot of bits of the code and it becomes really risky for us to do it at quality. So it's still on the to do list, but it's not going to be with this Fall release.

‍CB: Yeah. Okay. Well, will we move on to talking about the recent Title Updates and Sandbox then and I'll keep an eye out for other questions as well.

‍JD: Cool. Yeah, so, one of the things that I thought would be good to just talk about or take questions on and we should take live questions on this one if we could is, in particular for Bradley and Ryan, we put Sandbox out, we watched it an alpha, what, what are the things that stuck out to you as iterations that we have done or are doing to be able to feel more comfortable with Sandbox being kind of a beta release?

BF: Ryan, you want to start with this?

‍RM: Oh, I was hoping you would start with that Bradley! But I think you've got some exciting things to share about what you've been working on.

‍BF: Yeah, yeah! Well, I can kick this off. So, you know, one of the big things about sandbox, this is something we, experienced firsthand in our initial testing with it when we started many, many months back and we've also seen this carry through with the players as they've been playing the current version is, you know, when you take the rails off the world generation and let, some of our procedural systems flex their muscle, you get some more of these on expected things.

And I think that's one of the things that's really kind of exciting about procedurally generated worlds in general, but it also can lead to some odd ball situations. That's one of the things that we've been addressing and we'll see in the next update, you know, patching some of those holes, but also just making the experience a little bit more consistent.

Another thing that we found is, you know, we're trying to stand some more of the diversity in some of the environments. So we're adding some new locations for players to discover. We're also adding some more locations that players might spend a little bit more time in, some nooks and crannies in the world or maybe some places that you might have thought you knew everything about what that location was but there are a few secret doors somewhere that leads to a whole new space. So we’re really excited about that stuff and then also more things to find in the world that you can use to craft some new objects and some new resources that will help you in your adventures. So, I dunno, if Ryan you maybe want to talk a little bit about that?

‍RM: But yeah, I mean, I think a big part of it is looking for, one of the goals that we had, was looking for ways to continue to reward people for exploration, especially like you were saying, with some of those neat new areas that either they’re completely new areas that you've been building or some of the areas that you've been adding too, in the game, giving people exploration rewards, giving people reasons to to want to dive pretty deeply into those places and find, and yeah, get new items, get new crafting materials!

And in addition to those that we're adding, one of the other cool things is we're adding new armor sets to the game as well and other kinds of items like that. So that's going to be fun too, to distribute out through the Sandbox mode and again, from an exploration standpoint, like you were saying Bradley, there’ll be stuff to find but also from a crafting standpoint throughout the game, there will be new stuff to build and craft.

‍JD: Yeah, that was something that I feel like we'd always kind of had on our list was “more to do when you're exploring”, “more things that you find that are exciting”. And so there's two new mechanics that we're, we're layering in. You know, one is being able to collect books and scrolls and put those together in the same way that you do with treasure piles, which will give you a buff once you've had it and enter in your base.

And then the other one is smaller little consumables. You know, for those of you who've been out and you get hit with poison and you have to just kind of wait for it to tend to decay. So a couple of things that you can keep with you in your bag that can cure a few things or give you a little boost, little short term boosts that you can collect and craft.

So those are, I think, going to be two things that while you're going around, you're going into interiors busting open crates and things like that. So giving you a couple more things to collect is going to be pretty exciting.

CB: Just to confirm, I'm sorry if I missed this at the beginning when you were discussing, but is this- are a lot of these items just exclusive to Sandbox or are you going to have kind of a like a Venn diagram overlap with some things they'll be in Campaign as well, similar to how like the decorations and the new building stuff was in both?

JD: Consumables and the collecting of the books and scrolls. Those will be in both Campaign and in Sandbox.

RM: Yep.

JD: And so a lot of the new items that we're going to put in some of the armor and weapons and things, I think those will be in both.

RM: The armor and weapons are slated for sandboxing.

JD: Oh, okay cool.

CB: But you can bring those across to campaign?

RM: Yes, you can. You can actually. That's a good point. Thank you Clare.

‍JD: You can get in Sandbox and bring it back into Campaign. But you know, if there's strong feedback, we can, we've got a little bit of time, if we want to grab some of those and put them in the campaign somehow. The nice thing with Campaign is once we kind of put it in sort of like that feels like that's the “story experience” and now Sandbox is a good place we can just kind of toss things into it and not feel it needs to be this curated narrative.

‍RM: The other, I think, big change to both Sandbox and Campaign is the cooking overall. Do you want to talk about that?

‍JD: Yes, that's right. Yeah. The cooking is one- that was one of our big pieces of feedback throughout the whole time we've been Live, is how the meals kind of don't have a whole lot of meaning. And so we're revamping the buffs that you get from cooking but we're also going to be dividing up things into the different cooking stations and a little bit more logical of a way.

Every meal now is going to be either a breakfast, lunch or dinner, and you will get a different or a better effect if you eat it at that time. So certain meals will be clearly breakfast and lunch and they're going to be different for different zones. So hopefully give you just a little bit more choice when you go to make a meal, when you think about what you're going to make before you go to sleep or when you come back to your base.

And the breakfast buff is a bit different from the lunch buff, which is a bit different from the dinner buff and each one of those should kind of feed into the gameplay that you're having and hopefully also give you a little bit more reason to seek out and collect the food ingredients, because I know the ingredients in the brews are really coveted, but the food ingredients felt like, why not just make roasted meat over and over again?

So that's one of those things that hopefully people are going to have a little bit more fun with that and it'll feel a little bit more thematic.

‍CB: I suppose the big question there is if your Dwarf has had their breakfast, what about second breakfast? Will there be an extra buff for Elevenses?

‍JD: I don't want to confirm that.

‍CB: [Laughs] Okay! With regards to crafting- 

‍JD: Very very Hobbit-ish of you though, Clare.

[Both Laugh]

‍CB: I think I'm more of a hobbit at heart to be honest.

‍JD: Yeah. Or maybe Dwarves would have second dinner.

‍CB: Yeah. Extra helping of roast meat!

There's one or two crafting questions there. But before I go into those, so I don't forget, DurinDeathless asked a question that I actually want to know the answer to as well. Are there any Easter eggs that are in the game that people haven't found yet?

‍JD: Ooo are there Easter eggs No one's found yet? Well, there’s… Easter eggs, we haven't fulfilled the promise of yet... I think a lot of people have an item that after the end boss, that they're wondering what it is. I don't know, Ryan? Actually, I don't think there are.

‍RM: I'm so gun shy about putting Easter eggs into games now!

‍JD: Yeah, I would say we-

‍GH: I was gonna say, I feel like I remember being specifically told.

‍JD, RM, GH: [together] Do not do that.

‍RM: Yes, you can get in a lot of trouble, unfortunately, these days.

‍JD: I think you guys just called me the fun police.

‍RM: No, not you know, it's not you at all. It's, I mean, you talked about it a little bit earlier Jon-Paul, like part of it is we need to be faithful and true to Professor Tolkien’s world, right? And so we don't just get to put things in that we're excited about. Like it does really have to be something that is okay with the license holder.

But at the same time, like, you know, people need to understand that from a legal perspective, after the early 2000s, I don't know if people remember what happened, but there was a really big controversy with an Easter egg in a game that shipped. Is that companies were just really- they're really gun shy about doing that now, so…

‍JD: Yeah and you're talking about Easter eggs where like, a picture of your mom shows up in the game or something like that. Yeah, no, we definitely didn’t do anything like that, so, but in terms of like little Tolkien tweaks, I think most people have found the little ones, we just kind of put everything we had into what was in the main campaign.

So I don't know Bradley? I don't think the art team did anything that, if you did, I wouldn't have known about it either.

‍BF: Yeah, no, because we made sure to make sure that you knew everything that we were doing.

‍JD: Yeah so, next game, we need to make sure we put some fun Easter eggs like that in.

‍RM: Well, I mean, a lot of it is in the lore too, right? and people would definitely have seen all of the lore that's in the Campaign. But there are- there’s some real deep cuts in there.

‍JD: Yeah there are some subtle things that we did with the lore that I think I've seen a few people pick up on. But yeah, not a strong emphasis on - I feel like this is the most unfun answer ever - not a strong emphasis on, on fun Easter eggs like that.

‍RM: Okay, let's redirect the unfun answer though to DurinDeathless asked another question, which is will you be adding gold detailing to furnishings and or building pieces that will finally require gold bars?

‍JD: Ah, well, we do know- sorry. Go ahead, Bradley.

‍BF: Yes, 100%. [Laughs]

‍JD: Yeah, gold ingots will be in this release and the things to spend gold ingots on.

‍RM: And more than just building pieces!

‍BF: Yes!

‍JD: Yeah, yeah, that- we're skirting the edge of the next thing that we're going to announce, so we’ll uh-

‍RM: I'm not saying any more.

‍JD: Well we'll leave that as a tease.

‍BF: Yes you'll be able to gold plate a lot of your world…

‍JD: Yeah, which is pretty exciting. Oh and I think one of the things that I'm kind of, one of the little- it's one of those small things or it seems small, but I believe Bradley, Ryan, you guys have been working on making the treasure piles so that you can stack up the you can shove them together? Instead of like they're kind of separate and you end up with these kind of like sad piles with a space in between them and now I think you can actually like, we're revising the collision on them so you can start to shove them together and make a big Thráin style treasure pile.

‍BF: Yeah, because the fantasy was always that you had a room in your dwelling that had just giant piles of treasure heaped here and there. And we didn't quite get there on the retail release. So we've been trying to- we have been doing some things that’ll make the experience a little better.

‍JD: Yeah, that's probably that, that kind of hits most of the big gameplay updates that we have planned or at least that we're ready to talk about right now. There's also just going to be the usual, as you guys have noticed, you know, with the size of a team, there's only so often we can release and when we do, we shove not just like, some new features in but a pretty significant pile of [fixes for] bugs.

So we'll have like the usual round of stuff for watching. And for those of you who've been really active in the discord, you know, definitely thank you for reporting bugs, putting in support tickets and I think a lot of you noticed how quickly we try to jump on those when we see them. So keep those coming and there's a good chance that your thing will be fixed.

‍CB: And that actually leads into, I have it in my notes here if you want to touch on it, you were working on a follow-up update to the PS5, regarding save games?

‍JD: Yeah. Oh man. There were a couple of people that were in the Discord the moment the PS5 release went out, noticed some issues with the save games, and that early warning system really helped because we pulled back on the release and put out something that would keep it from happening. And then we are working on, hopefully within the next week or two, probably two weeks, because we really want to be sure about this one, we're probably going to put out one more patch on the Ps5 to try to prevent any save game loss.

So that's obviously a huge bummer for us that there's certain cases where really large worlds hit a very arcane Sony save game edge that caused them corruption. So we're working on an update that will prevent that from happening again and we obviously were real bummed that some people lost their worlds.

‍CB: Yeah, it’s never nice to hear.

‍JD: Yeah. And we weren't able to help get them back. So, you know, let us know if you lost your world. But we are hopefully we are going to have it fully fixed and then prevented for future issues.

‍CB: And again, thank you to community members who I think it was like within an hour that we were able to put a halt to the update going out and try and start fixing it. So we really appreciate people who warn us early about that sort of stuff if you see anything, it's really, really helpful and people were very understanding and kept sharing information as we asked questions to figure out what was happening. So huge, huge thank you to all of the community members that reported that and shared information with us.

So let me see… I don’t know if there's any other topics that you wanted to touch on, I’m gonna scan through for questions…

‍JD: Yeah, that was kind of the big stuff. I don't know, Ryan, with Sandbox did we do anything in terms of like the world generation and the layout, like based on, I think there were a few cases where like the stairs weren't quite where we wanted them to be. Were there, were there any iterations there worth talking about?

‍RM: Yeah, it's worth asking, thank you for bringing that up because there were some things that people in the community brought up both in the some of the discussions that I had in detail about people's experiences as well as just reports online about people having a hard time getting through some areas, so we made some changes that make the world a little bit more navigable.

We had been, in a couple of different areas, we'd been routing players through particularly tough locations that you really weren't going to be geared for or you weren't going to be able to be geared for at all so there is a couple of good fixes there and even one that one of our internal players found one of our well, I think Russell's been in one of these conversations before, Tech Lead, he's played sandbox a ton and he's had a bunch of good feedback too. So yeah, we definitely fixed a few of those layout issues.

‍JD: And there's a few things that we put in the Sandbox that were like, “Oh, we should we should start generating these and new Campaigns”. I think there's a few places towards the end of the game that use a very particular environment that has a lot of verticality that can be really maze like and confusing and I think we're replacing those with some of the straight up and down stairs. Try to make the end of the game more navigable.

‍RM: Yeah straight up down stairs and then also even porting back to the campaign, some of the work that Bradley's been doing has been in adding extra egress from different locations in the game. So there's more possibilities for connectivity in the procedural layout of the world that we are porting into the campaign version as well. So that's going to change the way that that generates.

People who’ve played the campaign before, I think it won’t be super noticeable necessarily, but you might see something a little bit different. You'll see some new environments and some new entrances and exits.

‍BF: Yeah, and what that’ll mean, you know, from the players perspective is that there are some locations that might have shown up very infrequently, just because the way that they were- the way that they connect to the other nearby locations was kind of more restrictive.

By loosening some of that up, by adding more connections, some of those rare locations will be a little bit more common and it'll make some of the larger, you know, zones or or area chapters of the game feel like they have a little bit more diversity. And it's stuff that was always there. It's just the mix, you know, the ratio. Those things are a little bit more balanced.

‍RM: Yep!

‍JD: So maybe just a few more questions, Clare?

‍CB: Yeah, I actually thought of one myself and then I’ll get to a few of others. You had mentioned, just because you were discussing maps and that, when Sandbox was first releasing, we had discussed that the size of the map was actually going to be a bit smaller than the Campaign. With new additions, is that going to be expanding at all in the next release or is that something that you're still looking at in the future?

‍JD: Yeah our focuses on this one is to get the gameplay and the generation of the current form of Sandbox really feeling good and so we'll be looking into in the future about different sizes or anything like that. But I think actually Sandbox is going to stay about the same size.

‍CB: Okay, so, I apologize if I mispronounce your name, but LordThrórbürt, I think how it's pronounced, is asking… I know we can't really go into too much about what's being added, I don't want to give too much away, but is there any plans to add more color zones or dye options for customizing your armor?

‍JD: It's a cool idea. I mean, we've talked about it. I think right now we're focusing on a couple more color options for the overall, but probably not in terms of like more detailed color in on the armor. And same thing with the Transmog we've talked about Transmog so that you can make things look the way you want versus what the stats are. So those are things where we're talking about, but we don't have any immediate plans on.

‍CB: [Slight scanning pause] Sorry, scanning down through the chat and someone asked about white stone building parts? or would that be giving too much away if we start talking about specific things being added? [Asked by Bananportion]

‍JD: You mean like- what's the question? Sorry.

‍CB: If like white stone building parts would be added?

‍JD: That's a fun idea. No, not in the plan right now, but that would be kind of neat. We can look into that.

‍CB: Oh, Sittable chairs and furniture, because I know people have been decorating with them, but will it be possible to sit in chairs in the future? [Asked by crabraggoon]

‍JD: Yeah, definitely not in this update. We really kind of debated back and forth. I mean, Bradley could jump in on this, too, like we debated back and forth here. Like, well, in our time frame this year sittable is probably not what we could have, but let's get these chairs out anyway. And I remember we were going back and forth with this and we decided it’d be better to at least decorate the tavern to look like a tavern before holding out for the kind of animation it would take, you know, I dunno you got any color on that, I mean, the answer is probably no.

‍BF: Yeah, I mean it’s-

‍GH: Engineering! “And engineering.”

‍BF: Yeah, it's absolutely a thing we all want, because we want, you know, ourselves to be able to even be able to. It doesn’t add any particular mechanical function, you know, it's not like you would gain something by sitting in a chair. But it’s a chair! You want to sit in it! And, you know, it fulfills the kind of the role play and fantasy of it.

So we all want it, but it's one of those things that, being such a simple concept. So, it was much better, like Jon-Paul said, we just decided it was much better just to be able to have chairs so that you can make a space that really feels like it can be lived, but not necessarily to interact with them.

‍JD: You know, Clare, before we wrap up, I've got a question for the community, actually, we're kind of curious if there's interest in an official soundtrack?

‍CB: Oh, I did see DurinDeathless asking about songs and music, but I think that was like extra songs in music…

‍JD: It's something we've been talking about. I just kind of curious for the people in the audience if that's something that would be worth it. A couple of yes [in the live chat] Okay, cool!

‍CB: It looks like a lot of Yeses.

‍JD: Well three, can't argue with three! Yeah, Awesome! [Editor’s note: it was more than that in the end]

So, yeah, you know, we're probably coming up on the time that we had. Obviously, like, you know, I want to reiterate, we love doing these, we want to do a couple of these. We've got a few more announcements coming up in the next month where we can formalize some of the things that we're dancing around right now, which I think we're all excited about and keep the feedback coming, you know, we are serious in that we we read everything and, you know, we're not a huge team, we try to do as much as we can. And that balance between something new and cool and fixing bugs and all that kind of stuff. So we want to keep digging away at this game because we really love it!

And if your friends want to play the game on Steam, ask them to go wish list it! You know, we wouldn't mind if you wish list it any way, even if you already got the Epic version or the PS5 version, it always kind of helps. And so Steam and Xbox coming soon, those are kind of the big awesome things that we've got to talk about and look for more in the next month.

‍CB: And just a reminder towards the end for anyone who missed it at the start that once the Xbox wish list page- or the store page where you can wish list is live, I'll be posting it in rtm-announcements [Discord Channel], so keep an eye on that there, but we can tell you that we're aiming for around the same time as Steam, which should be Fall 2024.

So keep an eye out for that! And of course, as Jon-Paul said, there's going to be some more announcements coming out. Hopefully once those are out, then we can have more chats like this and discuss it both with the community and amongst ourselves about what work has been done.

‍JD: Thanks, everybody. Really appreciate you jumping in last minute on a Friday!

[END]

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