I would first like to thank everyone who participated in our first and second survey. We honestly didn't think we would get as many responses as we did. This data has been critical to us in making our decisions about how we are going to move forward and we appreciate your involvement.
Instead of detailing it all here, I've made a post on the community page at the link below.
Results
Open Realms is a small team, and by that I mean it's just myself and Dave. Our first game Forge Quest took us four years to develop and in that time we learned quite a bit about ourselves, the community, and also plenty about game design. What we originally planned for our game all the way back then is very different then the game we ended up with. We are quite proud of what we made, yet there are many ideas that have been left unexplored.
After a few months from officially releasing Forge Quest, things began to settle down and we started to come back to some of our old ideas. We saw all the things we weren't able to do and finally had the time to begin exploring them. However, we quickly realized although these ideas are great, they would fundamentally change Forge Quest into a completely different game. It would be unfair of us to destroy the experience people already enjoy and we have worked so hard to create.
This is why we decided to take everything from Forge Quest and began working on it as a new title. Set in the same world and very close to in spirit to Forge Quest, but not a direct sequel. (Unofficially we call it Forge Quest 2: The Search For More Chickens).
Without promising anything, because anything might change as we design, I will share with you where our heart is with this new project.
First and most importantly we want to make the Forge Quest experience one of an open world. We want to achieve this is two major ways, both geographically as well as in the core of gameplay.
Our plans currently revolve around a large procedurally generated continent that will feature towns, quests, and points of interest to explore. This will also focus on varying types of terrain that may require tools like hang gliders, grappling hooks, or mounts to traverse.
There will still be a large focus on combat and dungeons with challenges for you and your friends. However we would also like to introduce gameplay elements that give you choices in how you play. Things like sneaking, thievery, merchant trading, and other unique ways to interact with the world. Our hope is to edge away from stat grinding and more towards activities that are enjoyable to play.
Last but not least, we want to feature more story and culture surrounding the land. This may be done in quests, NPCs, towns and other significant locations. Our hope is that we can make the continent into a living and breathing place where you get to explore and learn to love.
We have a million ideas we would love to see implemented, but already the above is quite a bit of task for us to do. (Honestly I'm stressed just writing all of this, but I know we can do it. :D)
This project has been underway actually for a few months now. We have been exploring story writing, world building, game play design, artistic assets, just about everything under the sun. Right now we are still focused on the core of the technology that will end up running all of our content at the end of the day. We can leverage a lot of our previous technology and the lessons learned to make this project not take nearly as long to develop as before, but we don’t want to give out any dates or deadlines at this time.
As we move forward with developing this project we want to keep the community involved as much as possible. Heck, we are making the game for you guys so who better to be involved. Expect that we will be posting news here, but we are going to start moving more of our spoiler content to other sources. We likely will end up with a development blog, however for the time being we will be using the sub-reddit at the link below.
reddit.com/r/forgequest
If you guys do have any questions about the new project, or simply want to just talk about ideas you would love to see please post on the sub-reddit for now. We will be actively looking at it and will love to communicate directly.
Both Dave and I thank you for everything and we are glad that you are part of the Forge Quest community. We hope that we can continue to develop content that brings enjoyment and perhaps even a smile.
- Chase & Dave