An ancient evil returns to the galaxy—will you be ready?
The producer and co-designer Erik Rutins did a preview stream of the new upcoming DLC Return of The Shakturi

We send greetings once again to everyone in the Distant Worlds 2 community.
As before, Elliot and I would like to thank our players for their patience and support since Distant Worlds 2 was released. 2023 saw our first two expansions for Distant Worlds 2 along with four Major updates (Aurora, Hyperspeed, Discovery and Fleet). We continued improving DW2 with the free "Game Faction" update in April, which followed a series of public beta updates. In addition to a wide range of other improvements, the Game Faction update included the first base game faction refresh with the Humans and Mortalen being brought up to a similar level as the new DLC factions.

After the release of that update, we announced that we would pause the update releases for a bit while focusing on the development of the first full expansion for Distant Worlds 2 - "The Return of the Shakturi".


The Current State of the Game
After the “Aurora” update resolved the worst technical issues with the initial release, the “Hyperspeed” update massively improved performance and the “Discovery” update gave us a revamped Hive and some improved Pirates as well as the first Ancient Guardian Vaults, the “Fleet” update released as official in November with many improvements to automated and manual fleet and ship behaviors. The "Game Faction" update then further improved various fleet and ship behaviors as well as improving the gameplay for the Human and Mortalen factions in various ways. Throughout these updates we continue to improve almost all gameplay areas as well as the AI, which is now much more competent and challenging than it was a year ago. You can see a summary of all the changes in the update announcements, there are far too many to go over here but if you haven’t updated lately we recommend it!

The feedback on the "Game Faction" update was overall quite positive. We know there are more issues to resolve, more UI improvements and AI improvements to make and we've made some of these behind the scenes while working on "Return of the Shakturi". Others will follow along with the "Shakturi" release or with the update after that.

We've also been working to update more base game factions as well as continue to tweak the DLC factions where appropriate. The Boskara and Zenox will be the next base factions updated.

The main change to our schedule has been a longer delay in the updates and future DLCs than originally expected because of the amount of work we've been putting into "Return of the Shakturi", which adds a proper endgame crisis to DW2 along with many other changes and improvements. The initial internal test and development stage for that has taken more time, but we are determined to make right and make it well. We expect a wider beta test to begin in August and we plan to officially announce "Return of the Shakturi" and start speaking more about its features before the end of August, 2024. That announcement will also include the official release date.

We have had some parallel work going on the next faction DLC after the Shakturi, which I expect we'll speak more about after "Return of the Shakturi" expansion releases.

While we are a small team, we are committed to both continuing to expand the game with new DLCs and expansions but also to continue updating and improving the base game through our ongoing free updates. We want to make sure everyone who purchased DW2 can enjoy it to its fullest on their system and for their playstyle.

Our next areas to focus on are listed below…


Future Priorities
I've included all those we listed in our previous roadmap to comment on those we completed and those that are partially completed or still in progress.
In Progress:
1. Update the base factions in the game, one by one, to a similar level as the recently released DLCs when it comes to faction and government gameplay differentiation. Completed for the Humans and Mortalen, still in progress for the other base factions.
2. Continuing improvements on fleet and ship behavior. We plan to also add a tutorial for fleet and ship tactical settings as well as more detail in the galactopedia to help with these issues. There were major improvements in these areas in the "Fleet" and "Game Faction" updates. We continue to make improvements in this area as part of our work for "Return of the Shakturi".
3. Further improvements to pathing issues as well as pathfinding performance. There are long-standing issues which in some cases result in sub-optimal paths as well as ridiculous paths around the galaxy. We plan to review the area of storms and galactic terrain to make sure that they are providing the gameplay benefits we were hoping to see and if not, we will rebalance them. We are also looking into the question of making it easier to plan jumps that do not require star system waypoints. Major improvements to the long-standing issues were made in the "Game Faction" update. More improvements continue as part of the Shakturi development work.
4. Improve the AI further, especially in the areas of economic management and diplomatic/military grand strategy. We’ve also seen more feedback and suggestions on the population policy side, specific to slavery but also other policies. We plan to revisit the design of these in the future and also improve the AI’s management of population policies. The "Return of the Shakturi" development is leading to many AI improvements across the board, but especially related to the prosecution of wars.


Completed:
1. Improve the appearance of empire borders, adding a thicker border line at the edges of an empire to help distinguish it from nearby empires with similar flags and colors.
2. Further improvements to ship auto-design and auto-upgrade to better consider nebula/storm defenses as well as existing weapon component categories and sizes for the upgrade system, so that players will find the upgrade tool more generally useful and so the AI empires will be better able to manage your empire and their own when it comes to navigating the galactic terrain. We plan to improve the policy settings which allow players to specify which component families their auto-designer should emphasize. Specifically we want to allow this to affect other components beyond weapons and also to allow “do not use this” to be a choice, so the AI can be guided to specialize its automatic designs more. This is completed for now, though we have plans for additional features here in the future.


To Be Addressed:
1. Improve quality of life for manual players further. We have already made a series of improvements here, but our plan includes returning the full manual play functionality of DW1. While DW2 includes quite a few new semi-automated features which can help with manual play, for example the global queues and fleet and army templates that were not in DW1, we recognize that many players are still missing tools that would make manual play more enjoyable. Next in line as a large task are ship and fleet order queueing as well as a lot of additional minor improvements to various UI areas.
2. Improve message handling further, especially regarding attack notification message spam and repeating advisor messages. We plan to add additional message filters for “all Pirates” and “all Empires” and rethink and improve the message purge system. We also hope to add the ability to tell an advisor “do not suggest this again” or to tell a Pirate or an Empire “do not contact me again with this offer”.
3. Adding a Galactopedia and Galaxy map Search function. A new Distance Measurement tool is in the latest public beta update already.
4. Modding support will continue to be a priority. We’ve expanded this greatly since release, including the addition of an in-game mod manager, Steam Workshop support and much better handling of multiple mods. We also recently added support for code modding and have been working on a new open source tool to make both data and bundle modding easier. (Further modding improvements are a priority after "Return of the Shakturi" releases)

There are also other reported issues beyond those above which we will also address as we go forward, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are our current highest priority goals. We have been compiling master lists of all issue reports by category and as our time allows, we work our way through these areas to make sure we continue to improve the player experience with DW2.


Future Expansions
As always, the Content and Art teams are not heavily involved in most of the game fixes we’ve been working through, so they have been spending most of their time working on future releases.
Our first priority is the “Return of the Shakturi” expansion, which will release in 2024. Stay tuned for our official announcement in late August which will reveal the release date later this year..
This is our main priority and will finally give DW2 a major end-game threat to pit your fully developed empire against, with a much more developed story and new gameplay options and research areas. This will be a feature expansion, rather than just a content expansion and some future feature support (such as planet destroyers and mega-ships for each faction and certain unique research branches) will depend on features in “Return of the Shakturi”. This has taken more time than originally expected, but we are giving it the time it needs to make sure the endgame is fully tested and fun.

We now plan to release a third “Factions” DLC content expansion in Q1 2025 (exact timing dependent on how much time Return of the Shakturi needs). This will add the Wekkarus and Atuuk to the game. The Wekkarus are among the most ancient and mysterious aliens in DW2 with possible connections to the Shakturi. The Atuuk are space lemmings of a sort who were just barely smart enough to figure out FTL. This DLC will work fine whether you have “Return of the Shakturi” or not, but will have some additional features/content related to that expansion if you have it.
Work has also begun on the fourth "Factions" DLC for 2025. All we can say about that now is that it includes the Securans and the Naxxilians.
We are also in the planning stages for the next feature expansion after "Return of the Shakturi" but that's all I can say about that for now.
Update Schedule
Our public update schedule has slowed down considerably due to "Return of the Shakturi" development, though internally we're already on version 1.2.4.3! We expect to resume the public update releases in the next month or two.
As before, we will be aiming for a bi-weekly public beta update schedule. It will generally take 6-12 weeks of beta updates to get to an update that is stable enough to become official. This means we expect public beta updates roughly every two weeks and new free official updates every 2-3 months once public updates resume.


Our Thanks
Thank you again if you took the time to read all of this and for your support of Distant Worlds 2. Please check in regularly going forward and try the newest beta updates if you’d like to see how things are shaping up.
Please stay tuned for more information on the Return of the Shakturi expansion in the late August announcement and on the following Faction DLCs after the Return of the Shakturi release later this year.

Sincerely,
Erik Rutins and Elliot Gibbs
Matrix Games and CodeForce