Horizons: Empire of Istaria Interview
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Q: What are your future plans? After all the most pressing issues are addressed?
A: On the content side, we're primarily focused on rolling out updates that show existing customers that Horizons has a great future and is being actively developed again. Outside of the last year, Horizons has an excellent history of releasing all sorts of great updates to the game world - some small and some very large - without requiring people to go back to the store to purchase the expanded content. We're going to continue that tradition of expanding Horizons with each update. We've got some great things in the works that we're sure existing players are going to like. Once this set of updates is out the door, we'll shift to a more balanced development plan where half of our content is focused at the newer players and the other half is for veteran players.
On the technical side, we're going to continue to make updates that improve performance and fix bugs. About a year ago, we had a great track record of picking problems small and large, and then focusing until the problem was fixed. Some things got done in a week and others took longer, but it got done and people noticed. The current client on Blight is one of our larger updates and has a new terrain system. The goal of this update is to greatly reduce video and system memory usage, while pushing out the view distance. This is one of our more challenging updates because of the complexity of the problem (more things in view is more things to load and manage), but we've been working on it and are seeing good results.
Why are so many people interested in buying this game? I have a tough time believing it's making any money anymore.
