As most of you are aware, the v1.70 update has been “on the verge of release” for several weeks now. Quoting myself from last month:

The biggest concern is dealing with players who still have savefiles on multiple servers, mostly in regards to merging files and/or dealing with excess characters that can’t be merged. There’s no perfect solution to that issue and it’s probably going to eat up a ton of time, so bear with me as I get it sorted out.

…unfortunately I was right, in that figuring out a solution to that problem gobbled up a *ton* of time. There were several occasions when I told players that I just needed another day or two at most to finish things up, only to find myself slogging through a bunch of additional unexpected development work. Though that’s the nature of software development, it never gets any easier to cope with (or in my case, predict).

The good news is that v1.70 will now include a bunch of bug fixes (courtesy of Spiff), and even more back-end optimizations than I had originally planned. Also, the solutions that I’ve come up with to handle the aforementioned extra savefiles will put users in direct control of handling their excess characters without any outside help. That means that after v1.70 I’ll be able to take myself out of the equation for savefile transfer and merging operations, which will be a huge relief moving forward.

My goal is to get v1.70 out this weekend, and then to run a little Steam promotion next week alongside the beta release of the new universal webclient. Granted, that’s been my goal for the past few weeks, so keep that in mind when placing your bets!

Key of the Exiles News

Working on v1.70 has left me pretty drained. Every time that I’ve sat down this month to write a KotE-centric blog post, I’ve ended up starting at a blank page for 20 minutes before giving up and returning to the development grind on v1.70. I know that many of you are hungry for more KotE news, and I’m going to try my best to prepare something cool for next week’s update.

I was planning to wait until we were closer to release before showing this image, but because I feel bad about flaking out on this month’s weekly updates I feel like I need to give you something related to KotE today:

Lo and behold, the title artwork for Key of the Exiles, along with a slightly redesigned NEStalgia logo. After KotE is released, players will see this title screen once they hit the new content. You’ll be seeing more images like this (and the new logo) once I’m ready to start promoting the expansion.

I’ll be back next Thursday with another weekly update.