I bring you good news and ‘not-so-good’ news depending on your point of view. Let’s get the ‘not–so-good’ out of the way first. We have decided to change the release date for Lost Eden. Whilst initially we planned to release early this year we have decided to push it back into later this year. We are not going to give an exact date, that will come later but today I wanted to address why we have decided to do this, because I firmly believe it’s the right decision for the game.

The reason behind this decision is very simple. Expansions do take a lot of work from a lot of very talented people, and maintaining the balance between the live game and the expansion is always a challenge. During the last year we have put a strong focus on improving the live game on every level. Reality brings with it some tough decisions though, and when it came to judging the priority of what the team should work on I realized that there were still some very important updates to the live game that I wanted to make happen (hey, being Game Director has to have some perks alongside having to make the tough decisions!)

First and foremost amongst these was content for our higher-level players. As much as I love the expansion and can’t wait to see you all stomping around in great big robots and lobbing missiles at each other I didn’t want to delay implementing my plans for the veteran players.

As I said in my ‘Christmas Letter’, we will continue our focus on delivering content heavy live updates in the upcoming period. The 16.2 patch is currently on test receiving its final testing before it is released to live. This patch will deliver an enhanced Shuttle port experience as well as large amount of new missions for the Nascence and Elysium areas.

Then we will focus on the high level content. A new Outzone experience allowing the high level players the opportunity to continue the battle against the alien forces and then a new experience in Shadowlands aimed primarily at single and small groups at the 205+ range.

I want to assure everyone that the expansion is in no way cancelled or on hold. We are working on it continuously and are very excited about how it is shaping up. We are currently at a point internally usually referred to as an alpha version. The systems are completed but not optimized or extensively tested, and there are uncompleted graphics used as placeholders. So it’s all slotting together nicely, but I just wanted to strike another couple of things off my ‘to do for the players’ list before I unleashed the dogs of war on Rubi-Ka!

-Morten Byom