Greenlight For The First PlanetQuest Outposts Preview!

Now that the dust has settled, we wanted to make it official — the first Outposts preview has been given the green light! In this article, we’ll break down the criteria we had for that to happen, as well as look at some interesting stats from your feedback.

Inside the Preview

During the preview, our goal was relatively simple — to check if the game works as intended. Rigorous testing was conducted on fundamental gameplay systems, including basic functionality, as well as connectivity, passport integration, resource generation, and progression.

Remarkably, all systems, except progression (which still needs some balancing), performed surprisingly well. In fact, they worked well enough to be cleared for further testing and development on our end!

That’s not to say that we didn’t have a lot of hurdles to overcome. During the two weeks the preview was live, tens of bugs were found by the players and fixed by our development team.

As the preview unfolded we also introduced “complications”, a feature that added a new layer of challenge and a greater element of risk to players’ actions. These complications lead to a sizeable number of exploded drones and big discussions on how best to tackle the challenges. Despite initial hurdles, you adeptly navigated these obstacles, resulting in a successful mission overall.

On the back end, our developers focused on creating a robust data structure, the backbone of PQ: Outposts, denoting the functions of each moving piece of the game. Tweaks to the structure were made to maintain more efficient resource usage. We also realized that near real-time communication between the system and players is necessary to provide a more polished user experience, so we are adding that core functionality into the game's backbone.

All in all — we have built a solid foundation to keep the game running smoothly!

Things on the front end, the parts of the game you guys see and interact with, are, at least in this initial stage of testing, relatively solid.

There is, of course, lots of room for improvement, specifically with the layout and component structures of the game. We saw a lot of comments about visual clarity and UI; we took your feedback about balancing and have been working with it to create a more engaging experience.

Speaking of what the community thought, this nicely segues into:

The Community’s Take

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to the community for their overwhelming support during this preview. The numbers speak volumes — over 1.2 billion drones created, more than 7 billion units of Materials and Energy generated, and an impressive 8 billion Raw Quantum units in just two weeks!

Outposts-related discussions on our dedicated Discord channel exceeded 2.5k messages. From racing towards reputation ranks to sharing images of crazy successful missions for bragging rights and, of course, the collective freak-out when complications were introduced. It was a great time for us on the inside to lurk in that chat. Some of us did more than lurk, though, as evidenced by Loren occasionally popping in, dropping a bomb, and disappearing. Good times all around. 😉

Valuable Feedback

We were truly impressed with the invaluable input we received from hundreds of (often highly detailed) fully filled-out feedback surveys we received. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts!

Some notable things include:

• You enjoyed the overall experience, rating it, on average, a solid 8/10, with the trend skewing higher than even that.
• The same goes for the general game interface, with most of you reporting that it, as a baseline, functioned on your device, though there is clearly more work to be done.
• You also enjoyed the variety of buildings and drone types on offer. A lot of you mentioned that it was an impressive number for a preview, but you also wanted more in the future. Rest assured, we’re working on it! 🙂
• On the other hand, you did have some issues with progression, citing some issues in the speed of unlocking things, as well as the clarity of the game flow both in terms of getting started with Outposts and from a UI standpoint. Those are, of course, also being taken into consideration.
• We got a surprising amount of individual feedback on specific additions you would like to see, particularly building and drone ideas. Some of them are quite ingenious and could definitely be used in the creative process going forward. We love you guys developing this game with us!

To top it all off, an incredible 90.2% of you said you would recommend future previews to your friends! That’s quite a stat, so we hope to see many more of you when the second preview goes live.

What’s Next

Speaking of the second preview, the obvious question is — what’s next? We are currently implementing a lot of your feedback (leveling curves, anyone?), fixing some bugs, and introducing UI improvements, among many other things. The next preview, when it arrives, will be what we’re calling an “early game preview.” Its focus will be the first 3 days of gameplay, essentially the new player experience, with the main goal being to see if the experience is fun and engaging.

This time around, everyone will start with a Dwarf Planet and go through a process designed to slowly teach you the ropes of Outposts. The purpose of this, naturally, is to get you acquainted with the game as quickly and easily as possible so you can then get into it and have a blast!

As far as when all of this and more is happening, let’s take a look at our updated Greenlight Process:

In terms of Outposts, we gathered a lot of very useful info, both from your guys’ feedback and our own internal observations and metrics. Given the great results, we’ve been able to finalize the plans for the next preview and are happy to share that you’ll get to return to Outposts in January for the Early Game Preview.

It was a super interesting experience, seeing what it takes to get the most out of a greenlight session. Although the results speak for themselves and are really cool, it did take a lot of teamwork, live monitoring, updating, fixing, and two-way communication. It also became the primary focus of a good part of our team for its duration. Taking all of that into account, we wanted to give the next big Greenlight event adequate time to truly be effective. With that in mind, we’ve decided to move the PQ: Frontiers Technology Preview to February 2024 instead of running two greenlights during December, when a lot of people are on holiday, as we feel that preview will similarly take a fair bit of support from our tech team.

Not to worry, though; we have plenty of really cool things coming in the remaining month and a half of the year!

Quite soon, you will have the opportunity to explore select chapters of our first novel — Quantum Paradox! During that Community Preview, you can give them a read and tell us what you think. Our writers eagerly await to hear what you all think of all the hard work they’ve put into the opening salvo of our novel trilogy. Be gentle but fair in your feedback, Explorers. 🙂

During December, we will have yet another novel preview, this time of the graphic variety. That’s right, you will be able to check out an early version of PQ: The Graphic Novel. Internally, we’ve had a chance to witness how it’s shaping up, and, without spoiling too much, you’re in for a treat.

Between those two previews and some cool things we have planned, there is plenty of PQ goodness to occupy your time as we wrap up 2023.

We want once again to extend a massive THANK YOU to the PQ community. As a first test of not only Outposts but our Greenlight System, this entire experience exceeded our expectations. We are very fortunate to have so many of you be so involved in this unique process of shaping our Multiverse, and we hope we can do that enthusiasm justice moving forward.

As always, if you want to stay up-to-date with everything PlanetQuest, be sure to follow our socials.

Catch you next time, Explorers!

About PlanetQuest

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