Patch #17: Community Unlocked New Cities and Stories
The More To Explore release is just two weeks ago but it's already time for new content. Patch #17 adds the content that was unlocked in the 48-hour Community Content Challenge in which a whopping 190 explorers joined forces to unlock all tiers of content. So, what's new?
New Cities (Tier 3)
The sheriff of San Francisco and the king of Muscat are very impressed with the spirit of the Renowned Explorers. To attract more renown to their own cities, they've opened up new facilities for explorers! San Francisco will open up a modest new Entourage shop, while Muscat will offer exotic trinkets in its humble bazaar. Naturally, Sydney and New Orleans will respond accordingly to this new competition on the market...
New Andean Quest (Tier 2)
Expansion owners may discover a new treasure in the Andean Adventure, but not before overcoming one of the hardest challenges among level 3 expeditions. Go explore, before this dark force consumes the Andes.
New Stories (Tier 1)
Wherever you go after this patch, you might meet some of the Entourage specialists during their travels. A few events scattered everywhere.
Quality of Life
While working on new content, we've also worked to improve several features in the game. Most notably you can now swap items in the item shop by dragging a new item onto an equipped one... like in any RPG :) You can also dampen the pulsing Resolve and Research icons through the options and read more crewmember details in the Advanced Selection screen.
For more improvements and fixes, please read the extended patch notes.
For now, enjoy the new content! And let us know what you think.
First expansion, More To Explore, released!
Invite your crew around the campfire to hear their stories, visit entirely new places full of secrets and challenges and redefine your strategies! With this new expansion pack for Renowned Explorers you'll be able to go on countless new adventures with more personality, more treasures and more control.
Learn more about the expansion on the store page or watch the trailer on YouTube below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6Sjf7ANUAQ
Launch Discounts
There's a special launch discount, which means you can get More To Explore for 10% off during the first week. You'll also find a bundle to buy both the base game and the expansion.
48-hour Community Challenge
We promise to keep updating and supporting the game and expansion until at least August. And there is now a special challenge to get even more content in the expansion. If you participate in the next 48 hours, you'll force us to create more content for the expansion :) Read more here.
Patch #16
This expansion coincides with Patch #16 for the base game. Read the change notes for that here.
More To Explore expansion releases tomorrow - Content Challenge & Twitch Stream
Dear Explorers, at the moment of this writing we're less than 24 hours away from releasing the first paid expansion pack for Renowned Explorers: More To Explore. This is a very exciting moment for us monks at the Abbey, as it will determine the future of our labor of love.
Harry, Earl and Hildegard camping outside the store, waiting for release. We hope Earl makes it.
We've been actively patching Renowned Explorers after release, and with this new step for the game, we'll continue this effort. We promise to extend this post-release work until the end of August. At a later time we'll decide what happens after that. For now at least we're focusing on Renowned Explorers!
Content Challenge
Tomorrow at 10:00am PDT, 19:00 CEST, the expansion pack will be available for sale. At that same moment we will announce a special 48-hour challenge, along the lines of our Weekly Challenges. We'll be making this announcement live in a Twitch stream as well, starting an hour before release. While the contents of this challenge will not be revealed until then, we can already tell you what you can win:
The more medals you as a community achieve, the more content we'll release in the first post-release patch for the expansion. (Note that this will not influence the content released in the DLC itself in any way).
Tier 1(50 Medal Points): You're not the only traveler...
Tier 2(100 Medal Points): A dark force terrorizes the Andes...
Tier 3(150 Medal Points): Muscat & San Francisco
This challenge will last no more than 48 hours, starting at release. One player can at maximum achieve 4 medal points.
We hope you'll join us in this celebration of Renowned Explorers' future, tomorrow! If you don't want to miss it, subscribe to our Twitch channel now, and join us tomorrow at 09:00am PDT, 18:00 CEST.
More To Explore expansion pack announced for May 31st!
Good day, explorers! Today we can finally reveal the upcoming expansion pack for Renowned Explorers. In less than a week, on May 31st, you will find Renowned Explorers: More To Explore, a paid content and gameplay expansion, for sale.
It's a project which we've worked on for several months to make sure we're adding true value to the base game. More To Explore contains new expeditions, but most importantly it introduces new gameplay features which vastly increase strategic options and roleplaying, allowing for even further replayability.
If you're curious what's in the expansion, then go discover the store page we put online today. If you find yourself interested, please consider wishlisting the DLC.
If you want to read more about how the expansion came to be, Joni, our composer and producer, wrote a blog post on exactly that last week. Read it here.
Continued Support
Following the expansion launch we'll also continue supporting and updating the game. To kick this off, we'll start launch day with a special 48-hour challenge, much like the Weekly Challenge, but shorter and with rewards that will influence further content...
If you don't want to miss launch day, consider subscribing for our mailing list. We use it very sparsely to inform Abbey Games fans of new games and major updates.
Patch #15: New Entourage, Ivan, Balance & Fixes
While Manuel is in Malmö, Sweden for the Nordic Game Conference, our Abbey is buzzing with work on the expansion for Renowned Explorers. We'll release info on that real soon. All I can say right now is that it's closer than you might think :)
In between the expansion work Adriaan and me found the time to create a small but interesting patch that adds a new entourage member, balances certain gameplay and fixes a number of reported issues. You can read the full patch notes here, but let's focus on a few things right here:
Rio Reworked
Rio de Janeiro is a bustling town, always seeing people come and go. In this patch, we introduce Flavia, a new entourage member you can recruit by using Status. This also means that Rio now has 4 levels of entourage, allowing you to recruit 4 specialists.
Ivan's Captain Perk
Ivan's captain perk has always been... polarized. With the new balance you get more of that juicy Supply Capacity out of it. Of course you still have to deal with the -1 Resolve, stemming from Ivan's questionable leadership.
Other changes
You'll also find some small changes in the research tree, and with the so called off-resource entourage members in Istanbul (Rami, Zafira and Amon). Read the patch notes for more changes, and the assorted gameplay fixes!
For now that's it, but check back soon to learn more about Renowned Explorers first expansion.
Expansion: sign up for Closed Beta
Are you looking for more Renowned Explorers, both expeditions and features? Do you want to help us out? Sign up for the closed beta and join us in testing the upcoming expansion! We're also looking for entirely new players. Read about sign-ups on the bottom.
Expansion If you've been following development of Renowned Explorers, you already know that for the past few months we've been working on an expansion, alongside releasing patches. Our goal is to release more expeditions so that there are even more secrets and locations to explore. We're also improving and adding features so that the strategy, roleplaying and replayability of the game is improved!
Why a Closed Beta? By now we've completed most of the work, which means we can move into the closed beta phase. In this phase we want to test with a couple of dozen players in secrecy to find out whether new features and content work as intended. Does everything work as expected on the technical side? Any bugs? And are they fun for everyone's playing style? Participating in the beta means playing the game in secrecy, and talking directly with the devs and other testers about your findings.
Testing with new players Some mechanics are important immediately from the first playthrough (but can be enjoyed just as well if you're a long-time player). To test these we're looking in particular for players that have played very little or not at all. If you've just installed Renowned Explorers, please consider to sign up and already get the expansion experience, which we think is a big improvement over the base game. We also have slots for more experienced and veteran players.
Signing up! To sign up for the Closed Beta, simply send an e-mail to info at abbeygames dot com. Make sure to add the following info:
A link to your Steam profile. (even if private)
Your current playtime and experience with Renowned Explorers (may be very litte, very much or none at all!)
One or two lines about why you want to join.
We have a limit on the amount of testers, so it could be that you are not invited or only at a later point. In any case, we will let you know.
More expansion info Curious about the expansion? When we're satisfied that the expansion quality is good, we will send out more news about release date and pricing. From that point on you will hear more about its contents as well. Make sure you stay up to date by following us in one of the ways shown on our website. Click on the image below to go there, thanks!
- Abbey Games
Patch #14 & Live-stream
In the last two weeks Renowned Explorers welcomed a lot of new players. The road to becoming the Most Renowned Explorer is a long one, so the community racked up quite a lot of new playtime. This strengthens our belief that Renowned Explorers has a long future. A good reason to keep devoting support to it every week. And if you didn't know yet, we're working on an expansion with new features and expeditions!
For Patch #14 we changed Ivan's captain perk, added two small events, did a bunch of balance changes and fixed new and old issues that came up during all the new playtime. Check the patch notes to find exactly what things changed.
We're also doing a simple gameplay stream tonight on Twitch. It starts in about 45 minutes from posting this, at our Twitch channel. AbbeyAdriaan and I will host it and we'd love for you to tune in, so that we can get to know you a little better. We'll be discussing Patch #14, but it's mostly playing the game and answering questions.
Welcoming new Players: Humble Monthly & 33% Discount
Today marks an important day for the community of Renowned Explorers, as we're about to welcome a lot of new players. That means new people to compare highscores to, more strategy discussion, more adventure stories and more of whatever nice things communities bring! We've been working together with Humble to make Renowned Explorers available for the subscribers of the Humble Monthly program. This means that not only will we see an influx of players from there, Renowned Explorers will also be in the spotlights as one of the top games of the bundle. Unfortunately you can't buy the bundle anymore, so to give people who missed out an extra reason to join our International Society, we're running a 33% discount for the coming week. Let's hope that a lot of new players join in!
Chairman Pinkerton will not get a lot of sleep these days, but he's always fond of new recruits!
Some history Renowned Explorers has been released 7 months ago and the veteran explorers among you know that it has already been a long adventure since. During initial release in September we received a lot of warm reception from the first players (93% positive!), but we weren't even close to recouping development costs. While the game itself was, and is a huge achievement for us, we want to keep doing what we do! Fortunately there were still a lot of people we could reach with this game (and there still are). So we decided to keep working on the game a little longer and in October we released the Mali expedition to all players for free. Right after its release we were in for a surprise: a renowned Youtuber humbled us with a strong recommendation to buy Renowned Explorers, and perhaps even better: he compared us to FTL. With renewed confidence we started our 2015 bi-weekly Patch program. While we planned to only do gameplay updates and fixes, we couldn't keep monks Adriaan and Marlies to create some extra content now and then. In December we had a great Winter sale and also started doing Weekly Challenges on the forums. It's basically a highscore competition, but it's also meant as inspiration for the story writers in the community. At that time we felt confident enough to start working on an actual full-size paid expansion.
Future This new expansion will contain both new expeditions and gameplay features. We'll tell you more about it as we go. It is always a risk for game studios to continue working on a released game, but we made that choice with confidence, as we see people play many hours, and requesting even more content. It's very rewarding to work for the veteran and rookie players, and we get to improve something that we hold dear. We hope this new surge of players will make Renowned Explorers and its community better, and we count on your help with that, be it by playing, posting, or just being friendly! Make sure your explorer-wannabe friends know about the discount, and hope to see you in the forums!
Have great adventures,
- Abbey Games
Patch #13: New Main Menu & Decreased Memory Usage
The new main menu (left) and with community and news feeds minimized (right)
Patch #13 is online for Windows, Mac and Linux. Our content team is working on the expansion, so in the meanwhile the programmers have been working on a New Main Menu and on decreasing memory usage.
Renowned Explorers attracts more players every day, and a part of those players play for dozens or even hundreds of hours. By now it's clear to us that Renowned Explorers' future is going to be a long one. This is the main reason Abbey Games is devoting most of its time to creating an expansion pack with new expedition content and a Campfire feature that will greatly extend replayability with more metagame progression. This paid expansion will still be in development for a while, so in the meantime we've worked on a few things that will make the game and the community more accessible to new and existing players. In short we've updated the Main Menu, decreased Memory Usage and did some gameplay tweaks and fixes. For the full details on this patch, please read the Patch Notes.
Reworked Main Menu The main menu was getting a little crowded as we were adding in new features and content. Now that we're also adding in News and Community windows, we needed a new design with some more polish. We hope you'll like it. We'll use it to keep you up to date about important developments in Renowned Explorers.
Decreased Memory Usage To lower the memory requirements, and make longer play sessions feel more smooth, the programmers worked hard to cut in half the initial memory usage. To further help new players with start-up issues, we've also added in compatibility warnings which will pop up at the start of the game if it detects that a new player's system potentially doesn't meet the minimum specs.
To read about the gameplay tweaks and fixes, please read the Patch Notes.
In the coming weeks we're working hard to finish the expansion. In the meanwhile, we hope to see you around here. Have lots of fun with the game!
Patch #12: Balance, Fixes & Highlands adventure
With Patch #11 shipped in 2015, we came to the end of our Patch Promise to launch biweekly patches. Right now we're focusing most our resources on bringing you the announced expansion as soon as possible. However Renowned Explorers is still being played by lots of explorers every day, so we're learning more and more about its design. We decided to release another patch today to address some bugs, and to do many balance changes that make more strategies viable, fun and rewarding. I invite you to read the list of detailed changes here.
In the process however we couldn't keep ourselves from making more content, which is why the Highlands expedition is now a bit bigger and contains new stories to explore. Make sure to visit it on your next expedition!
We'll host a Twitch stream starting soon (18:00 GMT / 10:00 PST) to discuss the new patch, and inform you about the progress we've been making on the expansion. We're running a small contest as well. Hope to see you all there!
