Stardock takes over Ara management, and new roadmap for Ara

[The_J]

Stardock has announced today that they're taking over the management for Ara from Microsoft (Oxide is staying the developer). Brad Wardell has posted on Twitter an article about how Stardock was managing Ara and Old World before, but gave Ara away because there were some obvious conflicts with e.g. the target group.
At the same time Stardock has posted the new roadmap for Ara, which includes 2 updates in May and June, a new DLC in June, which apparently focuses on scenarios, and a major update for everything in summer this year.
It seems that the development will be interesting .

 

[Snipergw]

These are very good news for Ara, and Brad Wardell's behind the scenes blogpost is extremely enlightening. Suddenly almost all of Ara's issues makes perfect sense, and the fact that they are genuinely attempting to solve it is very promising.

Already the user interface looks more 4X like with upscaled units, smaller tiles will improve the game significantly. AI Personalities and Per Nation Units will make each Civ feel more distinct. I last played Ara in March and concluded that it had probably been abandoned to hospice care after such a poor launch, with only small maintenance updates, but this has filled me with optimism.

 

[KayAU]

Yeah, things have been slow lately, but there have been a lot of things going on internally, and Brad Wardell has been quite active on Discord talking to the community. I am happy to see things finally surface publicly, and am very hopeful for the coming updates.

 

[Pedro P]

It's a lovely game and the only one of this wave of historical 4X that, to me, seems to have a trail for an innovation that is actually significant. Having stardocks is good, having more updated is good, I didn't agree fully with the design of Old World but I can't deny the care and polish, if they apply that without changing the core idea of ARA I think I will be very happy.

 

[Hawke9]

I love ARA for it's unique take on the 4x genre. I agree that these updates look very promising, here's hoping the updates will attract some more players

 

[KayAU]

Call me shallow, but I am especially curious to see the new terrain shader and any UI improvements. The claim is that the game should run better while looking even prettier. Ara runs alright on my setup, but the fans on my GPU run quite high when playing.

I am hopeful that the first 1.4 preview may be out later this week.

 

[Shirotora Kenshin]

These are very good news for Ara, and Brad Wardell's behind the scenes blogpost is extremely enlightening. Suddenly almost all of Ara's issues makes perfect sense, and the fact that they are genuinely attempting to solve it is very promising.

View attachment 730660

Already the user interface looks more 4X like with upscaled units, smaller tiles will improve the game significantly. AI Personalities and Per Nation Units will make each Civ feel more distinct. I last played Ara in March and concluded that it had probably been abandoned to hospice care after such a poor launch, with only small maintenance updates, but this has filled me with optimism.

I must say this screenshot looks extremely pretty and impressive.
The roadmap plans sounds promising. I just hope that new terrain shader will also have an effect to the water look, as it could be prettier for my taste.
Overall quite dark, could be a tad brighter, but the colors are saturated, which is good. Looking forward to try Ara as soon as i finally (!!!) got my new pc, whenever this will be.