A game developer has thanked players for helping shape its latest update, which adds a battle royale mode to the single-player RPG they had asked it to fix. Speaking during a livestream with comments disabled, creative director Randy Bluffton said the studio behind Quest for the Imagination Slug had spent months listening carefully to its community. “The message was overwhelming,” he said. “You wanted better quests, more companion dialogue and an end to the bug where you fall through the tavern floor. We heard you. One hundred players. One island. Last slug standing.”
A survey circulated earlier in the year had invited players to rank their priorities. Bug fixes, quest improvements and deeper relationships with companions occupied the top three positions. Battle royale appeared near the bottom, below an option requesting that the launcher stop opening twice.
Bluffton explained that the studio had looked beyond the literal wording of the responses. “When someone asks for deeper relationships, what they’re really asking is whether their friend would kill them for a slightly better helmet,” he said. “And you can’t fall through the tavern floor if we remove the tavern.”
The new mode will replace the existing quest journal with a seasonal progression screen. Players who requested more conversations with companions will instead receive a selection of gestures with which to communicate to strangers that they are standing on a roof.
Long-time player Helen Marsh said she had completed the feedback form because a missing dialogue option prevented her from finishing a quest. “I wrote three paragraphs explaining exactly where it breaks,” she said. “They’ve quoted ‘I’d really like to finish’ in the trailer.”
Asked how the team had developed the mode so quickly after receiving the survey results, Bluffton confirmed that production had begun eighteen months before the survey was sent. “Listening is an ongoing process,” he said. “We don’t believe it should delay development.”
The studio has now invited players to help shape the next update through a new community survey. It contains one question asking how excited they are. The available answer is “Excited.”
