Status Report
Anniversary Report #1 - 29 October 2019
We completed Helm’s Deep seemingly an age ago, and @LimeeFox is on the verge of finishing the cinematic. The staff team have seen the first draft, and he’ll be making a few changes to it in the coming week.
Éoford was completed and released in late June, and that went very well, having the effect of making July our most successful month ever - in terms of downloads and revenue.
Expect a full review of 2019 at the end of the year, but it’s seen us start the Rohan Project which is somewhat of a re-orientation for this server, and as a side-effect it has seen a renewed concentration on the development of our Resource Pack, which has now forked from the Empire War Resource Pack quite dramatically.
We took the decision in 2019, too, to cease any revamps of past projects permanently. As a team that has existed for eight years, I came to realise that spending all our days revamping old projects was an utter waste of time and creativity. This won’t stop us working on locations we’ve built before (e.g: Edoras), but these will be complete rebuilds rather than updates.
This decision, of course, had the side-effect of halting our Dale & Isengard projects, but I’m confident it’s for the best and will lead us in a much more stable direction.
The final change of note that I’ll mention here is our recent rank reforms, which can be read about in detail here.
In the near-future, expect the release of Helm’s Deep this weekend (if all goes to plan), and the completion of Grimslade in the coming month. Grimslade most-likely will not get an individual cinematic as Éoford and Helm’s Deep have done - rather we’ll create an announcement cinematic for the Rohan Project as a whole, which will be posted with the Grimslade release.
Expect a Rohan Project Overview page on both Planet Minecraft and CurseForge, which will act as the public face of this project-of-projects. It’s important that the community realises this is separate from our old style of individual, unrelated project releases.
The next stage of the Rohan Project will be Aldburg, which you’ll see is in the planning/brainstorming stage if you check the Discord #aldburg-planning channel. Once we’ve decided on the layout, @Enoshade will do as he did with Grimslade, and export a small portion of the terrain for us to work on.
It’s important that non-Rohan projects remain in the old, standalone style, parallel to the Rohan Project. As such, it’s my pleasure to formally announce that preliminary work on Minas Ithil has begun, and expect more announcements regarding that to follow.
If all goes to plan, by the end of the year we’ll have released 4 projects for download, which I believe is the most since 2014.
I can’t mention everything here, but EpicQuestz is in the most stable and comfortable place we’ve been in since 2015, and maybe ever. We have direction, leadership, and motivated builders. I’m sure the future holds exciting things for us.
