Vintage Story: Adventure Mode

Let's do a little follow up on the previous devlog post on Hytale, now that the dust has settled.

In short, we will attempt to create a new game mode as part of Vintage Story!

Team, Budget and Risks
We are now looking through the job applications and contacting promising candidates. So much potential. It feels like picking your favorite candy from a candy store. Thank you everyone for applying! We've carefully thought about our options, budget and potential risks. We'll be starting small (3 to 4 people) and expand once the project shows merit and gathers interest. A small team might be slower, but is also much more manageable, more effective and can pivot quicker. Slow growth allows us to fund this truly for the long term. And thankfully, we can re-use a lot of the Vintage Story ecosystem.

The Goal
The new mode would be departing significantly in aesthetics, setting and game mechanics compared to Vintage Story. More focused towards fantasy and adventure/rpg-y compared to the gritty, realism based nature of the current experience. Personally, I would love to see some Elves and Dwarves in there
For the time being it would ship alongside Vintage Story at no additional cost but in the purely hypothetical scenario where it really takes off we could spin it off into a fully separate game. We'll be very open about it, release early and the sub-team will be given significant agency over development direction and communication style with players. There will also be some areas where the goals of both teams will intersect and both projects will benefit, such as combat, improved enemy AI or better NPCs in general. For existing players - rest assured, the aesthetics and game mechanics of Vintage Story will remain true to its original vision.

Closing words
It's a bold move for us - we haven't tried this before, nonetheless I'm confident that we can build something truly engaging for all players. In the off chance that the community is not interested in what we're building we'll keep the option open to pivot to making Vintage Story better instead. Either way, we'll try our best to deliver something worth your time!

We'll share more as soon as we have something to share.

Cheers,
  Tyron

[Update 07/06/2025, Q/A]

Dear Vintage Story Players,

I've read through the forum posts and comments on reddit - I hear you! Thank you for voicing your concern, I'm happy to address some of them.

> "It's a bad name for a new project"

I agree. We'll rename it to something better.

> "Finish Vintage Story First"

We have now 24 in our team, of which 15 are contributing to the game itself (I should update the about us page ). If there's one thing I have learned from hiring this many people is that it made us more ambitious, but not necessarily quicker. I still carefully review almost every game mechanic and (game mechanic or engine altering) code change that gets added to the game and Saraty still looks over nearly every piece of art and modelling change, to ensure that Vintage Story remains true to its original vision. We can only do so much. I can assure you, adding more team members will dilute this vision - Saraty and me would no longer be able to review all the changes the team makes. (For context, it was Saraty that defined the art style of Vintage Story)

It is already a significant struggle for me to put together the devlog posts, because there is so many changes being made to the main game on each update. More people means more opinions, means more possible development directions. We had to split our weekly meetings into 2 subgroups where each group can talk only every 2nd week because there were simply too many voices going on at the same time. I don't like it because I want everyone in the team to have a voice, but due to the team size this is no longer possible.  We in the VS team are not fond of a strongly hiearchical management structures where only the leadership gets to decide what to add. If we want Vintage Story in its full glory AND with its original vision, then we need to stop diluting the vision.

Lastly, finishing Vintage Story to its full glory would take 10 to 20 years more, if ever. There's just so much interesting mechanics that could be added still. This not something that can be done quickly.

> "Spend that Money on Vintage Story instead"

See above, adding more team members to original VS is very difficult. So if not more team members why not make us of these additional funds for a small side project?
    
Individual contributions to the original Vintage Story experience in terms of common systems as mentioned is a lot easier to manage than 3-4 people doing the same thing but full time.

> "Go to Steam first. It is too amibitious"
> "It is too risky"

Money is not the bottleneck. 

> "I paid for Vintage Story, not this"

And you got Vintage Story in the very exact form as advertised with many more updates to come. I am not sure how this is not a fair exchange.

> "You will be spread thin for project management"

Going from past experiences, I doubt it. Let me tell you about two previous side projects:

Vintagehosting: This had a very large initial time investment because I wrote a lot of code for it, but now this is pretty much a self running service. I maybe spend 2 hours per month on this to look at game server issues
Secret game project: This also took some time to set up, albeit much less than Vintagehosting and I am checking up on progress on a regular basis. I spend maybe 1.5 hours per month on this.

If you tally that up, both of these projects result in about 2% of my total time - i.e. 98% of my time still goes to managing Vintage Story.

Once this new project is fully set up, it should be able to run mostly independent from me. The exception being when there are engine changes that would benefit both projects.

> "This is feature creep"

It should be the exact opposite, since its 80-90% a separate project. If anything it would be more feature creep if we were to hire more devs on the main team

> "This new mode should be a separate project"

This would prevent us from sharing code between both projects, decreasing the symbiotic benefit we can get from this.

> "If it becomes a separate game, will existing VS players have to pay for it?"

This is a good argument, it would be fair if existing players could get it for free or at a significant discount.
    

> "Vintage Story will loose its identity / the new project will bleed into VS"
> "The re-use of mechanics in Vintage Story will make it like Hytale"

In the sentence were I mentioned both projects can benefit, I meant it in terms of pure engine tech, not game content, such as better hitscanning, tighter weapon/tool interactions, status effects, a stronger mod api, a more robust animation system, more intelligent AI systems... stuff that has already been in the requested by players or in the back of our minds.

I cannot emphasize this enough - there is absolutely no intention to ever mix these two game genres. Vintage Story will remain the gritty uncompromising wilderness survival you know today - with more survival mechanics to be added in the future. Saraty would kill me if that were to ever change

I also want to add here that Vintage Story was built with modding in mind from the ground up - to the point where we ourselves use the mod api to add game content. This is no different - the new mode will be just another (vanilla) mod to the game. Should engine changes be needed then this will be available for the original game, but if anything, this merely means we will end up with a stronger modding api.
 

> "Hytale failed, your project might also fail"

It's definitely within the realm of possibility. Here's a number of reasons why I strongly doubt that or why this is low impact:
- The company grows sustainably - we don't hire above our means
- I already pulled off a commercially successful game and learned a lot in the process. I am confident I can do it again
- We are willing to ship imperfect, flawed products and improve it over time - because the alternative is never shipping
- There is a symbiotic effect to this - both projects can benefit from this
- Most of all: We don't live off of debt! We have a continuous revenue stream

Imagine if I would have never started VS in the first place, because I was afraid it would fail. None of this would have existed either. Too many companies become risk averse and stagnate, or try to deliver the perfect product and fail. This right here is our opportunity to do something right!

> "You will abandon / slow down development of Vintage Story"

I started development of Vintage Story because that is the kind of game I wanted to play. It's the kind of game Saraty (my wife) absolutely loves to play. We deeply believe that this game needs to exist. We will continue on this mission unabated.

We are reaching out to the Hytale community and its devs as they too truly and deeply believed in Hytale. This is a chance to maybe maybe at least partially keep that dream alive. We are all on the same boat here. We're all gamers, desiring to dive into different game worlds with all our senses, to escape reality for a few moments in time. Why can't we, why shouldn't we peacefully coexist? Why shouldn't we help eachother?

When I worked for Hytale in 2015 I really felt their passion for what they are working on. The team there really believed in the work they did. It was also this very experience that gave me the confidence to start Vintage Story in the first place. It was Noxy that saw my work on worldgen and handed an olive branch to me - believed in my skills to work on their project.

Vintage Story might have never seen the day of light without Hytale. Now it is my turn to hand them an olive branch. It is the least that I can do.

I know many of you have a significant emotional investment in Vintage Story, I am well aware of it. I will be careful to not loose sight of that.
- Tyron