Lies diesen Artikel auf Deutsch!
Hello Starfam, this is Bretton (Game Master Bee), the Lead Game Designer for SSO! I’m here to talk about some exciting changes to the way Star Stable approaches festivals and our seasonal updates!
Last Spring we made the decision to focus on story quests and gameplay improvements such as Horse Care. However, we heard you loud and clear when you all spoke out after the poorly explained absence of our Spring events like the Galentine’s Day, Easter, and Fortuna Festival. Many of you pointed out how important festivals are in our game. We couldn’t agree more!
Over the last year or so, we have focused on growing our design team and reconsidering what festivals should look like in Star Stable. We have focused our efforts on Stage One of our Festival Plans, which has been to overhaul and stabilise our two most popular festivals, Halloween and Winter. With those two closer to a state players and the team are happy with, we are looking at Stage Two of our Festival Plans.
This post is all about improving the transparency of our plans, so you know what’s coming and what we’re doing with all your incredible feedback! Stage Two has us moving towards having two types of Festivals. Primary Festivals, like Halloween and Winter, and Secondary Festivals like New Years Party and SSO’s Birthday!
We want every season (Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter) to have one Primary Festival that lasts 4-6 weeks. In addition to tons of seasonally themed activities, collectible items, and rare rewards, we are also looking to use our Primary Festivals to tell some big stories as well! Last year, players experienced the first of these stories as they teamed up with Linda to uncover Galloper’s dark past. These stories will grow and evolve with each passing year, and new players will always be able to play through the quests they missed from past years! This means players can adventure with and build stronger relationships with our Soul Riders and other important lore characters apart from the main storyline.
Importantly, this will NOT impact our ability to continue our main story quests! This just means that you all will get MORE quests, on a more predictable schedule! Keep an eye out during Primary Festivals as well, you may encounter Game Masters, like me, riding around the world, and we’d love to celebrate the festivities with you!
Secondary Festivals will be speckled throughout the year where they make sense. These will be smaller 2 week festivals celebrating Jorvegian traditions. Each year you can expect new items and rewards, but the activities and quests will receive minor improvements and bug fixes each year.
It will take us a bit of time to transition to this new structure, but we already have a strong idea for what’s to come this year!
Spring
This year we will feature the brand new Equestrian Festival, a grand celebration of Jorvegian culture and our love of horses. This year players will find the Open House at Jorvik Stables and the Red String Trail included as part of this event. Over the coming years this Primary Festival will grow to celebrate the equestrian traditions and riding styles of other towns around Jorvik!
We want to be clear that to make this new festival as awesome as possible, the smaller Fortuna Festival, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and April Fools Day will sadly not be returning this year. We know that this will disappoint some, and for that reason, we would love to hear what your favourite parts of these events were, so we can bring that into future events! Perhaps, someday we will even revive one of these for a new Secondary Festival in spring!
Summer
Since we are releasing a brand new Primary Festival this spring, we will keep the Rainbow Festival, Midsummer, and Beach Festival mostly the same as previous years with some minor tweaks and additions. Next year, we will dedicate ourselves to creating a new Primary Festival for the summer. We’d love to hear your ideas for what you want to see? Should we expand one of our existing summer events to become a huge festival, or do you want to see something totally new? Renaissance Festival perhaps? ^_~
Autumn
Halloween is returning as autumn’s Primary Festival, this time with lots of improvements to existing activities and the next chapter of the Galloper storyline from last year! The SSO Birthday event will be returning from previous years as a more relaxed affair compared to the explosive celebrations of our 10th anniversary!
Winter
A little penguin bird told me that our narrative team is cooking up something special, and our tech team is looking into more thematic visual improvements. This first example of this is how we cast the Aurora over all of Jorvik, and added cold weather breathing effects throughout the event! Winter Festival will find a new festival story quest, lots of new items and rewards and improvements to our biggest and best activities. Lastly, New Years will return as our Secondary Festival extension to Winter Village.
So as you can see, there are a lot of thrilling changes on the horizon as we commit to bringing you all bigger and better holidays! We will do what we can to ensure that the items from discontinued events make their way into the game and newer festivals. Let us know if there’s anything you want to see from festivals going forward!
Once we are confident and feel we have a healthy spread of Primary and Secondary Festivals throughout the year, we’ll update you all on what Stage Three of our Festival Plans looks like! We want the world of Star Stable to feel ALIVE!
For our most passionate players, we want to hear from you!
There’s two ways to give us your feedback!
Post or comment on Social Media using the tag #SSOPartyPlanning
or
Contact us directly through our website
https://www.starstable.com/support
- Select “I have an idea for Star Stable” from the drop down.
- Then write your ideas and feedback!
Your ideas will go directly to us so we can carefully consider all of our options!
Together we will make Star Stable better than ever!
Thank you so much for reading and ride on, StarFam!