As pretty much anyone who even just casually follows iOS gaming knows by now, last week brought the release of Crashlands ($6.99), an ambitious open-world action-crafting-adventure from the three brothers at Butterscotch Shenanigans. Not only was Crashlands born out of an inspirational story of facing and defeating cancer, but the game itself fully lived up to the hype and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mobile game (or any video game, really) that’s been as universally loved as this one. Anyway, with the launch date finally coming and going, and Crashlands officially out there in the wild, the Butterscotch Bros. penned a quick blog post over the weekend with a few thoughts on where they’re heading with the game’s forthcoming updates.
First out of the gate is a requisite bug fix patch, which may not sound all that exciting but is an important step in a game’s lifespan. For how big and complex Crashlands is, I’m honestly very surprised at how few bugs have been brought up, but as any developer will tell you there simply isn’t a video game that will ever launch that will be 100% bug free. This update will fix the known bugs and tighten things up all around, and Butterscotch expects to submit that by the middle of this week.
The update after that will be a “quality of life" update which will add some additional features just to make the entire Crashlands experience as friendly as possible to its players. Butterscotch isn’t giving any details on what this might entail, but I’d imagine this will include things like a more user-friendly map or maybe a more robust quest log. Crashlands is pretty much the most user-friendly game in existence as it is, but sometimes things don’t occur to a developer until thousands and thousands of players are putting a game through the wringer, and there’s always room to make things even better than they were before.
The third update mentioned on Butterscotch’s blog is by far the most exciting. As you might have heard, during development Butterscotch decided to create an editor of sorts for Crashlands which would more or less allow people to create their own worlds and campaigns. It’s known as the Crashlands Creator. It was such an ambitious idea that it didn’t quite make it in for launch, but it’s still coming and it’s going to be awesome. Straight from The Bros.’ mouths:
“The Crashlands Creator patch will add a bunch of new toys, and will also feature player access to other player-made campaigns, which can also include weird mutators like permadeath, the removal of crafting entirely (WHAT), permanent night, one-shot deaths 100% of the time, and creatures murdering each other. These mutators won’t affect the official campaign, but other players will be able to use them in the campaigns that they create."
As if Crashlands wasn’t already this freakishly massive game, now there will be basically unlimited new worlds and quests to explore if the creative community gets involved in all this. Unfortunately there’s no word on when the Crashlands Creator update will be coming, but expect the Butterscotch Bros. to keep everyone well informed of its progress. To be honest they can take all the darn time they want, as my hands are still more than full with the current Crashlands campaign. For even more information, news, help and discussion on Crashlands, be sure to visit the extremely active forum thread.
