"Tiny Multiplayer Online RPG" Book Of Travels Abandons New Content Plans To Fix Bugs

Book of Travels developer Might and Delight is finding the road to making a successful game more difficult than it imagined. Two months ago, we learned that the studio was laying off over half of its employees, and today the developer informed its player base that future content would be delayed while the staff focuses on polish and bug-fixing efforts.

The "brutally honest" assessment from Might and Delight is that "Book of Travels is nowhere near the level of polish we expected it to be at this point in its life cycle, nor where we need it to be to make it a successful product in the long term." New content would only add more problems, so the focus for now is "to get Book of Travels to a place where we can start building it with brick and mortar rather than putting bandaids on it."

The developer shared the results of a pair of polls, one that asked what the dev team should focus on first and what it should follow after that initial goal was met. The first poll resulted in 56.9% of players voting for "Gameplay bugs/glitches" and the second had 28.7% also voting for "Gameplay bugs/glitches," with an additional 31.3% voting for "Server Stability/Functionality." In other words, over half of all players just want the game to work.

The results weren't surprising to Might and Delight, which will now "put everything we have into the betterment of Book of Travels," stressing that they do "have the talent onboard to straighten this out, we really believe that." I don't want to crush the dreams of a struggling developer too much, but if you believed you had the talent in the first place, why did the game launch in the state it did? And what was the purpose of those 25 people that were let go? It seems like some serious errors were made in high-level decision-making, and if that isn't sorted out, it won't matter what anyone believes.