Welcome brave Adventurers to the grand celebration of TADO’s second anniversary! It is with immense pride that we can reflect on the incredible journey we've all shared over the past two years. From the moment you all first stepped into this vibrant world, you have embarked on epic quests, formed unbreakable alliances, etched your names into the annals of our realm and experienced a host of bizarre, fun, and sometimes not so fun..., unintended experiences – I’m thinking of you ‘Wolf Day’ which saw everyone who summoned a wolf… summoning 300 wolves…. Your dedication and passion have been the driving forces behind our labours and continued development. Each battle fought, every puzzle solved, and all the friendships forged, we are honoured to have been part of your adventures and are endlessly grateful for the support you have shown us. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41756378/a8bc074bd1f008436f14306507c80a775f089bf1.jpg[/img] To mark this occasion, over the next week, starting on the 26th of January, Adventurers who visit the Kami shrine currently in Genmire are awarded a new title and limited unique anniversary cloak. Last year we brought out a lot of new content such as the launch of the Secrets of Star Island, more events, a lot of new equipment, more ways to customise your character, easier ways to reset your stats and new improved hair styles to name but a few. We also tidied up some of the more dated areas with Rogue Town being fully rebuilt to look better, perform better and be more functional. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41756378/fe22d27460d15dded9098b4b1b7c6a3482574f1a.png[/img] We’ve continued to improve performance and graphical fidelity both by optimising and providing additional options to enable a wider variety of systems reach high levels of performance. One of the last major milestones deployed last year was a remake of the UI which looks nicer, is easier to interact with and more familiar compared to other traditional PC MMOs. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41756378/d0e02c72c3821ae3c49dad23800090c4901c8f72.jpg[/img] Some of these things weren’t planned in but were recognised as being required for the good of the game overall. This did leave a few items planned last year having to launch this year instead. The big items on our list which moved into this year include fleshing out the fishing system, merchant cargo transport and lairs which produce harder monsters the longer you survive in them. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41756378/759cc82f5cc7513eb29841bffe312a742ed219c3.png[/img] So what’s in year 3? Well adventurers we have a bit more of the core story to launch which will be coming very soon. This will see you unlock the Star Elf city, head into the Demon Realm to find out what’s pushing demons into Star Island before making a trip back to the Order in Rogue Town for a confrontation. We also have a few more events coming out shortly two of which are quite different to any of those that came before. Genmire Fishing tournament offers a non-combat PvP event where players attempt to collect the most and best fish. Adventurers score points for each caught and returned to Genmire based on the rarity of what they’ve found with the winner being announced and reward when the time runs out. The Rogue Town mini pet arena is an event which players can submit their favourite mini-pet (which they may or may not have levelled!) to do battle on their behalf against both NPC mini pets and other player’s mini pets. There’s also mini-pet racing which will come a little later. We have had a lot of requests for an in game world map which is also very close to launch. Its a surprisingly challenging thing providing a nice looking map of a large world where things are constantly changing, but we believe we have come up with something which will do the majority of what people have asked for whilst also not requiring too much development work when things change. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41756378/b882f3e0a7d7f49ae84abbc333b555b9e2df1d42.jpg[/img] Of the outstanding pieces of content enhanced fishing and trading will both be launching in full in the first half of 2025. These systems provide alternative ways to level up, gain experience along with some unique rewards and ways of gaining access to some items which are otherwise difficult to get your hands on. Outside of these remains a couple more dungeons which we’ve had built for a long time but haven’t found the right time to open which will come not long after the final story patch. We’ve been blessed with a relatively large number of players coming through TADO over the last two years, it’s done well but we don’t have a large concurrent playerbase which can be a barrier to bringing in more people who are looking for an experience where they regularly bump into other players. At some point later this year we will move TADO out of Early Access into full release which will provide a further opportunity to bring in new players and make the world feel a little fuller when you’re not playing with friends. Further beyond that… Well, we have a fourth major continent which will come some time after we launch the game as an expansion DLC with with new quests, new dungeons and a much-requested flying mounts for high level players. We will share more details on this later in the year. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/41756378/6214738b5e829413a4d1be165e2d6e515833b436.jpg[/img] Even further...? Well beyond that, and depending on how well its the expansion is received, we are looking at removing as many barriers to entry as possible recognising there's a lot of people out there who see TADO, but can't or won't drop the initial box cost on a chance of it being fun. This is something we'd like to remove entirely so we can get more people through the door and having fun. Anyway, happy anniversary adventurers! Here's to a great third year! Monty