Hello everyone!
Now that the new year has kicked off in earnest, we wanted to write a bit about what you can expect from Barotrauma in 2025, and beyond.
First, let’s take a quick look back, before we go forward: Barotrauma has been in development for about a decade, on Steam for over five years, and out of Early Access for soon two years. That’s a lot of development history! What’s better, this year is still not the end of the line for us. We’re very happy that we get to keep developing our favorite submarine simulator even further.
However, this year we’re going to start going lighter on new content. Our last update of 2024 proved extremely successful: we saw a lot of happy comments about the bugfixes and improvements in it, and the release was also such a stable one that we didn’t need to issue the usual hotfix or two after it. It was clearly time for us to slow down and turn our focus from content to fixes, and we’re going to continue down that path this year, for the most part.
– For the most part. We’ve still some new content lined up, left over from previous releases and pending final touches; the Reserve Bench feature of the Permadeath mode is one bigger item that’s been sitting on the shelf, for example. We’re aiming to release the Reserve Bench and some other “leftovers” content in the first update of the year, in the early spring.
Following this spring update, our releases will likely get smaller, and possibly a little less frequent, for some time. We are still aiming to update the game multiple times in 2025, but the changes will be largely in the bugfixes and small improvements departments, with the occasional new feature and other content added now and then.
This may actually be a relief for many modders and mod users – fewer changes, less mod breakage – even though we’ve been aiming for backwards compatibility for mods ever since our 1.0 release. (Do keep in mind, though, that code mods like Lua for Barotrauma will still need updating following every game update due to how these mods work!)
Besides wanting to take some time now to make Barotrauma really smooth and solid, there’s another reason for us slowing down. We’ll write about it in more detail later, but just between you and us for now… we’re quietly working on a DLC, and have been for some time already. We’re very excited about it and can’t wait to tell you all about it – but we’ll have to keep waiting for a while longer.
That’s all this time. Stay tuned for more information about the upcoming spring update a little later, and for a proper announcement of the big news further down the road. Enjoy 2025!
