Before launching into this story, let’s put out a quick review. At the beginning of this year, players of Pirate101 started up a “flood the servers” community initiative in order to beseech developer KingsIsle to keep the game updated on a more regular basis. Following a Gamigo buyout shortly afterward, there were early rumblings that Pirate101 might see new content after all. Fast-forward to July, when the MMO got its first new injection of content after some time in maintenance mode, but things have otherwise been quiet save for an investor report’s promise that Pirate101 would make its way to European players.
That brings us to now and a state of the game address from Wizard101, which hearkened back to an announcement made during a December dev stream that affirmed Pirate101 would indeed be getting updates in 2022. That said, the address tries to temper expectations and asks for patience from eager fans.
“This news doesn’t mean anything is going out next week or next month. To do this right, we’ve got a lot of pre-production work to do. We need to dust off all those pipelines (art, design, sound, programming) and get them flowing again and the time it will take isn’t insignificant, but fortunately we’ve already been working on the process. Integrating new team members will help complete the initial steps of development.”
Once the aforementioned pre-production is done, players can look forward to new weekly and daily activities, a refresh of the game’s starting experience, and “small content drops.” Larger content updates will have to come later once KingsIsle is comfortable with what the game’s new team is capable of.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the address looks back at 2021’s development goals for Wizard101, recounting steps taken to optimize dev tools and processes, improve current systems in the MMO, make subscriptions more valuable, and bring players together.
