The end of Temtem’s development with the release of patch 1.8 has caused fans and Kickstarter backers of the game to presume that Crema doesn’t care about the game – and once more brought forth Game Director Guillermo Andrades to try to push back against that presumption.
“We do, but that doesn’t mean we want to keep adding content to the game forever,” Andrades opens. “Temtem has always been a smaller and finite game in concept, a campaign-focused game with MMO aspects around. […] That means the game is designed as such, and not designed to keep players engaged around forever or designed in a way that could accept a feed of new content constantly” – in spite of the fact that Crema said in a statement that presumptions of the MMO’s abandonment were a “misunderstanding.”
“If we didn’t care about Temtem we would have stopped supporting it right when the 1.0 launched, but we’ve spent 2 years doing updates to it and adding new things,” Andrades reasons.
Andrades then wheels out explanations that have been provided by the studio before, namely that the addition of new Tems and big islands – an effort he says took between six to nine months – generated a temporary spike in players who “consumed” new content in a matter of days. He says the studio “always tried to be honest about what Temtem is” while arguing that the devs “can’t control everyone’s expectations for the game.” He also claims that efforts to revitalize the game with things like its PvP-focused side game Showdown and related esports league just didn’t work out as a result of being “too restricted in both the design and technical sides to do something impactful.”
He then goes on to assert that Temtem: Swarm “is a side project which is being made in collaboration with another company” while the primary devs at Crema work on a game codenamed Project Downbelow, a project within the Temtem universe that seeks to “build new foundations and try out new things we would love to see in a hypothetical Temtem 2” – while also making plain that it’s not Temtem 2 or Temtem: Swarm.
As for patch 1.8, that’s scheduled to arrive in early September, which will open up all previous battle passes and cosmetics from previous seasons, apply multiple bug fixes, and introduce several quality-of-life features, while later patches are one more confirmed to be about bugfixing as needed (aka maintenance mode).
