It's actually happening! Philip (SCSN) and I are building the new version of Dominion Online that will go online on the first of January 2017.
We're really excited we got the contract. It involved us building a demonstration Dominion during the first two months of this year, demonstrating it to Jay (RGG games) and Donald, and now building the actual game.
It's still early to say what exactly you can expect, except we will do our very best to make something all the Dominion fans will love.
* We intend to have different clients for different people. One will look as pretty as we can make it, one will be sober, with minimal images and mostly text. These clients will run on Windows, Mac and Linux, or any other platform that supports running Java. We will also make a client that runs in a web browser. Finally phones and tablets will probably be running a different client. If you play online you can play against any other client.
* We will be selling two different products: Dominion Online and Dominion Offline. In Dominion Offline you can buy expansions, and use them to play random boards, selfmade boards or campaigns against AI. For Dominion Online you will have to buy a monthly subscription. This does not require you to own the expansions offline. Online you can play against other players or against AI.
Exact prices are yet to be determined, but you can expect them to be around $3-$8 per expansion offline (depending on the expansion size) and $3/month online (for all expansions, $2/month for half the expansions). Existing users will be offered a choice: they either get their expansions transferred to 'Dominion Offline', or they get their expansions Online for the period of one year.
* We will never be late on releasing new expansions.
* We have some nice plans for new features. It's still very early to consider them promises, but this is certainly on my personal wish list:
- A tournament hosting feature. We want to facilitate other users to act as a tournament host. Especially creating a one day cup and sending out invitations to your friends should be easy. A proper implementation of a one day cup requires some form of a timed game.
- Gamelogs where every decision is a link. Clicking on the link allows you to continue playing from that point on.
This should facilitate questions like "What should I have done here?"
- A 'spectator mode' that allows you to observe any game running on the server, if the players permit it. For entertainment value, or just to wait until your friend is finished playing a game and can play against you.
- Multi language support
At some point we'll be looking for test users, but not yet.