Arcane Odyssey Update Timeline / Ript Controversy - Discussion

Arcane Odyssey Update Timeline

(Excluding Seasonal Updates)

Early Access Era

  • Arcane Odyssey Early Access Release — February 25, 2023

  • Under Water Update — April 22, 2023

  • Brewing Update — June 23, 2023

Starting off strong: Release & updates are 2 months apart, the most consistent era of updates in the game in my personal opinion.

Dark Sea Expansion

  • Dark Sea Update — October 6, 2023

  • Small Update / Dark Sea Addition — November 10, 2023

Continuing off with an amazing update; albeit it did take 4 months. The next small update was only a month behind, which genuinely gave high hopes to many people in the community.

2024 Major Content Updates

  • Nimbus Sea Update — March 29, 2024

  • Mistral Update — May 31, 2024

  • Empire Update — September 27, 2024

2024 was a bit more quiet overall. It took 4 months to release Nimbus Sea and then 2 months for a smaller addition. Then it took about 4 months for the Empire Update. No genuine hate or major concerns so far.

Full Release & Post-Launch

  • Full Release — December 26, 2025

  • Dragon Update — May 1, 2026

  • Optimization Update (Failed) — May 15, 2026

This era of updates was probably the worst. It was more than a year (14 months without an update) between the Empire Update and Full Release. Then came the Dragon Update, which was practically just a new sea monster addition alongside weapon reskins (Arcanium weapons), despite taking 5 months.

Ript Controversy (Update Speed)

Although he might’ve used AI and hastily tried to add more onto the game, he still shouldn’t have been completely let off.

In my personal opinion, Ript had the most enthusiasm we have seen so far toward the development of the game from one of the developers. Vertex has shown a similar amount of enthusiasm in the past, but it’s different since he’s the creator of the game itself.

Due to Roblox updates and just the age of the code that Arcane Odyssey currently has, an optimization update has been long overdue. When an optimization update was announced by a new developer, my first thought was:

“There’s no way this gets finished in only 4–5 months, regardless of how small the changes are.”

Yet within roughly 20 minutes of the announcement, proof was already shown that active changes and improvements were being worked on. Then only about a week later, the update was already planned for release.

That level of speed is almost unheard of in Arcane Odyssey’s development history. For comparison, the shortest successful gap between major updates before this was the Dark Sea Update and the Dark Sea Expansion addition, which were still about one month apart.

Whether the execution was flawed or not, I think the situation explains why a large portion of the community initially supported Ript so heavily: it was one of the first times in a while that players felt genuine urgency, transparency, and visible progress toward fixing long-standing technical issues.

Ript Controversy (AI Usage)

In my personal opinion, there honestly isn’t much to be said since Vetex cleared most of it up. He mainly used AI at times to get a better understanding of the style that Vetex and the other developers used.

A simple way I look at it is through the manner of when and how long updates take. I’d rather something like this take 2 weeks and be assisted with AI than take 2–3 months while the community gets strung along waiting for progress.

It’s also a little ironic that AstralWorks made comments about something like this, yet one of the biggest contributions they supposedly made to the game was reskinned items from the Roblox catalog. That can practically be compared to not even a fraction of the utility Ript provided toward helping the game.

Consensus

I made this post on the forums because I posted the timeline with similar thoughts earlier and instantly got muted for it. Nothing about AstralWorks was even mentioned either, but apparently certain things get cherry-picked when needed.

I excluded any seasonal updates (Easter, Yuletide, Halloween, etc.) due to the fact that they are not permanent content updates and will most likely be reused in the future.

I genuinely appreciate everything Vetex has done for the game. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have played Arcane Adventures in elementary school, World of Magic during middle school, and finally Arcane Odyssey throughout high school and now into college.

What I don’t appreciate, however, is the lack of transparency. What Vetex posted in the news channel was the first time in a long time where it actually felt like nothing was being held back, and I truly appreciated that. It’s something that honestly needs to happen more often.

People are far more willing to understand situations when multiple detailed statements are made instead of a single vague sentence with almost no context behind it. Just look at what happened with Rune Slayer if there’s any doubt about that. (Used to be the most popular RPG on roblox and now nobody plays it.)

Sorry for the long post guys. It’s just that I feel like this has been an ongoing issue with the game and a shred of hope was given to all of us and this happens.

No hate to Vetex or the Dev Team obviously.

Mod’s on the other hand are low-key acting like dictators right now, I can’t even lie :joy:

You might be remembering incorrectly, the nimbus and mistral updates were extremely hated, with nimbus particularly being considered the worst update in AO history. A shit ton of people had their sunkens wiped with no compensation, and the early nimbus sea was extremely underwhelming

I think mistral might’ve been more hated, since right after nimbus dropped, vetex said the updates would switch to a monthly schedule to keep the game fresh. It was originally meant to be the alignment update but 1 month in when the update seemed to release in a reasonable timeframe, it was fully scrapped, and we instead got a single new island with a forgettable chapter and far too little spirit content to qualify for a spirit release.

mistral was just disappointing, the nimbus update weapon wipe was an absolute disaster

Mistral sucked; all we got was a level cap increase and a destroyed town. Plus an incomplete class with one relic and one spirit move. The only good thing that came out of it was skill notes, it didn’t help that the town/kingdom alignment feature was meant to be included as its major feature, but got postponed to be added in the future, which led to this update having less content than originally planned.

More like it was left in the shed until vetex dragged it out and killed it with a shotgun

Tbh as crazy as an idea as it may seem; have mistral be rebuilt as the story goes on for the player. They’ve done it for certain area’s where player’s see other things; so it can be possible for mistral.