Among Us has been patched and a sequel in the works
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(UPDATE - 10/23/2020): In a blog post from developers Innersloth, Among Us 2 is now cancelled. Instead, the developers have decided to work on the first game and update it with improvements and new features to cater to their growing player base.
The player base for Among Us has grown rapidly due to the sudden rise in popularity of the game over the past month. With the mobile version being free to play, many of the English servers have been hammered by waves of peenoise (toxic Filipino gamers) who troll and refuse to properly communicate in-game. Not to mention all of the connection issues that came with the massive new player base. The developers over at Innersloth have taken notice and have been working on improving the overall experience.
The developers have noted over on their itch.io page that the average amount of players were about 30 to 50 per hour. But recently it's been reaching about 70,000 to 110,000 per hour. The number of servers have been increased throughout the month to address this and as of the writing of this post, connecting to games is almost instantaneous. For the rampart peenoise issue, a separate chat server has been made for the Filipino language. This won't guarantee that the English servers will be peenoise free of course. But at the very least, I've been running into them less and less since its implementation.
Innersloth has also announced that Among Us 2 is now in the works. They've mentioned that even if the sequel is out, that they'll continue to run servers for the first game will continue to run as long as people are still playing. And that if there aren't enough people playing to justify keeping the servers up for Among Us 1, the developers will open-source the code so that players and run their own servers instead. The reasoning as to why they've started working a sequel just as the original game blew up in popularity is because they weren't expecting the game to reach such heights.
"Among Us 1 has been out over two years. It started as a tiny local-multiplayer-only game and has grown and grown and grown. Online multiplayer took 2 months and a total rework to make happen, then 6 months per extra map, and horrible server growing pains along the way. It really was not created to be this big. Because of this, it's extremely hard to add more things without breaking existing things. Frankly, it's terrifying to add in more things because the game is so fragile. Fixing this would require recreating core sections of Among Us, then making sure everything else still works on top. It's actually even harder than just making a new game."
The devs have already teased some of the new features for Among Us 2. All of the maps from Among Us will be carried over but will be able to host 12 to 15 players total to make 3 impostor games more balanced. Matchmaking will work differently to better support custom modes and player skill levels. An account and friend system will be available for the sequel right out of the gate. Moderation tools will be made to provide a better overall experience for players. Possibly the biggest shift in dynamic would be the inclusion of unique roles outside of just crewmates vs. impostor/s. At the moment, development isn't far enough to confirm any roles, but the primary addition for the sequel is to add more complexity.
A few extra details were also mentioned which will please Steam owners of Among Us 1:
Launch with a discount coupon for Among Us 1 owners on Steam.
Keep Among Us 2 Mobile free but with (removable) ads.
Have free big content updates like maps and game modes. We're not making that mistake again.
Have in-game currency so we can break up big cosmetic bundles and let people buy/earn just the things they want.
Among Us 2 is in the very early stages of development so don't expect to see it for a while. At the very least, we might see a Steam Early Access build land sometime in 2021. In the meantime, the first game should be enough to hold us over for at least a few weekends. Among Us is a fantastic game that I can easily recommend, especially when played with friends.
The upcoming action adventure Stellar Blade comes out on April 26 and before launch it was updated with a new game plus patch, allowing players to carry over most of their progress and unlocks to a new playthrough, playing the game from the very beginning.