March 31st is starting to redeem itself as maybe not a terrible day for gamers after all: it may be the day Mario finally dies forever, but it's also the date that Among Us' new Airship map will finally be added to the game.

As announced by the official Among Us Twitter account, and detailed further in the Innersloth Dev Blog, the Airship map will add new tasks, ladders, features, and moderation, plus free hats for "being so patient with us".

Airship Among Us
Image: Hannako Lambert/Innersloth

The Dev Blog also answers a few questions that the community might have, such as "why did this take so long?" and "why didn't you just hire more people?".

"Among Us’ popularity was something no one expected, and quite late into 2020 too... We had already considered the game done and had moved onto something else. [...] Because our game is cross-platform, it means EVERYTHING needs to work on as many devices as possible."

The maintenance, testing, and general fire-putting-out that comes with a hugely popular online game takes a lot of time, and although Innersloth has made a couple of hires recently - Community Director Victoria Tran and Programmer Adriel Wallick - they don't want to hire "a ton of people" because they value their "close studio dynamics", and besides, as they put it, "the bigger the group, the more problems you run into." Besides that, they want to offer their employees all the benefits they need, and that's their priority.

However, they did bring in outside help, especially with the servers and Switch port, as well as merch, legal, accounting, and HR. Spoilers: game devs aren't always good at doing everything themselves!

Airship Among Us
Image: Innersloth

Even more stressful is the Among Us team having to deal with legal battles over fake Among Us merch, and illegal use of their IP, which slows down what such a small team is capable of.

But onto the new map itself: Innersloth are calling it their "biggest" map, and with the addition of new stuff and new moderation tools, it's going to be a much nicer process for people playing the game, who will be able to report people. You'll also be able to choose which room you start in when a game begins, for ULTIMATE TACTICAL POWER.

https://twitter.com/thisishannako/status/1365358267027709954

However, there's one mystery left: Why did the Among Us account tag artist Hannako Lambert in the tweet? It seems like Lambert, who has done Among Us fan art in the past (which the Among Us account retweeted), was commissioned to draw the art for the announcement, saying "drawing memes will always spark joy." How cool!

The Airship will be out on all platforms on the 31st March.

Are you hyped for the Airship? Let us know in the comments below.

[source twitter.com]