PRE-PATCH NOTES:
Hey everyone,
A massive new patch for ARCANIUM is coming on Tuesday October 26th!
It has been a while since any update was made to Arcanium, and we would like to sincerely apologize for the delays. And no, we didn't take any time off if that's what you are wondering. Quite the opposite actually :)
Here's an overview of what's coming (we will post a detailed patch notes with the release next week):
OVERVIEW:
The game is now “Content complete” and everything that will be released in 1.0 is now included.
PERFORMANCE:
One of our top priorities was to address the performance issues on PC. We took this very seriously and worked hard to make the game run as smoothly as possible on most machines. You should now be seeing drastic performance improvements.
CORE PROGRESSION LOOP:
We’ve made a lot of changes to the meta progression loop to make the game more engaging in the long-term and less “grindy”. The “Stones” system was removed entirely and the Heroes & Cosmetic items are now unlockable via achievements only. Any fresh account will now start with 3 “Starting” heroes: Leon, Milady and Aurora.
TUTORIAL (WIP):
We added a brand new interactive Tutorial for new players, that will have you travel through our starting island and learn the ropes of the game in a fun and engaging way. It is not completely polished but we figured you would want to see it anyway, and we would love to hear your feedback! The Tutorial can be skipped and replayed at any time you want.
TRANSLATIONS (WIP):
We are in the process of adding over 15 new languages to Arcanium including Korean, simplified Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Spanish and much more! Chances are you language of choice is already implemented but if it is not the case, it will most likely be at full launch. These new languages are a WIP and still being worked on, but we wanted you to have a look and give us your feedback anyway.
ACHIEVEMENTS:
We added a whole new structure to the game called Achievements. Achievements are responsible for unlocking future Heroes. For example, Shinzo will now join your roster of Heroes whenever you defeat Aranax, the Brood Queen (Anador’s Boss) for the first time. But Achievements will also be used to unlock the newly added Cosmetic items. For example, the Anador Adventurer frame will be unlocked after unlocking 100% of the Anador Province.
All Achievements can be inspected via a new section of the game available from the main menu.
COSMETIC ITEMS:
Cosmetic items are also new and unlocked via Achievements. They consist of different styles of portrait frames that you can apply to your Heroes in battle to show off your skills. Some Cosmetics are unique to a specific Hero i.e. Master Frames become available whenever a Hero hits Level 20, while other cosmetics can be assigned to any of your Heroes before a Run.
HEROES:
10 Playable Heroes are now available to play. Leon, Milady, Aurora, Shinzo, Tara, Ragnarok, Mozebus, Lazaar, Misty and Angorn.
NEW PROVINCE:
We added a third Province: The Scorched Lands. The area comes with a set of 9 new enemies, Events and Boss - Noctus, the Fallen Prince. The Scorched Lands is a treacherous area where few adventurers have set foot into. Demons, Warlocks, Wraiths and Ghouls await your arrival!
AKHAN, THE CALAMITY:
If all the above wasn’t enough already, we added the Final encounter to each of your Runs. That’s right, defeating one of the Province Bosses is no longer the end of the journey. Once you have done so, Akhan himself will summon you to the Arcanium island for the last showdown. Only once Akhan is defeated, you’ll have successfully defeated the Run.
Once you arrive at the final area you will be able to heal, shop and manage your inventory one last time before the last Battle.
Akhan can take on one of five “forms”, at random. Each one of his forms has its own set of cards, passive abilities, and ultimate abilities, and represent a different challenge that you’ll have to adapt to. Akhan, being the gigantic monster that he is, takes a lot of space. This is why we are representing him as 3 of the enemies in Battle. His body will take over the center lane, and his two arms and hands will take the left and right portraits. Lastly, each of Akhan’s forms is represented by a different skin color variation.
-Akhan, the Deceiver (Arcana) is geared towards controlling the Battle by disrupting your hands and card draw.
-Akhan, the Ascended (Light) is geared towards sustaining himself with strong heals and debuffing your Heroes with Blinds.
-Akhan, the Evolved (Nature) is geared towards using Poisons and Cleave attacks.
-Akhan, the Destroyer (Elemental) is geared towards making your Heroes Vulnerable and dishing huge amounts of single-target damage.
-Akhan, the Devourer (Void) is geared towards using Hex and weakening your Heroes.
GAME DIFFICULTIES:
We have simplified the read and how the Game difficulties work. We went back to a more classic “Diablo” style with 7 difficulty settings to unlock. Normal mode is the only mode unlocked by default. By defeating Normal you will unlock Hard, then Expert, Challenger, Heroic, Mythic, Nightmare and finally Apex. Each mode will pile on more and more modifiers to your runs. The higher the difficulty, the more XP you will gain with each run.
ARTIFACTS:
The game has 105 reworked Artifacts. Each Province received its own set of Artifacts and we removed the concept of Neutral Artifacts, meaning that no Artifact is shared between multiple Provinces. Part of being a good Arcanium player is knowing what Province to visit based on your team composition and overall strategy, since only a specific set of Artifacts will drop in each Province.
HEIRLOOM ARTIFACTS:
Heirlooms are the most powerful Artifact in the game (Red rarity gem). They received some of the biggest changes too. You will no longer start Runs with Heirlooms assigned to your Heroes. Instead, Heirlooms will now drop from Super Elite encounters, and be equipped on a dedicated Artifact slot for each Hero. Each Hero has now 3 Heirlooms that they can find. Each Heirloom is tailored and enhances a specific playstyle for the Hero it belongs to, and only that Hero can equip it.
ULTIMATE ABILITIES:
Heroes now have 3 Ultimate abilities they can swap out and equip before each Run. One Ultimate is unlocked by default while the other two will need to be unlocked via Leveling the Hero. Ultimates drastically change how the hero is played.
HERO ABILITIES:
Each hero now has access to 24 personal Ability cards consisting of:
-3 Starter abilities (Grey Rarity)
-3 Ultimate abilities
-6 Common abilities
-5 Rare abilities
-4 Epic abilities
-3 Legendary abilities
Some of these cards are unlocked by default at Hero Level 1 while the rest will be unlocked by leveling the Hero with the XP gained during the runs.
HERO PASSIVES:
Each Hero received a Passive ability that is unlocked by default and can not be changed. It represents the Hero’s playstyle and DNA, and affects how that Hero is played.
NEUTRAL ABILITIES:
Neutral Abilities are back, and you will have access to 136 of them. Each Hero will be able to equip any Neutral ability as long as they belong to one of their two colors. For example, Leon is Light and Arcana (Yellow and Blue) so he’ll be able to make use of any Blue and Yellow Neutral ability found during the Run. Neutral abilities can be swapped between Heroes as long as their colors match. This allowed us to address some of the biggest core issues: the cards felt compartmented and the replayability suffered from it in return. The game lacked synergies, but this change alone boosted the replay factor, fun, and synergy significantly.
A portion of the Neutral abilities are unlocked by default, and the rest will be unlocked simply by leveling up your account (Mastery level) over time.
Now, for the significant changes of all:
STARTING BLESSINGS:
Each Run will now start with a Province Blessing to choose from:
-Starting a Run in Anador will grant your team the Anador Blessing, increasing your party’s maximum HP for the rest of the Run.
-Starting a Run in Uzir will grant your team the Uzir Blessing, increasing your party’s starting Gold.
-Starting a Run in the Scorched Lands will grant your team the Scorched Lands Blessing, giving you access to a free Common Ability card.
WORLD QUESTS:
Each Run will also start by proposing three World Quests at Random. You may mulligan each quest once, after which you will have to accept your fate. World Quests are added to a brand new Quest Log accessible from the in-game menu at any time.
World Quests are side-objectives that will challenge you and send you traveling to the four corners of the continent of Arzu. The Quests vary in difficulty and you will decide which ones to work towards. Each World Quest, once finished, will grant some incredible loot!
EXPLORATION:
Some of the biggest changes and improvements went into the Exploration. You will have to experience the changes for yourselves but here’s a top-level list of changes:
-We completely revisited the system and how players interact with the map. Before the patch, you could see your “location” on the map and would be restricted by distance which always felt very underwhelming at times. You will now be able to push the exploration to extend your reach, and click on any available tile to teleport to it. This new system is more casual, fun and engaging and allows you to cover a lot more ground on each Run.
-The Province Bosses are not visible from the start, but now appear once you enter the “Cataclysm” phase. You enter “Cataclysm” by simply exploring and reaching a full Threat bar of 30 Threat points.
-Each time you visit a new tile in Cataclysm, 5 random tiles will turn into a Boss Battle. Soon enough, the map will be covered of them and you will have no choice but to engage the Province’s Boss.
Battle nodes block all surrounding tiles. Whenever you uncover a battle node, a big red “X” will appear over all its surrounding tiles, rendering them unclickable. You will have to defeat the battle tile in order to free the adjacent tiles.
-Shard battles are now optional, but are brutal Battles that will offer a guaranteed Heirloom Artifact as a Reward.
COMBAT:
-Combat has been simplified a lot while retaining most of the DNA that makes Arcanium unique.
Heroes no longer can swap lanes by default. You now need Ability cards with the Dash and Teleport keywords to do so. A lot of new players never knew that you could swap Heroes as a part of the core gameplay, and we wanted to reduce the amount of hidden interactions players had with the game at any given time.
-To balance out the Swap nerf, we made all Abilities able to reach any adjacent lane by default. You won’t have to reposition your Heroes in order to be efficient any longer. That said, we also introduced new range keywords like Melee and Ranged written on a few cards. Melee cards can only be cast in their own lane, while Ranged cards can only be cast in adjacent lanes.
All unused cards are discarded at the end of each turn, and each Hero redraws 2 cards per turn by default. We wanted each turn to feel like a puzzle, and didn’t want previous turns to affect the outcome of a battle. We also wanted to eliminate any “irrelevant cards” overflow that some players used to experience.
-AP is now team-wide again. We decided to simplify the mechanic and go back to a more traditional style of resource. Your runs will start with 5AP shared by the whole team. Abilities from any of your Heroes will be paid for with the team’s AP, but will contribute to generating Fury only for that specific hero, like it used to.
CHANGE TO CARD RARITIES AND POWER LEVELS:
We kept the rarities as they were in the previous patch (Common, Rare, Epic, Legendary) but completely revisited what they mean, and created a new system that sets Arcanium apart from other games in the genre:
-We kept the Essence but simplified how it affects you. Whenever you defeat a Battle, your Party will automatically receive Essence (1 on normal Battles, 2 on Elites and 3 on Super Elites). Whenever you reach 5 Essence, your Party will simply receive an extra AP that will be added to your total team AP. 5, then 6, 7,8,9 to a maximum of 10AP towards the end of the Run.
-All card rarities are now based on the same power level i.e. a Common 1AP card deals 6 damage to an enemy, and a Legendary also deals 6 damage to an enemy. The fundamental difference is that the rarer a card is, the more expensive it gets. As a matter of fact, Commons usually have a cost of 1AP on average, while Rares cards cost 2AP, Epics cost 3AP and Legendaries cost 4AP.
-This change, coupled with the growing AP pool available to your heroes over the course of the Run, is what creates the crescendo and power spike. Battles will slowly become longer, more explosive and intricate as time goes by.
-More importantly, this change makes 100% of the cards you will find relevant until the end game (I often find myself using Commons in my final decks) and further extends the -already big- pool of available cards to equip, and further increases the synergy and build paths on all Heroes.
-Loading a deck with too many 1AP cards will most likely end up with your Hero “gassing out” since you are limited to 2 cards per hand on each turn and might have left-over AP at the end of your turn. But cheap cards are more flexible and versatile than the 3 or 4Ap counterparts.
-Loading a deck with too many 3-4AP cards will give you all the firepower you need but will often result in an un-flexible turn that can fall apart depending on RNG, your positioning etc...
That’s it for now! Thank you so much for reading our update, we hope that it all makes sense to you. Please do not hesitate to leave a comment on the Steam board and we will respond as fast as we can!
Until then, see you next week and happy gaming!
-The Arcanium team-