Hello Heroes!
We mentioned it before in 2021, and last month we finally announced the progression wipe for The Last Spell. Now, it is time to give you (almost) all the details! We hope this will help clarify some questions you may have.
Why are we doing a progression wipe?
For starters, the game has evolved a lot since the beginning of the Early Access and our vision has shifted from having only one map for the entire game to having 4 completely different maps.
The Last spell is a rogue-lite game and as pretty much every rogue-lite game, you acquire permanent upgrades that help you to progress in your runs. We call “meta progression” all those upgrades and the way they are dispatched during the campaign. To have a great rogue-lite game this meta progression needs to be carefully crafted and we have to consider the game in its whole.
With the early access, we are moving step by step. At each step, we added new meta upgrades and/or modified existing ones. The result of this is something currently clunky and inconsistent because as I mentioned earlier we needed to consider the whole game.
Since we are close to the end of the Early Access and we now have a clear view of the entire game, it’s time to fix our meta progression. To do so, we need to restart from scratch and we can’t technically keep your old save file because we are changing everything.
Another problem we want to address is the player's potency. With the current meta progression you earn a lot of permanent upgrades that empower your heroes. This creates some gates (upgrades that you need to have to progress) and it also completely annihilates the point to replay older maps since you have too many upgrades for the challenge.
Also, we are at a point where it’s difficult for us to create more challenging (and interesting) stuff because with the current system we are stacking up too many upgrades. Finally, this wipe is a great timing to include all the feedback you gave us about our meta progression and the Oraculum since the beginning. Those feedback helped us a lot so thank you!
So these are the reasons why we decided to implement a new system to solve this issue (more details in another section).
What’s going to be deleted?
Basically: everything. You will start again from scratch, with only three heroes, 20 mana each, one wooden sword, no pants and your wit. Good luck! Also you will all start in Swampfurt, the tutorial map we created and added a few months back.
You will all still be able to play on an older branch of The Last Spell to keep your save. Unfortunately by playing on this older branch, you will not be able to get the updates and the new content of the game.
What can we expect from the Meta Rework?
It’s time to reveal something that's been in our mind for several months, a totally new system called “Omens”.
Omens are bonuses for your run that you can equip before starting a run.
This system is our solution to our problem of having too many meta upgrades active at the same time, because each city will have a maximum Omens that you can equip. To sum up, you will be able to equip more Omens when playing in Glenwald than in Gildenberg.
With this system you will have to make strategic choices to compose the best combination of Omens that fits your gameplay style: we are excited to see what you will come up with!
New Omens will be unlockable in the Oraculum (both sides) all along the campaign. So you can have an idea of what's to come, here is a sneak peek of 3 Omens (names and effects are subject to changes):
- Omen of Early Wealth: The Haven starts with 40 gold and 80 materials.
- Omen of Talents: Heroes start with 1 Perk Point.
- Omen of the Siege: Ranged defense buildings and traps gain +25% damage.
And as you can see, we’ve converted some bonuses from our old meta into Omens. You probably have a lot of questions about this too, but you will have to wait a little more to find out all the details about the Omens!
But… When?
In a few weeks! You know we love to have short gaps between our updates, and especially between our announcements. Since this Major Update will be a very important one, in addition to a devstream the following day, we will also carry out an AMA on Reddit. All of the information about these two events will be shared in the blogpost of the Meta Rework update.
Thank you for reading! Make sure to post your questions if you have some, we will gladly answer them.