Major Announcements
Hello everyone and welcome to todays Developer blog!
We have been hard at work on many different things while we stayed fairly quiet, and today we want to share some big news with you all!
Developer Stream
For those who may have missed it, we held a large developer stream yesterday to announce many topics that we will discuss in today's blog. We have added the YouTube video below for those who could not make it can view the entire stream including the Q&A.
We plan to continue holding regular streams to interact further with our amazing community.
Name Change
We have changed the name of our game to Fault: Elder Orb!
This change was made for multiple reasons which include marketing, ideas for the future, and more!
Free to Play & Epic Games Launch
We are very excited to announce that we will be launching on the Epic Games Store this Monday the 18th and going fully free to play on both Epic Games and Steam!
This has been a long time coming, and we can not wait to open the doors to new players everywhere as we launch our free-to-play model and start our marketing efforts to tell everyone about Fault: Elder Orb!
Free Skin
Those who download and play the Epic games version of Fault will be granted the Epic Astro Gideon skin for free!
1UP Movie
As we had recently confirmed, Fault: Elder Orb will be featured in a movie from Buzzfeed and Lionsgate! We are very exited for the movies release this July 15th on Amazon, we had a blast working with them to create this film and can not wait for the future and everything this collaboration brings to both our game and the industry in general.
Pocketful Of Quarters
We have begun working with an outside group named Pocketful of Quarters who run events and tournaments for tons of different games. As a PvP game, we are very excited to work with them in the future, as they will be running events with some familiar faces in the Fault community.
POQ has a interoperable game token that players can earn in events and spend in many different games. This currency, named Quarters, can also be used on their website for cool prizes and other in-game goodies from popular titles. Our players will have the ability to link their accounts with P.O.Q in order to obtain and spend Quarters directly in Fault and everywhere they are accepted. Quarters can not be sold and are simply a way for gamers to have more freedom with their purchases.
We understand the concerns this may raise to some, so we have added information below for our players in order to be fully informed before making the decision to link their accounts.
How Quarters Work
POQ Partners
You can learn more about P.O.Q in an article found here: Link
Patch 0.17.0
As we stated on the dev stream, patch 0.17.0 contains a big overhaul to our in game economy, which includes a new store page and much more. We plan to share the patch notes live with everyone during our upcoming anniversary stream.
Anniversary Stream
We will be holding a dev stream to celebrate our two year anniversary this Sunday July 17th at 3 PM EST!
During the stream, will be taking a look back on the history of Fault while comparing our EA launch to new content from the company, and the community.
What Are We Working On?
The team has been hard at work on many items outside of what is coming with patch 0.17.0 and the 1UP Movie. We have prepared a brief summary below to get everyone caught up on a few of these.
Maps
New map
Our new map is in it's greybox stage and development of it continues along with internal testing. The new map will take time, but it is happening, our current focus is our current map and optimization.
ARAM
We have seen many players jumping into our custom game modes and all running down the midline to have epic 5v5 battles right from the start of the match. We have seen this and the community's craving for an ARAM game mode and we are happy to inform everyone that this map is already in development.
Our original ARAM map is in it's greybox stage as well, and we anticipated it to be launched before our full new map we spoke of earlier.
Player Learning
Gym Mode
We have been working on a new feature that will allow players to load into a new location that will be full of areas for practicing and testing heroes and builds against all of the monsters, buffs, heroes, and structures that exist within the battlefield of Fault. We do not have a date for this features launch, but we will keep everyone informed in futrue developer streams and blogs.
Tutorials
We received a lot of feedback on our previous tutorial and we have heard you. We are currently creating a list of role-specific tutorials and one going over the very basics of MOBA games as a whole. We have plans to upgrade our learn tab with multiple features to help new players gain an edge before even stepping onto the battlefield.
Hardware Ban Tech
As a competitive game, we understand that there is toxicity in matches, we have worked hard to ensure we ban the ones who deserve to be removed from the game and we will continue to do all that we can to make our game as comfortable as possible for all players.
Outside of player reporting and chat muting that we have in-game, we are also working towards hardware bans in order to fully remove accounts of players who warrant permanent bans.
New Hero & Mastery Races
We will still be releasing new heroes and we have one planned to launch after we have gone free to play.
Mastery races will also be returning with our next hero, and we intend to keep them running for all future hero releases. We received a lot of feedback about our previous race and plan to make changes to the system before the next one begins.
Console
We receive constant messages from the console gaming community, and we can not wait to open the doors to all of you. We can confirm that we will still be releasing on console in the future and we are working hard to get Fault closer to its full release state while we also work to make that a reality.
Thank you
Strange Matter Studios takes pride in being a company that has stood on it's own two feet all this time and holds it's creative freedom, which we value greatly. All of this could not have been possible with out every one of you, we are truly grateful to everyone who has supported us.
We have a lot we would like to say to you all, and we plan to speak more about our community during the anniversary stream this Sunday the 17th at 3 PM EST.
— Strange Matter Team