It’s time.
Thank you so much for all the positive support on the announcement post! I’m glad you’re all excited to dive into some Tempest gameplay. It’s been a blast to put together, and everyone has really helped out to get things done in such a quick time period. The Tempest will be released on Oct 6th as planned.
However, as of today I can officially say, she is playable right now on the Beta Branch!
I don’t want to go into too much detail on her mechanics and play style - I’d love to ensure that all comes across okay in game! But if you like BIG numbers, then I think you’ll enjoy the Tempest.
You’ll also notice that the Tempest actually sits in between the Hidden and the Enlightened in the class pool. This isn’t a mistake! The Tempest is supposed to bridge the gap between these two. It’s no surprise that, after playing The Hidden, the jump to ol’ Monk man was a bit ... OH MY KEYWORD OVERLOAD. The Tempest was purposely designed to smooth that jump. She only has 3 unique keywords, and makes use of things players should already be familiar with (Overcharge, Rage ... and a lot of both).
The Beta Branch
A few things to note:
- Your profile will have no problem switching back and forward between both version (beta and live)
- MOST save games will be fine to continue on both branches. The exception to this is if you’re midway through a Tempest run, and then switch back to the live Branch, you might need to use the Delete Save option from the debug menu.
- Any progress you make (Mastery) will carry over to the live version.
To access the Beta Branch, all you need to do is right click on Vault of the Void in Steam -> Properties. There will then be a tab right at the end called “Betas”, where you’ll have the option to opt into a branch, aptly named, “Beta”. By doing so, Steam should go ahead and download the latest version, which is 1.3.87.
Global Changes
I’ll go into this in more detail in the launch post, but there's a few global changes to the way Vault works which are present on all classes on the Beta Branch. I’ll expand on these change more later, but things to keep an eye on:
- Elites: no longer have a card reward! The combination of an Elite Artifact, extra Souls and Essence an Uncommon/Rare card was a bit too much for these. It lead to not much choice when it came to pathing. Instead, a Rare card has been scattered among the standard mobs, as well as 3 Uncommons each floor.
- Treasure Chests: Treasure rooms have been changed a little, and now there are Common Artifact Treasure rooms available as well. These have the same icon, just slightly different colours!
- The Bleed starter kit has changed again as well. It now contains Lick the Knife
A Few Thank Yous!
A huge shoutout to my Internal Testing team who have logged over 100 runs already in a short period of time, finding and alerting me to as many bugs as they could find (there was a lot!). This also really helped with balance, to find a nice spot. The further runs over the next few days on the Beta Branch is going to help immensely with this also - I’ll be monitoring all the data as we go!
And a few extra special thank you’s - firstly to Mengo, my fellow artist, who REALLY pulled out all the stops to get all the card artwork done so quickly - they all look beautiful! Sanjeev also - my animator friend who crushed it with the animated version of the Tempest, and also who rushed to help out with the Chest animation and various other things as well. And of course Dabor (who many of you know from Discord and the forums) who carried a lot of the early design weight when it comes to the Tempest (including the first card batch!), dating all the way back from her initial inception nearly 12 months ago. For putting up with constant Discord calls the last few weeks, and managing the testing team and bug reporting as well - it’s been a major help, we wouldn't be here without you!
I couldn’t do it without you all - and it would be pointless without all the amazing players. I hope you all really enjoy her gameplay - as much (or more) than I have enjoyed getting it all put together!
All for now!
- Josh
