Greetings!
In today’s update we’ll be sharing our plans for this year’s development on Cursebreaker.
The amount of support, feedback and bug reports since our EA release has been truly phenomenal, thank you sincerely everyone who’s been a part of this! It’s been more than we could’ve expected and we’re really grateful. Rest assured, the bug / feedback reports you’ve been sending have been reaching us and we’ve been combing through hundreds of messages in the past week.
Our focus since release has been mostly to document player feedback, and within the hot patches we pushed during this time, we alleviated the most egregious bugs that were preventing main quest progression and addressed QoL issues, such as a WASD movement option and inventory bloat before bank is even accessible.
We will continue shaping the game according to player feedback throughout the rest of the development as well. Underneath we’ve outlined seasonally what we’ll be focusing on in our upcoming development.
Addressing bugs and QoL features is something we’re aiming to do throughout the year. This is just a list of the major features or other things we have already planned, or have started working on. But it does not mean that our development will be strictly confined to what's listed here.
Spring of Side Quest Adventures
Improvements to Thornhill exploration
- Currently side content drops off sharply around the time the player reaches Thornhill city
- Will therefore be developing several new quests focusing especially around Thornhill areas
- Thornhill covers a large area without any dangers present, so will be adding street thug encounters etc. to create more dangerous parts of the city
- Will work on adding sidequesting content to the other bare areas after Thornhill, mainly the surrounding forests, fenwater village (which currently has nothing) and swamp sidequests
Haywind marauders / Bandit Fortress quest chain development
- The marauder plight Haywind is experiencing - mentioned in misc dialogue by several npcs - is getting a larger quest chain related to it
- Sequel to the small existing quest involving the mayor's daughter
- Leads to the heart of the bandit fortress northwest of Haywind, concluding in a repeatable dungeon
- New lootable equipment and... rare drops?
More traits and abilities to Haywind trainers
- Traits give mostly passive bonuses now
- We want to add some more active abilities, including to life-skills
- We're planning at least a few more traits in each skill tree in Haywind
- More traits will be coming later to Thornhill
Workbench furniture obtainable from Thornhill
- All crafting workbenches will be placeable in player houses
- Obtainable from Thornhill, but will most likely require completion of a special quest to unlock
Pathfinder improvements
- We've started reworking our pathfinding system
- Currently the biggest cause of lag spikes
- Will greatly reduce getting stuck issues
- Possibility of adding new features like line of sight
Balancing
- Setting up analytics so we get more reliable data to work with
- Balancing combat, economy (item value, shop prices), xp gains
- Balancing inventory size (solutions include but not limited to: increase stack sizes of certain items, offer more and different storage items, beast of burden or bankrunner followers, allow turning unstackable items to stackable on the go if you have the right tools with you [for example use Mortar and pestle to turn unstackable bones to stackable ground bones])
Summer and The Ghost of Greywall
The Ghost of Greywall late-game quest chain and dungeon
- The old Greywall prison southeast of Haywind is afflicted by a curse, preventing its dead souls from passing onto the afterlife and driving them insane
- Includes a chain of multiple quests, each step unlocking access deeper into the dungeon and its boss, The Ghost of Greywall
- Dungeon becomes repeatable after completion
- New lootable equipment and... rare drops?
Thornhill Academy
- Thornhill trainers will be offering late-game perks and abilities
- Possibly trainer / skill related quests
Thornhill Catacombs
- Filling in the extended areas into a dungeon to crawl through
- A quest leading to the dungeon's depths
Life-skill minigames
- Various content offering alternative ways to level up skills
- Xp rates will depend on gameplay intensity: designed to offer either low but consistent xp rates for those who just want to sit back and relax, but also top tier xp if you're focused and keep up with intense mechanics
Steam cloud saves
- Back up your saves in Steam cloud, access them on multiple devices
Optimization
Focusing on graphics optimization, possibly requires reworking graphics of some elements in game, such as buildings, particle effects and vegetation
Fall Achievements
Achievements
- Achievements on Steam, also an in-game window to check achievement requirements and progress.
- Achievements might also unlock new content and add new cosmetic options such as cosmetic gear or house furniture.
- Halloween Event
- Focusing on more endgame challenges (open outdoor boss encounters?)
- New items to be looted and crafted
Necromancy quests
- Access to the depths of Spruce Shade crypts
- Possibly adding in quests to learn abilities to summon undead minions
Winter and the Ogre Mountains
- Christmas Event
- Pausing small updates to prepare for the official release patch, we'll be sharing sneak peeks in social media
Amarien's Mountain Pass
- New mountain areas
- New enemies
- New quests, probably a multiple-quest chain leading through new areas, surrounded by smaller side quests
- New harvestable items
- New items and crafting tiers
- Increased level cap
- Full release and big update early 2024!
Conclusion
We'll continue to post further updates on our progress in these dev blogs and let you know if our plans happen to change. You can also join our discord community if you haven't already done so, the link can be found below; we're most active in responding to questions there.
Also feel free to follow us on twitter, where we've posted progress updates and behind the scenes content regularly.
Massive thanks once more to everyone playing, giving feedback and supporting the game! Seeing so many players finally really getting to play the game has been incredible to our team.
But for now, stay tuned and happy gaming!
Regards,
Pura
