Hey everyone!
Time for our weekly update! First of all, let us start by saying that there is no patch coming this week for a few reasons. Many people from our crew took some time off (and we feel that they really deserve it!). Secondly, we have a lot of things that are in the middle of work, and they would not feel complete.
BUT! This is a perfect opportunity to take that time and talk about the roadmap of what's coming soon!
As you may know, we are reading almost everything you leave us – all the feedback, good and bad. We deeply believe that this is the only way of making awesome games – work on them with the community. Past weeks since our premiere, we have internalized A LOT of this feedback, processed it, and planned the most important features that we want to add to make the experience better.
A lot has been added already, but even more is in front of us, and that brings us to…
PATCH 0.95 – a HUGE upcoming update
Patch 0.95* is our response to the majority of your feedback and will be designed to address the following major issues:
- Learning curve
- Structure of the game
- Content
- Visual enhancements and UX
Here is the full list of features that are already in the middle of implementation or will be in the near future ;)
1. Tutorial
Probably not as important to most of you, since you already manage to get through the game (and are quite good at it, considering how unforgiving the learning curve is!). But this is something that many people point out: the current learning curve starts way to high with the amount of different mechanics and little explanation.
This is why we are creating a special starting zone, that will not only walk you step by step through the core mechanics of the game, but also create a proper story setting for Conquest! A small visual spoiler for the game's storyline below! Can you guess what's happening here? ;)
2. Corruption
Currently, Corruption is implemented quite poorly and in a non-interesting way. New Corruption will be a story-driven experience that will take you through 10 levels of increasing difficulty.
But the difficulty will increase in a quality way, not lazy “+20% DMG to all enemies”. With every new stage of Corruption, you will face new enemies, new encounters, new bosses, and old ones might learn new moves. Wyrdness will also get more deadly!
You will also build your village in-between runs with better-balanced buildings.
3. Journal
We will bring you a journal that will summarize all your in-game achievements.
You will know exactly how many cards and passives you have unlocked for every rune from the ones available. You'll know how many enemies you've seen and how many story events you've participated in.
All of this will be kept in one place, and you will be able to easily see how much content you've seen and how much is left to be discovered!
4. Weekly events
We will also be introducing weekly events. Right now, we are not sure whether it will be every week or every 2 weeks.
There will be some special rules regarding that play, usually including a special boss for that event too. We will also create a leaderboard for those events and achievements for everyone who will finish them!
5. Re-design of UI
We need to take a step back and re-design most of the game's interface so that it's easier to manage, prettier, and more intuitive. Here are a few quick examples of that:
- Once you get loot after defeating an enemy, you will also have your equipment on the other part of the screen to equip things right away.
- When you are picking new cards, you will see your current deck on the other part of the screen.
- There will be filters for your decks and so forth
These might be small things, but the devil is in the details ;) We are deeply committed to making the game flow much better!
6. New map generation algorithms
Currently, we have a HUGE Tier 1 and then almost non-existent Tier 2 and 3. We will change it so that every Tier has more or less the same amount of enemies and encounters.
Overall, we think that one run's completion time should clock at around 1 – 1,5 hours of exciting, dense gameplay!
We're also introducing much better map generation rules to our algorithms. We're getting rid of enemies standing at the end of the path or treasure boxes "guarding" encounters (rewards should be rewards!). We're also reducing the number of milestones so that they're not just a checklist, but also a proper gameplay mechanic. There's a lot of different tweaks happening in this area!
7. Changing weapons and armors
This system will be re-designed in quite a big way, too. Here are the major new changes and additions:
One
We've had many discussions about armors and weapons - whether it's better to let players customize their characters any way they want, or to just offer them a couple of really cool visual presets. We decided to keep the best of both worlds. Because of that, we're going to detach gameplay-related effects from cosmetic items such as weapons and armors.
In the new version of the game, your weapon and armor will be set at the character creation screen you'll access through a special NPC. You will be able to unlock new cosmetic items for Wyrdstone (or get them as rewards), and after you've done that, they will stay with you throughout your runs. This means that we will offer you only starting archetypes with their respective gear sets, but if YOU want to change them - it's up to you! Do you want to have a Druid with blue hair and a heavy plate armor... well, who are we to disagree with your choices? :D
Two
So how will the gameplay values change? We will be implementing a new system of "orbs" or "gems" (development codename for now). During the game, you will be finding a lot of different gems that will contain small buffs and effects (things like "+5 DMG", "Start combat with extra 2 cards in hand", etc.), and you'll be able to place them in special slots.
Your weapon and armor (again: doesn't matter how they look like) will have limited slots for these gems, so you will have to carefully manage them, and create your perfect combination between gems, cards, and passives ;)
Three
We will also be detaching base statistics from the items (DMG / Armor / HP). They will still be present in, for example, some gems, but your "Base" value will be dictated by your character's level. Yes, you've read that right, with every level, your character will get a bonus Base DMG, Armor or HP.
This will make your power level growth more linear (instead of "I killed the boss, now I have a weapon that is 3 times better"). It will also create a more prominent asymmetry between the runes. For example, Guardian can gain more armor and Brawler more DMG with every level.
...And that’s not all, but this update is already really damn long!
8. Balanced and more interesting buildings in the village
Currently, we are also not that happy with the village development. We will be re-balancing everything and adding a lot of awesome buildings.
We don’t have everything tested yet, but we have A LOT of cool concepts like cards crafting that we would really love to add o the game!
9. Visual enhancements
As we have shown in our previous updates, a lot is happening there. We are working on animated cards, more in-combat animations, better UI, new enemy visuals, effects, and so forth!
10. New content!
We are preparing over 100 new cards and passives to be discovered! New enemies and bosses, new encounters, and side quests!
And that's not all!
As you can see, there is A LOT on our plate, and most of those systems are interconnected. This is why we will introduce only small part of those features in our weekly updates and bring, hopefully, all of the above with the HUGE patch 0.95.
We hope that with it, this will elevate your gameplay experience on the new level!
When will it happen? We are aiming at the second half of September and feel pretty well with this prediction ;)
As always, thanks so much for your encouraging feedback and for helping us with the game's development! We feel that this is a full beauty of Early Access, where you can actually play an active role in the game development and be a part of a community.
Have a great week, and we will see you in a bit with a new update ;)
*By the way, we also made a little cleaning in our patch numeration and going forward this is how the Patch names will work. Currently we are at 0.92b. Every new functionality adds 0.01, balancing or content patch are letters (a / b / c etc.). Hope this will make more sense ;)