What's new, Puppy-dogs?
The work on Major Patch #1 continues on! I'm gonna pull back the curtain a bit this week, and give you guys some insights to the development cycle on this patch. So, let's start with the goal of Major Patch #1 and what that means. The goal of this patch is first and foremost to overhaul the balance of the game, in-and-out, front-to-back. This has been the #1 issue present in Ephemeral Tale's life so far. I touched on this some last week, but the gist is that the damage formula, the basis and foundation of all stats and damage numbers that the game is built on, was super-omega messed up. You wanna see? Like I said, I'm pulling back the curtain today! Today's pupdate is VERY reading heavy, so if you aren't into the nitty-gritty, just hop to the bottom two paragraphs for a summary!
(((user.Attack*1.3)+user.Attack*1.1)/(target.Defense*1.6))*(user.Attack*1.3)
As a formula, this was built for the purpose of allowing the players attack to out-scale a targets defense, regardless of statistical disadvantage. This was built for a former project in the Ephemeral Tale universe that never saw the light of day (Hey, never say never! Sequels are all the rage, baby), that was pretty linear. When work on Ephemeral Tale started, the previous project was used as a foundation with which to build upon. Initially, Ephemeral Tale was also a linear game! You would go from the Forgotten Forest to the Occluded Oasis, then to the Corrupted Castle, and so forth. At some point, I made the decision to cut the linear path to allow for player freedom in builds. By forcing the player down a set path, I was intrinsically limiting the possible builds that they could make, which harmed the replayability element that I was aiming for. Less options meant a quicker solve for the meta, which meant less replayability. I've spoken personally with a few of you about potentially making the game linear again, and you generally caught onto hesitance on my part. This is the reason for that-- there's a way to have more flexibility, more options, more choices, and still be better balanced. That was when I decided that an overhaul was necessary, and that we would have to start with the biggest problem: the damage formula. Of course, changing that would also mean having to change everything that it touched, and everything that touched, ad infinitum... But the results could be pretty awesome.
So, I took off to my favorite place to talk about games, development, and head-wrinklers like the above: the Something Classic discord! Seriously, a big shoutout to our friends over at Something Classic. They have a clear love for all things JRPG, and the deep dives that we regularly get into about player psychology, stat crunching, and all that fun stuff has been hugely beneficial for Ephemeral Tale as a game. After a long discussion between a few of us there, I finally nailed down what I wanted to accomplish with the formula, and how I would go about it. See, there's a very clever fellow named Patrick Holleman who wrote a few books who was nice enough to chat with me for a little while, and was just an absolute goldmine of information. If you're interested in seeing some of your favorite JRPGs dissected, I highly recommend checking out those books! Anyway, thanks to him and the rest of the Something Classic gang, I was able to chart out a damage formula in a spreadsheet, calculating how much damage the player should do at each level. From there, I was able to determine what stat ranges I needed to have across enemies and gear in order to accomplish these numbers. So now, let's go back to that overarching goal of the patch: overhaul the balance of the game, in-and-out, front-to-back. How do we do this, now that we have the numbers?
- Change the combat formula to be more malleable
- Change enemy stats to be built around the above formula
- Change how gear is made and the stat ranges on it to work with the above two elements
- Change drop rates and acquisition methods to work with the above
- Change gameplay loop to work with (you'll never guess) the above
As you might be able to tell, this is a simplification of the whole process, but I hope this gives you some insight as to the amount of changes that have had to occur to make this patch work. Because of how many systems were touched by just changing the combat formula, it wasn't really possible to feasibly roll this out in waves, either. The downside is that this meant you guys having to wait for this patch to put the game in this much better state; the upside is that I can now give you a firm release date for the update! Right now, I'm planning on the patch releasing in 7 days-- February 4th! I'm currently putting the finishing touches on the update, and testing those changes. There's been no major issues with the balance in our internal tests, and there's a ton of bug fixes and tweaks to fix inconsistencies, as well. This patch has also let me start to really nail down what Ephemeral Tale can be, which was the entire goal of going into Early Access! You guys seem to dig the loot (awesome!), zones (sweet!), and want more world building. It's good to have goals to aim at, so now I can start to focus on really bringing that to you guys! In a couple of weeks, the Pupdate will likely be focused on the end-game experience, as that's a conversation I'd like to have with you guys once you've tried the new gameplay experience.
Now we've had a lot of discussion today about why this patch had to happen, why it had to be so system inclusive, and what that means moving forward. But there's one thing that we haven't addressed yet: what about those who have existing save files? This one is a tough one to deal with. Some of you guys have already played for an incredible amount of time, gathered all the coolest gear, and hit level cap. With that said, the stats that those folks have, and the gear they have, those were made for an almost entirely different game (numbers wise). So what's the best path forward? There are a couple of options that I've whittled it down to. While I could invalidate the old save files entirely, that's what we in the business call "rude as hell." Another option would be to simply ask (politely, mind you!) that you start a new save file, for the sake of your own player experience. After all, whacking the bosses for a silly amount is only fun until you can't get a challenge out of it anymore. The last option would be to simply manually reconfigure all of the save files to match with the new statistics. You'd lose some stats, but that's anticipated with a change like this. Unfortunately, the stats aren't really the issue, it's the gear-- and replacing gear isn't as easy as one might think.
So here's the proposal: I'm asking you to restart the game. I know, it's a bold move. For those who absolutely, positively, refuse to make a new save? That's cool, boo. For a few weeks following Major Patch #1, there will be an NPC available in the Traveller's Respite to those on an older patch. You'll be asked if you want to re-initialize your character, and if you do, your characters stats will be adjusted to (more or less) the correct values. Doing this will cost all of your current gear, but in order to ease the pain you will be given gear back in return. Of course, that gear will be randomly generated under the new system. After this period of time, there will be no way to convert your old save file to the new stat system. Again, the preferred option is that you start a new game-- I have no clue what weird oddities will come about because of this patch with old saves. To the best of my efforts, it should be backwards compatible (minus the stats being completely out of whack), but unfortunately you can just never be 100% sure. Solid 95% though!
Wow, we've really covered a lot of ground today, huh? I won't take up anymore of your time this week, but next week the patch will be dropping at 12:01EST, Tuesday morning. :) The pupdate will be early that day as well, so that you know what's in the patch! We'll be stress-testing the hell out of the update through then, but as usual, if you guys have any issues in the interim, feel free to let me know. I'm here to make the game better, after all! I'll see you guys again soon,
-- Ryan