Hello Community!
Today I wanted to share some of my plans for the future of Rift Wizard.
Heres the current roadmap for Rift Wizard's journey from early access to full launch:
Patch 1 is about adding variety, especially to the early game. Rift Wizard is meant to be played many, many times. Fighting bats and goblins gets old. Monster variety is currently worst early game, so that is where this patch will mainly focus. The number of monsters in the game will increase dramatically with this patch- around a 4-6x increase. Many of the new monsters will be variants of existing ones- in addition to bats, we now have flame bats, giant bats, and poison bats. Some of the new monsters are quite weird and exotic- we now have goblin siege mechanics who build and operate cannons, and cultist altars that turn dead cultists into swarms of imps.
Along with the new monsters, the monster spawning system is being reworked. Later levels should have fewer different monsters, and be a bit more focused. Red frame bosses are gone, instead you'll encounter variants of the monsters being spawned (the aforementioned siege mechanics, toxic bats, cultist altars, ect), or small bands of higher level monsters.
Levelgen variety is another area where the game can, and will, be improved in this patch. The levelgen algorithm is being reworked and expanded, and will be capable of creating a larger variety of level types. Smaller levels, snaking maze levels, symmetric levels, wide open chaotic levels, and grid like levels will all be possible in the new system.
The first patch will also include new spells and skills. The new levelgen algorithm tends to generate levels that make you want mobility spells and terrain destruction very badly, which are cool mechanics anyway, so I'll be sprinkling more of those throughout various spell schools. Ice Magic will be landing in this patch as well.
Lastly, there are some big balance changes. The biggest one is a change to how stuns work which make it impossible for the player to get stunlocked. Additionally, there are some numerical changes to skills, spells, and monsters I or the community have deemed under or over powered. Flock of Eagles will be toned down.
Ill talk a bit more about each patch as it nears, but here are the key points from future patches:
Patch 2 will focus on some big systematic issues with balance, and cool loot. Shrines and spell upgrades will go from being small stacking bonuses to being large exclusive bonuses. This will also be a good time to reexamine how stat bonuses work, as some of the mechanics around this are getting very confusing (Orbs damage is based on 'damage' not 'minion damage'? Annihilate deals 13x4 damage? ect). I may have time to do some skill tooltip reworks here- or those might have to be delayed, this patch is getting very wide in scope already.
Patch 3 will focus on community features, creative challenges, and replay value. These features are going to focus on encouraging and rewarding players for beating the game in as many different ways as possible. Challenge modifiers, combined with weekly shared challenge leaderboards, will hopefully allow some really interesting community discussion and exploration.
Patch 4 will be the game's graduation from early access to launch, and will mainly focus on polish. This means a big balance patch, and a big UI patch.
Beyond patch 4 is far away, and is very subject to change. My current plan is to keep adding spells, skills, and monsters to the game as long as players are interested, and perhaps a bit beyond that, solely for my own amusement.
Mod Support is something I would like to do after launch. I'm not sure how feasible it is yet, but having skimmed the steam workshop docs, I'm optimistic. Ditto localization. I don't want to make a hard promise that these items will be worked on after launch (yet), but that is my current intention.
All of these plans are subject to change of course, and there will be many small items not mentioned in the road map. If there is suddenly huge community interest in something not currently on the roadmap, it may well make its way onto it. This is simply the current most up to date plan for Rift Wizard, and updated versions will be posted before future patches.
Thanks for reading, and feel free to come by and share your thoughts on the discord.
-Dylan