We have been very busy working on Gates of Everforge. I wanted to provide everyone with a quick development update on behalf of the team.
We have been engaging with our community regularly on Discord, and I have decided to start sharing these development updates here on steam as well!
Our team knows that the community continues to wait with excitement for our upcoming Closed Beta.
Your excitement and anticipation is motivating the morale of our team far more than you realize. It has been an incredible experience working on Everforge, knowing that we now have thousands of people waiting to play it.
Our team is passionately crunching literally every single day to move Everforge forward and closer to release.
Here is a summary of everything the team has done over the past 6 weeks or so. We have gotten A LOT done:
- Following the Controls Survey we sent out, we took the community feedback and added optional controller support, without sacrificing or making any changes to the core top-down PC MOBA experience. Nothing was changed in the core mouse and keyboard experience to accommodate this option.
- To accommodate the controller options, we also added the option for you to choose between MOBA style controls or ARPG style controls. (More details will be released soon.)
- Our team welcomed a professional Data Scientist to help us balance our gameplay now and in the future. His work is already underway.
- We added sound and visual effects to several of our spells/abilities and creatures.
- We added a special Dragon Hatchling creature, that will be the first mob players see each match - it will reveal the Dragon buff that is in the middle of the map for that match, and it will have a special loot table that makes each match start differently.
- We finalized layout changes to the Everforge map to allow the PVE Horde mode and PVP Raid mode to both happen on the same map: This required moving walls and adding gates all over the place.
- We created a system that will be used for teams to channel their Scrap to open gates. This creates flexibility for which team members pay to open the gates, by how much each player channels (or doesn’t).
- We created a standardized focus system in our HUD, so that when you click on things like players, monsters, gates or chests etc, there is a single simplified UI widget to display them.
... Previously, there were a few different widgets, and this is just a way to clean up and simplify the UI. This simplified focus system also allows us to fill the game with tiny little one-line tips and explanations, which will all but remove the requirement for players to complete a tutorial.
- We rebuilt our multiplayer backend to incorporate Epic Online Services, which will enable cross-store play. Previously, our multiplayer system was only going to be able to support Steam. We know Steam is likely going to be the favorite platform for our players (we are gamers too, so we get it) but we wanted to be able to reach as many players as possible!
- We set up account-linking, so you can access the same account through multiple stores.
- We finalized our gear upgrading system and UI, aka The Forge.
- Completed the last pieces of art for all our initial premium skins and their color variants.
- We started creating the art for player profile Avatars/Icons.
- We continued writing the backstory and lore, for the entire Everforge universe, most notably with the backstory of the final boss: The Smith, being finalized.
And of course, there’s still more to be done!
We know the community is eager to get playing Everforge - and trust us - we are too.
After 3 and a half years of development time, no one wants this game to launch more than us.
We have said this before, and we will say it again. We are far more interested in releasing a GOOD game than we are releasing a timely game.
We still believe we can begin sharing Everforge playtesting with you towards the end of June, and will continue to do everything we can to make it happen. But please keep in mind that we will not rush our game out if it is not ready.
Finally, it's becoming incredibly clear that I need to do a better job of communicating the important work that our team is silently doing each and every day.
As such, I am going to continue posting these updates here on steam, as well as in our Discord and subreddit.
Thank you all so much for your continued encouragement and support!
GLHF,
Murg