Greetings, Principals!
It’s been quite a while, isn’t it? To tell you the truth, we’ve been hard at work improving all aspects of the game, one of them being the major change to our exploration system. We moved away from automatic exploration in our previous build to a more open one where you can freely explore the different areas in the game!
At present, there are 3 different areas in the world that you can explore in the early access with 3 more coming along the way . These areas can be accessed through the world map, representing the varying biomes in the realm of Valthiria itself. Separated based on the combat difficulty, the explorable areas are:
1. Plains – Difficulty: Easy
2. Forest – Difficulty: Medium
3. Mountain – Difficulty: Medium
4. Desert – Difficulty: Hard (1st update)
5. Tundra – Difficulty: Hard (2nd update)
6. Secret Area (3rd and final update)
Aside from giving players a more pronounced sense of agency, the change also brings about a slew of new features to improve the sense of progression in the exploration itself.
The first is the introduction of the Teleport Gate. In order to start exploring an area, you have to activate a dormant gate. After you activate it, you can fast travel directly to any gate you have activated . Here’s a neat feature: If you (or your students) are itching to go home, you can directly teleport to the gate located in the academy as well!
Don’t rely on the Teleport Gate to take you away every time you’re in a bind though. There will be certain times when the gate won’t be active, such as when you’re being overrun by a gauntlet of monsters during a quest, or when you need to find an item in an area before you can proceed to the next one.
It’s not going to be very fun exploring large areas without a place to fall back to and rest, right? We’ve also added the campsite feature in our current build, where your students can lay down, relax, and enjoy the night sky from the comfort of their camp.
Your students may also choose to fully restore their HP at the camp, but there’s a caveat: the monsters they’ve defeated will respawn as well, so choose wisely when to rest and when to keep on adventuring!
We also know that you might have a little too much fun exploring to only stumble on areas where your students are underleveled. You don’t want to lose your dear students in an “accident,” wouldn’t you? That is why we also put blockades towards certain areas of the game.
The blockade exists for a variety of reasons, but we ultimately put it so that you will have a far more focused experience while playing the game. This is how the blockade looks like in our current build, but we are working to make it blend more seamlessly to the areas that you are currently exploring:
Well, that’s it for the update on the exploration mode! We’re looking forward to seeing you explore the different biomes that are populated with dangerous (and sometimes cute) monsters that we have lovingly crafted. Stay tuned for more information, we’ll see you on the next Dev Diary!
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