Mr. Z here!
Last Dev blog I said I was going to discuss some of Renown’s game design and that's what we’ll be doing today.
During the demo we had our largest number of players yet, over 1000 at one point even. This meant we got to stress out the game servers extra hard and we got a lot of performance data out of it. It also meant we got to see what high pop gameplay looks like.
One of the things I noticed during the demo is a lot of players were not crafting their own gear, but finding it from looting. Going forwards we’ll be adding more ways to acquire tier 2 gear from looting to support this more active playstyle. We’ve added many new POIs to the map so there will be way more ways to acquire better gear without having to craft it. Of course tier 3 gear will always need to be crafted, and looted gear won’t be a replacement for crafting.
Another thing that happened is groups were rushing through the tech tree way too quickly. We are in the process of finishing up a new tech tree that allows players greater choice as to which weapons to unlock while also making it more difficult to rush the research. Also to note, all our servers were running at x2 resource gold coin gain which made it super easy to tech up. We will also be adjusting costs accordingly so that rushing plate armor and t3 weapons isn’t super trivial and also be running our playtests at x1 gold rates going forwards.
There was definitely an overabundance of resources during the demo, this was by design to onboard new players more easily. For the next demos we’ll be running the game the way it was meant to be played with x1 rates. There are also now less resources in general spawning in the map to encourage players to roam around more instead of staying near their homes. Gold and Silver were especially too common and have been made rarer. Animal Hunting grounds should also become more contested now.
Raiding bases was a little too easy in the demo, due to the abundance of resources. We’ve made the Sapper’s axe a little harder to unlock and silver much rarer so people don’t get raided so easily so early. That being said, I’ve added an even earlier raiding tool, fire arrows .They can be used on plaster and wood doors. Fire arrows do not cost silver, so they can be used to cheaply raid any really underdeveloped bases quickly. Petards will be getting many changes so players aren’t able to use them so quickly to explode their way through a base. Another issue with petards is the placement range, it’s way too far so the attackers do not place themselves in nearly enough danger when blowing through a base, this will be addressed soon with a big rework.
As far as Gear disparity goes, having better weapons is much more beneficial than good armor, so costs will have to be adjusted to account for this. Plate armor is also not quite good enough I feel and would benefit from being stronger but also more expensive so it really fits into the elite armor role. Additionally, the damage resistance calculation isn’t quite giving the results I want and will be tweaked to make higher tiers more useful, especially against lower tier weapons. We don’t want to see sticks being used to beat plate armored players to death so easily.
We’re now in full production towards preparing Renown for Early Access release, some things that will be coming is an animation rework of many of the attack animations, shield gameplay rework, UI polishing, server + client optimization, and additional map improvements.
In the next Dev blog I’ll be discussing some of the UI improvements that have been in the works lately.