Greetings, Rune Hunters.
I'm Seong Seop Song, the director of UNDECEMBER.
We are already halfway through the Season Re:Birth since it is a short-term season.
I would like to start this Director’s Letter by saying that we look forward to your continuous support for UNDECEMBER at the end of this year as well.
As many of you already know, there was a Q&A session with two YouTube streamers,
where we received many honest opinions about the game, from the suggestions for game improvements and some tough questions that were harder to answer.
To address those questions, we would like to give you an insight into the direction of development through this Director’s Letter.
1. Season System
The most common feedback we’ve received concerns the future of the season system, and we understand there have been a lot of concerns around it.
To give you a direct answer, UNDECEMBER will be reinforcing the season system from now on.
We will implement growth support buffs that are at or above the level of those applied in the Season Re:Birth so that new and returning Rune Hunters can easily adapt to the game,
and make several changes including increasing drop rates, decreasing the amount of consumed currencies, and holding various events to make sure that more Rune Hunters can enjoy the endgame content during each season.
The changes will also include setting the chance of the newly added season content to occur at 100%, and applying discounts on Chaos Stone costs to play the content of previous seasons.
Lastly, we will change the reset rule of the Chaos Statue so that players of Standard Mode do not have to go through the inconvenience of raising the Statue Level again.
2. Drop Rate
Next, we heard a lot of thoughts on the low drop chances.
While low drop rates bore the gameplay by making players lose hopes of obtaining desired items,
frequent drops of items that are designed to be rare can diminish their value.
We have been working on a solution to address both of these problems at the same time, and we will make improvements as below.
Simply increasing the drop rates can only be noticeable by Rune Hunters at higher stages who have access to certain content,
so we will avoid directly increasing relatively lower drop rates but diversify the sources of these items.
In addition, we will significantly reduce the prices in the Disassemble Shop, allowing all Rune Hunters to obtain reasonable rewards that are in line with their playtime,
and rebalance the drop system so that certain Gear and Essences, which were previously dropped from higher difficulty content, will also be dropped from the lower difficulty content.
Moreover, we plan to hold more events for Rune Hunters, such as the Holiday Raid Event, to provide additional opportunities for obtaining more items,
so that more Rune Hunters can experience the fun of obtaining better loot.
3. Balance Changes
UNDECEMBER’s skill balance patches are not intended to only lower stats,
but rather to first adjust skills that are rarely used to make as various skills as possible used,
and only to lower the stats of skills that harm the overall game balance due to its overpowering stats.
Of course, we are aware that the ideal solution is to avoid making a skill that harms the balances in the first place, and the development team will review the balance more thoroughly to do so.
4. Content Improvements
Many of you expressed concerns regarding the content that was introduced to refresh the game but has now lost its appeal.
We will make improvements to content according to the order of priority as stated below.
1) Improvements to the Constellation of Time
We heard many complaints regarding the Constellation of Time, even that it needs to be removed from the game.
The development team has considered several options from revamping the content to removing it, but has concluded that it cannot be removed since there are several related content.
Therefore, we have concluded instead that we will increase the Emotion and Gold drops drastically so that it has more fruits to play the Constellation of Time.
We will make sure that old content is not neglected in the future.
2) Improvements to the Solo Raids
Solo Raid is a content that has been avoided by the players due to its discouraging rewards and difficulty unlike its designed intention.
In the next season, we will increase the rewards and lower the boss difficulty.
Plus, to fill the empty statues in Saluto, we will make the change to the statue registration from the previous way to register the first users for each statue to a new way that the users are registered in the order of defeats.
3) Improvements to Bottomless Abyss Monsters
We have received much feedback that Bottomless Abyss monsters are a great barrier when you encounter them without sufficient growth.
We will lower the number and HP of Bottomless Abyss monsters in the next season to lower the barrier for new Rune Hunters.
5. Convenience Improvements
The development team agrees that the game’s convenience needs to be improved..
To answer the requests from many of you, We will add a feature to save selected information of Chaos Stone in the next season.
Other than that, we will add a function to display all descriptions of Zodiac Nodes, and a ‘Withdraw All’ feature in Compendium.
We will continue to make more improvements to other elements that we were unable to address
this time.
While we have been giving extensive consideration to the game content internally, the way we have communicated with you may have not been the most effective.
Moving forward, we will try to share more details on the future of the development through various ways.
About the Next Season
We hope we’ve answered some of your questions about the direction of development. Below, we’ll share details about the next season.
1. Scenario Addition
The player and Canna arrive in Nemera’s city Ghieva, looking for the Zodiac Master.
To meet the mayor ‘Hatus,’ known as the Zodiac Master, you two enter the Arena together.
At the Arena, a boy trying to steal a participation ticket and a mysterious man named ‘Oppert’ appear and the truth behind the stories starts to reveal.
Please check the story of Arena out yourself in the game that opens the first half of the Act 14.
2. Season Content: Arena
You can enter the Arena by collecting Essence dropped in the Chaos Dungeon.
You can obtain growth gear by defeating the bosses that appear consecutively in the Arena.
The obtained gear can be added to the extended Gear Slot, and will summon the soul of the boss monster (provisional name) by chance to support your attacks.
3. Zodiac Specialization Node Renewal
Zodiac Specialization Nodes will be drastically improved in the next season.
We are currently working on original nodes for Special Nodes to provide the Rune Hunters with a different kind of fun that was not experienced before.
To mention one of them, Bowguns that have been ignored so far will receive Specialization Nodes.
We look forward to your creative builds combining new nodes.
4. Tier 10 Charm and the New Charm Essence
Charm will be extended to Tier 10 from 9.
In addition, a new Essence to regrant the Options to a desired Charm will be released, and this will partially help lower the difficulty of setting Charms.
To conclude,
we understand that Rune Hunters want a changed game, not the game getting ready to be changed,
and we are committed to working hard so that you can feel the changes in the future.
We will continue to put our best effort into running the remaining Season Re:Birth and preparing for the next season.
We look forward to your support and anticipation.
Thank you.