Hey everyone!
There's still plenty of work to be done until the next content update for Of Blades & Tails will be ready, but I figured it's about time to give you all an idea of what you can expect from world expansion part 3.
So in this post I want to show you impressions of new Barrend Land biome and how the Combat Arena will work!
The Barren Land
The update features a whole new region with a new biome.
It is also the home of the Boar Tribe, which have their settlement Murzork in the heart of the Barren Land. You can reach it by following the road from Levendell to the east.
(The final region layout is still subject to change.)
The Barren Land features a dried out, earthy soil, tall mushroom trees and clay-like rocks.
Unfortunately I can't show you screenhots of the new boar settlement yet, but it will feature a new architectural style that is somewhat inspired by orcish/barbarian housing.
However, the thing I can show you is a glimpse of what Murzork is widely known for...
The Combat Arena
As teased in one of the previous posts, the next update will feature an exciting combat arena and I can finally share a few more details with you now.
The Arena of Murzork will have 2 different events:
The Tournament
The tournament mode contains a finite number of stages, each stage will throw 3-5 waves of enemies at you and comes with special modifiers to the combat and the arena layout.
For example, one stage may be flooded and contain only little walkable areas, while you're being chased by flying enemies. Another stage could have a rule that you must end your turn next to an enemy or otherwise all enemies will get healed.
Things like that :)
(The arena level is still work in progress and not final, but with this you can get an idea of its size.)
You'll be able to leave the arena after each stage to receive your reward and prepare for the next stage.
This tournament will probably be also related to certain quests and the tribe story.
The Leaderboard Challenge
The combat arena will also feature online leaderboards in the challenge mode!
This mode is one "endless" wave attack. With each wave enemies get tougher and grow in number (with a limit of 8 enemies per wave).
By defeating enemies you can increase your arena score.
Defeating multiple enemies within a short amount of turns will also grant you score combo multipliers.
For example if you manage to defeat 2 enemies in max 3 turns, you'll get a x2 multiplier. If you manage to defeat more enemies you can keep the multiplier up or increase it even more!
Otherwise it will eventually drop back to x1.
The challenge mode will also have other surprises for you, that will pop up every X turns and make the following turns more thrilling ;)
Ultimately, your own defeat in the leaderboard challenge is inevitable! Once you're defeated, your final score will be submitted to the online leaderboard and you can see your global rank on a board outside of the arena.
It's worth noting that only your highest score will be displayed in the leaderboard and this score is saved by your username, not by your character. Of course you're free to participate with as many characters as you want.
I also managed to make this feature cross platform, so players from Steam, GOG and eventually consoles will be able to compete in one leaderboard.
It will also work independently of the difficulty mode you have chosen. The difficulty modifiers will all be normalized when you enter the arena in challenge mode, so there is no separation between difficulty modes necessary.
There might be more categories of leaderboards introduced in the future, but that's completely depending on its popularity.
I'm aware of the fact that many players will never see the challenge mode or participate, because it's meant to be an "end game" feature for high level characters.
However, for all the hardcore fans out there, I hope this will be a pleasant surprise!
Needless to say that I'm more than excited to see where some of you will take this :)
A few more thoughts regarding fake scores or playing with modified savegames:
Originally I wanted to introduce a validation for new savegames, so they can't be easily modified anymore and then used to achieve otherwise impossible scores in the challenge mode.
But that would have caused older savegames to be disqualified from the leaderboards, because figuring out programatically if a savegame was already edited turned out to be very hard and/or inaccurate!
This would also have excluded almost all of our current early access players and I didn't want that to happen.
So while the actual score submission is reasonably safe, the possibility that players just "tweak" their stats in the save file, is still an open concern.
To address that, the related savegame (with only your game data!) will be referenced when submitting leaderboard scores. With this information it will be possible to detect if unreasonable high scores in the leaderboard are legit or probably fake and therefore subject for deletion.
For now, I'm happy for anyone who joins the leaderboard challenge, fake or not! :D
But the possibility to investigate and curate the entries in the future is possible, making it hopefully a fair competition for all players.
TL;DR: Everyone can participate in the leaderboards and fake entries can be detected!
Update 0.18 when?
I need you to stay patient a little longer this time!
There's still the entire boar settlement to be set up, NPCs, quests and more surprises to be added.
Even though the leaderboards are already fully working, the remaining expansion content might still take another month or so.
I hope you're nevertheless happy with the things I introduced in this preview post and I would love to read your thoughts in the comments!
Until next time, take care everyone!
Felix