Hello Adventurer,
Here is Sylvain. What's new since our last news on December 31? Yes, we indicated that we would do a quarterly post and it's only been two months! But we really wanted to communicate with you about Ortharion - The Last Battle.
In this post, we are going to tell you about three things: Our visions of what an action-RPG is, our roadmap and Adrien will conclude by explaining what he has been working on lately and next. Here we go !
Our visions
What is interesting in our approach is that we (Adrien and I) have two different visions of what an action-RPG should be. Different (ouch!), but complementary (phew!), which brings a symbiosis in our approach.
Adrien the developer is more oriented towards action, theorycrafting, character evolution at its peak. And for my part, I'm more RPG oriented with customization and character development, interactions with the world and especially story.
So you see that the two of us are complementary and therefore Ortharion - The Last Battle will be a game for both categories of action-RPG players: Those who want to level and those who want to live an adventure. The leveling will be without limit and you will be able to evolve your character as you see fit even after the end of the campaign. As for those who buy the game to live a story, they will also be satisfied, because after the big end boss, they can move on to another adventure... or stay.
This is therefore what will make the strength of Ortharion - The last Battle, which will be a much more successful version than Ortharion Project, Adrien's first game (and in no case its sequel).
Roadmap
If it would have been possible to release the demo of Ortharion - The Last Battle for the Steam Neo Fest in February (ha no! shouts Adrien at me), we decided to postpone it for the next one, that is to say June 2022. This will make it possible to control, debug and check if everything is working well and if this demo corresponds well to what was expected.
The result is a schedule, which logically must be respected on Steam, that is to say, a release of the game at the latest, 6 months after the exhibition of the game during the event.
We can therefore consider that Ortharion The Last Battle will be released in January 2023 in early access. In the meantime, two important things will have happened: The first is that during the June festival, we will be launching a Kickstarter campaign to finance the game, which will allow us to improve certain points - with in particular the improvement of the visuals of the character and a ranking system and seasons - and on the other hand, will allow us to take into account all your comments. Adrien will then decide whether or not to make changes. It's him who has his hands dirty, I remind you. I handle the pen.
Speaking of pen, I'm going to leave room for him to explain where he is in the development of the game.
I greet you and say see you very soon, advising you to continue to put Ortharion - the Last Battle in your Wish list. Yes, it makes Adrien work faster (!) and above all it motivates us both.
See you again… let’s say… June 1st. It will be 3 months…right? Yes, we have problems with the term “quarter”!
March 2022 development news
the biggest part of the work in the recent months has been to overhaul the code that was present on Ortharion Project. I had already talked about it ici, so with saves and character movements, so in addition to continuing to improve the source code base I looked into the design:
The class system has been completely revised, you can now have up to 7 class choices in total on the same character. You could perfectly make a summoning necromancer who throws axes if you wish, or a warrior using magic.
Who says new class system, says new skills. I have therefore already added all the new skills in the game. There are currently 276 of them. They will still require work: the visual effects of certain skills were not done, for example, and I would like to improve the older.
It's not about adding to have big numbers, but about creating diversity in gameplay and theorycrafting, so new mechanics have been added. One of the most important is, for example, the separation between physical power and magic power and the taking into account, or not, of weapon damage in certain situations and therefore with the creation of hybrid builds.
Each class has its own talent tree, the image below is an alpha preview and is only there to show you what one of the 39 talent tree class will approximatly look like.
The talent trees are not limited to the class, it will simply be necessary to have points in the previous tree. For example, the Barbarian's talent tree can only be unlocked if the Warrior's has been sufficiently invested but you can invest point if you are not a warrior.
The last big job I have left to do is adding the quests, which is already done, but also the dialogues, on which Sylvain gave himself to his heart's content, leaving me to manage to put them in place then in game. Thank you Sylvain! There are a few new mechanics also related to these dialogues that will change the face of the world, but more on that later. Unfortunately, this won't be very visible in the demo much to my dismay.
Changes have been made to the battle structure. Already for performance, mainly for high level players, so builds based on attack speed will be much more effective than those you could have had in Ortharion Project.
I now have internal tools to have an effective global vision of all skills and to be able to change dozens of skills with a simple click or even add skills more quickly.
The structure of the lands has also changed. It goes from a size of 500m by 500m to 1km by 1km, i.e. an area 4 times larger. And so, 4 times more monsters and objects to create when launching each land. So improvements on that side have been made. Below you can see the added stats for creating 500 monsters.
Note that I am only talking about the attribution of statistics here, many improvements remain to be made to be close to an almost instantaneous loading and to maintain 60fps during gameplay phases with density and fast builds as we can see in Path of Exile for exemple.
But let's stop there for now. And let us know in the comments if you have any questions, we'll try to answer you as best we can.
See you soon adventurer.