Hey Realmers!
This is part 2 of the Producer's Letter that we first shared with you last week. It’s time to get a first look at the future of Realm!
MotMG moved to September
A lot of things have been happening this year. We are only in the middle of it and we already released a new client, a new class, and we are about to release the biggest and hardest fight in the Realm. But our game is not the only place where things have taken a crazy turn. The pandemic of COVID-19 and all the chaos around it affected us all and changed our lives in many ways. We needed to adjust to it and we needed to do it fast.
Now, as the world has finally started to adjust to our new reality, we want to readjust as well. All of the above made us realize that the best move for players as well as ourselves will be to postpone MotMG this year for one month. It will give us more time to securely prepare more and better content for this great celebration and will give you more time to enjoy Oryx 3. But make no mistake, we will still be actively adding new content to the game! For big changes, you will need to wait until September. That begs the question...
What are the big plans for the future?
Our design and development teams are already working on plenty of new features, many of which we want to release for MotMG 2020. Here are some previews:
Item Forge (UT Exchange System)
The first concept of the system we created in September, but we weren’t happy with the concept and couldn’t make it properly due to the halting of Flash development. We made a decision to postpone it and release it on Exalt. Right now we are finishing the design phase of the feature and will soon enter the development phase. There are still some decisions to be made, but we want to share an early mock up:
Item Forge will be much more important as we will also plan to introduce…
IC/OOC (In-Combat/Out-of-Combat)
It has been a while since our last public testing session with IC/OOC functionality. We have been looking into feedback and adjusting some numbers ever since. We know how big this change will be and how it will affect gameplay, and that is why we want to do it in a very conscious way.
This system will come alongside with some major balancing changes, so you can expect another public testing session to gather even more feedback. Besides just balancing, we are also looking into the UI part of this system - how to present in and out of combat status. Here are some concepts:
But this is not the only system we want to introduce! We are also working on...
Exaltation
Exaltation is a new system of extended progression of characters as a long term set of goals beyond reaching 8/8 stats maxed on a character. It is a system based on endgame dungeons and will provide some extra benefits based on class, weapon type, and overall progression. We don’t want to share too many details as this is still a work in progress, but here are some mock ups that can give you general idea of the feature:
But new systems are not the only thing we are developing...
New Fame Distribution
Fame has long been an imperfect system despite being intended as the main compensation for death, a form of progression and consolation to give players a bit more of an edge after every major death. But we realize that this system has aged poorly and does not hold up in its current form.
Meaningful XP sources are few and far between without scaling properly to content difficulty (comparing basic godlands hunting to the array of dungeons more challenging and complex than that, as an example) and fame bonuses often reward inaction more than varied accomplishments.
It’s been planned for a very long time, but we are finally moving forward with a fame rework to the two core aspects of the system: XP distribution and fame bonuses. XP distribution, while a big project to thoroughly review and change, is fairly straightforward. Rather than having a few random outlier dungeons like the Ice Cave give noticeably high amounts of XP, we want everything to scale in that sense. Tougher dungeons should give meaningful fame for clearing, bigger bounties from bosses and quests, and a reason to participate for enhanced XP rates.
Fame bonuses provide an even more exciting area for expansion, allowing us to cast a huge net of short and long term character goals, rather than a couple dozen checkboxes without much to seek afterwards. It’s still too early for us to share a complete table of planned bonuses (as eager as we are to do so), but we do want to give you an idea of the design goals and a handful of examples.
We want to stress that these concepts are not final. The numbers shared in particular are only examples and may not reflect the final version. Not everything listed here may represent what we release, but they are all under heavy consideration among many more ideas.
- Replace/remove restrictive bonuses (the do-not bonuses)
- Don’t kill cubes -> Kill as many as possible
- Don’t teleport -> Teleport a lot
- Don’t drink pots -> Max your stats
- Don’t fire shots -> Fire at will!
- Replace ratio bonuses, such as Slayer of the Gods or Sharpshooter, measuring flat numbers instead
- Introduce more bonuses and split them into tiers for a mix of short and long term goals, as well as helps newer players experience more bonuses
- Oryx Slayer requires you to kill Oryx once, however we’d like to offer additional value in further kills
- Doer of Deeds requires you to complete 1000 quests, it would now be turned into 5 tiers:
a) Pursuer of Deeds: 25 quests completed
b) Doer of Deeds: 100 quests completed
c) Performer of Deeds: 250 quests completed
d) Achiever of Deeds: 500 quests completed
e) Master of Deeds: 1000 quests completed
- Individual dungeon completion bonuses for every dungeon
- More dungeon collection bonuses in addition to Tunnel Rat
- Explosive Journey for all Kabam era dungeons
- Travel of the Decade for all Deca era dungeons
- First steps for all early game dungeons
- King of the Mountains for all typical godlands dungeons
- Conqueror of the Realm for all encounter dungeons
- Enemy of the Court for all court boss dungeons
- Hero of the Nexus for all non-seasonal dungeons
- Realm of the Mad God for all dungeons
- And many more, so feel free to share any collection category ideas of your own!
- Expand tags like “Cube” and “God” to include every killable enemy under some kind of label, making every monster kill worth something (think labels like Beast, Humanoid, and Grotesque)
One of our goals when coming up with many of those changes was to keep existing characters under consideration, so as to ensure the time and dedication spent on living characters right now will not be for naught. We’ll have more specific information as the system develops and solidifies, but we want to assure that what you do with characters right now will still matter.
Expanding fame bonuses from roughly 20 to over 400 takes a lot of number balancing, so many things can change over time. However, we hope that these examples are exciting enough to think about more kinds of long term goals characters can have while rewarding all kinds of varied play. With a more balanced fame economy, we can start safely using the currency in more meaningful ways again!
And if this is still not enough and you will want a break from Oryx 3 and his sidekicks, we are also preparing...
High Tech Terror
High Tech Terror is an upcoming boss dungeon, starring a certain purple creature who has been left on the cutting room floor of game development since 2012. While this fight is not on the same level of difficulty or scale as Oryx’s Sanctuary, it will demonstrate a variety of new projectile functions that were never before possible, requiring heroes to read patterns and anticipate attacks in all new ways. Be on the lookout for more info and previews of this advanced adversary.
And for those of you who admire some good quality of life features…
New Vault UI & New Vault Type
One of the QoL features we have talked about in the past was unified Vault UI. As Exalt is live, we came back to this idea. We want to make usage of the Vault easier with the end of Flash, having all items available in one place with sorting and filtering options so that searching for specific items is much easier and faster.
But revamping the old Vault is not our only plan for it. We know that with the end of Flash, usage of mules will be much harder. This is why we want to introduce a new type of Vault which will enable players to store much more items. We are now in the process of evaluating what people keep on mules and how we can make their life easier. We will give you more information as soon as we can.
While waiting for all of these big features, we are not stopping introducing smaller features and content too!
Small QoL Features + UGC Dungeons
We want to introduce a lot of small QoL features, some of which are already implemented (loot preview, realm queues, realm timers). Others we are still working on include player visibility enhancements and specialized boss health bars.
But our team is not the only ones putting in a lot of work lately. Our amazing UGC members are working on some new stuff as well. There are a few new dungeons that are being developed, and you can expect at least one of them to hit production pretty soon!
With this opportunity we want to thank our UGC/artists for helping us out with various projects and sprites! We also want to say a big "thank you" to our lovely testers, who have been by our side through it all. With their feedback and suggestions, we've managed to release some quality content to the game and to catch the meanest of bugs out there!
Let’s also not forget the Discord and subreddit moderators who have been doing an awesome job to keep you updated on various things and to entertain you with fun and artistic events! From the whole Deca Team, thank you contributors, moderators, and thank you Saturn for the mind-blowing piece of art! We are more excited than ever before about the future of Realm, and the incredible acts of this community make it all possible.