Hello, Merchants!
Welcome to State of the Game Volume 2! It’s been a while since our last State of the Game and since then we have had over 30 patches & hotfixes released, and we even launched a beta branch of Merchant’s Guide to get the testing available to a wider range of people who may want to take part in such things. The feedback and support from all of you has been instrumental in helping us catch the things we may have missed, and even inspired many ideas on new features, some of which have already made it into the game.
Many of you saw and voted in our recent community poll, and that is so greatly appreciated! We have a plethora of features we want to bring into the game, but it’s also important for us that we are giving you the things you want as well. Merchant Skills won the poll by a landslide, with Merchant Exploration coming second, Officer Follow Command third and Town Quartermasters fourth. Merchant Skills are currently live and we also managed to squeeze in the start of Merchant Exploration, with mysterious little rocks (Tufa) showing up in the world. What this is used for is…well…you’ll see a little later! There is more to be added to Merchant Exploration, and that should hit beta testing soon.
We recognize that we have been quiet for some time now, so we wanted to also make sure everyone knows what we have been up to and what’s coming. We have been spending this time recently fully planning out our roadmap to launch. It’s something we want to make sure is clearly defined, expressed and followed to make sure we get there in the best way we can. We also wanted to let anyone who wants to keep track of it as well to do exactly that, so we are launching a living document roadmap which will show all of the plans, what’s being worked on, and what’s to come leading up to our official v1.0 launch. You can see all of that information by checking out our live document following the link below. Feel free to bookmark the link and keep an eye on things!
Road to Launch Living Document
With all that said, we wanted to give you a little more specific update on what a lot of the things coming are!
Officer Follow Command
The Officer Follow Command is a way to get your officers to follow you while you’re in Merchant View to help make things more efficient. Fish with you, craft with you, etc. However, we have made a number of changes to the functionality of the game which we believe makes that a little less necessary. As a result, we are going to be delaying the follow command to make its way into the game further down the road when there’s more to be done with it.
Towns & Quartermasters
The Quartermasters feature was fourth place in the poll, so will be included in upcoming patches in the near future, but we wanted to give some idea of what it means, while also getting your feedback and ideas!
Without giving too much detail so your imaginations can run wild, it will essentially be full integration of other towns in the realm becoming a part of your game, as opposed to just being Goods Vendors. You will have multiple rankings of reputation to unlock and each rank will unlock something special along with the rank including features like guild contests happening between the guilds in the Realm (there will be more guilds with this feature being implemented), Quartermasters which will offer increasingly valuable things you can buy, new adventures, special building unlocks, and many other surprises you can do while visiting neighboring towns.
What would you like to be able to do when you visit other towns in the realm? We’d love to hear ideas that could add some fun to this feature!
UI/UX Overhaul
As you all have surely seen, the UI in place right now is a temporary implementation as we were working to get everything in and functional. We are getting close now to finishing the features we wanted to put in, and that means we have been diverting some of our resources to getting UI assets ready to go into the game for the full overhaul we have coming up. This will fine-tune the functionality of the features in the game, making sure they are universally accessible, easier to understand and use, while also massively improving the visual layout and appeal. We have a sample of the UI assets ready to show, and the moment all of these assets are done, we will immediately begin implementation!
Currencies
We enjoy crafting in games when it is done right. Right now, we feel as though our crafting system is a decent start, but a very basic version of it. In the not too distant future, we want to start rolling out more “currency” items that have their own individual purposes throughout various mechanics in the game.
A few examples would be an item that will allow you to reforge your crafted items completely just using the currency item as opposed to having to gather all the materials all over again to recraft. Or another currency that will allow you to increase the quality of any item.
Though, we don’t want this to only apply to items, we also want other currencies that can increase the speed of a specific research, or apply reputation to a specific town. There are many more ideas we have, but more on these in the future as we roll them out!
Idle Mode & Other Game Modes
Leisure mode has officially been added to the game! This removes hero permadeath from the game, and any heroes who would have died will instead be sent to the hospital to recover, returning to action soon after. This also gives you the option to enable or disable consumption of hero energy. Finally, Leisure mode also unlocks the “Free Roam” feature right away. This makes the game mode a lot more relaxed than Hardcore!
Idle mode will be removing the Merchant from the world entirely as a gameplay mode. Yep, you read that right! Without the Merchant, this means the game will only be played from “World View” and anything you would normally be able to do as the Merchant you will now be able to do by simply clicking the appropriate objectives. For example, if you want to fish, you need only to scroll your view to a fishing location, and click it to start fishing. This is a very different way to play the game, and is designed for people who want a much simpler and more relaxed game to play.
We also have plans to add a “Custom Game” mode which will allow you to alter just about anything in your game. XP rate, gold rate, dungeon difficulty, raid difficulty, hero movement speed as some examples, but to go even deeper, we want you to be able to control how quickly time moves, or whether it moves at all. Just about anything in the game you will be able to control. Though, Custom Game mode is a little further down the road as we want to implement it after all the options to change are already in the game.
Finally, we also have plans to add varying difficulties to the game. Right now, Early Access is balanced around what will eventually be a “Normal” difficulty. Though we have plans to add an Easy mode, as well as a Hard mode and Very Hard mode, for those who really want to push their realm to the limits.
Hero Talents & Ability Orbs
Before long, we will begin rolling out our hero talent trees. This is going to introduce many more abilities for each class, and also let you choose for your officers what abilities they will be able to cast, as well as certain modifiers to that ability. Essentially, everything you’d expect from a talent tree built around abilities.
For example, as an Elemental in game right now, you get access immediately to Incinerate. However, when we roll out the new trees, you will be able to choose between three different starting abilities such as Firebolt, Frostbolt and Arcane Blast. Each of which has a very different function based on what role you want your Elemental to play within your group. It will even open the opportunity to have two Elementals in one group with one playing the hard hitting DPS role and the other being spec’d around control and utility.
We can’t wait to start rolling this information out there for you all to see and get your hands on!
Along with the talent tree being released, we will be introducing a new item type called Ability Orbs. These will be modifiers to hero abilities which will increase their damage, reduce their cooldown, reduce their mana cost and several other available effects. You will be able to choose which orbs you apply to which abilities based on the strategy you want to implement. These orbs will have multiple ranks per orb, and you will have the ability to combine a number of orbs to rank up a single orb, making a lot of room for growth using these ability orbs to continuously increase in power and function.
Continued Performance & Settings
Performance improvements will be an ongoing task for us up to launch, and even after. We have been able to include several settings that help performance, and generally improve the performance of the game overall with many of these patches. However, we do have many more improvements coming to reduce PC, and more specifically GPU utilization, as well as more things you will be able to adjust to fit your specific setups. Expect to see these additions added every now and then as we release patches.
Stonehaven
Stonehaven is the human capital. A massive city about 4x larger than Terafell. For anyone who hasn’t heard yet, Terafell is actually the halfway point of Chapter 1 in The Merchant’s Guide, and not intended to be the starting zone for you. Once we are done with the first half of Chapter 1 and it is fully incorporated into the game, your starting location will be the Marketplace in Stonehaven.
What comes with that? So many things! To touch on a few, you will be able to upgrade your own shop in many more ways, as well as other buildings such as an Inn, a Bank, Stables, a Colosseum and more.
Stonehaven will be a massive new home, and bring a whole new start to Merchant’s Guide, and we cannot wait to show you the features tied to every one of these buildings and locations!
Always remember, we encourage you to join the discussion on Discord and follow our Twitter for the most up to date notifications and status updates!
Thank you all for your continued feedback, reports and discussions around The Merchant’s Guide to the Kingdom! Every bit of communication from each of you is contributing in major ways to the future of this game, and we cannot wait until you see what we have in store!
-Devs