Greetings, Ravens!
Wow, it’s been a hectic month! We’re glad today to take some time to retrospect on the Fall of Avalon update that came out last month, as well as to chat about our short/medium-term plans for Ravenswatch.
But first and foremost, how are you doing? :)
We’ve got quite a bit of things to tackle in this dev diary, here’s a summary of the subjects you can read about in detail below:
- Crazy positive response to the Fall of Avalon update, thank you!
- Reacting to feedback and data from the community
- What do YOU think of the Custom Game Modes?
- Balancing patch incoming?
- What about version 1.0?
The Madness of the Fall of Avalon Update
I think “Madness” pretty much sums up everything about the Fall of Avalon update. The content, the reception, the numbers, the balancing (😈)... We thought BIG with the update and BIG we received!
The Fall of Avalon update is the largest iteration ever made to Ravenswatch’s Early Access and we didn’t even plan it this way.
Triple-i Showcase
We were approached by our friends at Evil Empire for the Triple-i Initiative, and seized the opportunity to make a big boom! After all, the Fall of Avalon update was already shaping up to be the bulkiest of our Early Access, so it was the perfect opportunity to introduce Ravenswatch to new people. We knew that many players were also waiting for more content before finally taking the plunge into Reverie's nightmares, and we were delighted to see players' positive opinions on the update.
We enjoyed the event very much (soooo many cool games were revealed) and we hope you did too. You can see the full replay here:
Madness in numbers!
With 5,940 concurrent active players the week of the launch, the Fall of Avalon update is simply our greatest release since the beginning of the Early Access! We know that it can look pale compared to some recent successes on Steam, but that’s still a very impressive number for our small team, and for a game that has been in EA for more than a year. And the icing on the cake was going from Mostly Positive to Very Positive on the overall score of the game on Steam! The team is very proud and grateful, thank you all!
Many of you also joined us on Twitch for the official Fall of Avalon update showcase. It was a great moment that we loved sharing with you. If you're curious about the format, you can find some of the replays (Q&A, interviews, gameplay) on our YouTube channel, or follow us on Twitch to not miss the next ones!
Looking at the data & balancing matters
Here’s a cool infographic of in-game stats, dating back to this month:
Custom Game Modes
There's one subject that doesn't stand out in this infographic, and that's Custom Game Modes! Here's a short video explaining this new feature, which we shared at the AG French Direct this week:
https://youtu.be/_NVT6QtLZ_Y
With the additions of Custom Modes and Challenges, we aimed to give a breath of fresh air to players who wanted to rediscover the game from a different angle. They make Ravenswatch more accessible for new/chill players, let you test out some funky combinations, and can also provide an extra challenge for hardcore players.
What do you think of Custom modes? Our in-game stats show that 13% of games (of all difficulty levels) use at least 1 Game Modifier, and we think that's already a pretty cool number! We'd love to hear more opinions on the matter so that we can improve the system and add new modifiers. If you've got a bit of time to spare, here's a questionnaire you can fill out.
Did we talk about Madness already?
On the topic of balancing, we’ve spent a considerable amount of time reading your feedback, watching videos and live streams, and checking our data. We spotted quite a few interesting things!
We're happy with the balancing for the "Adventure" difficulty mode. The game is globally more fun to play because it’s more permissive.
We did note, however, that Avalon's enemies were oversized in terms of damage, and were very hard on players arriving at Chapter 3. A rebalancing of their damage according to the difficulty modes is planned. On the same note, and for a healthier feeling of progression within a run, the Master Nightmares in Chapters 2 (Faceless) and 3 (Claws) are also oversized in terms of resistance. This is harder to notice, as there are currently too many ways to "break" the game. But for players who don't make builds optimally, these bosses are too powerful.
Balancing with your feedback
Our main takeaway from watching your videos and studying your feedback is that access to Magical Objects is too important in the game: players are picking up more objects than we estimated (especially in the higher difficulties, or for hardcore players who know the game's meta inside out). The result is a feeling of power that greatly exceeds the game's level. It's also combined with the fact that players have too many ways of controlling the game's RNG (with the abundance of rerolls) and that build synergies (talents, power-ups, items…) that should be exceptional to do aren't all that exceptional. This detail detracts greatly from the game's replayability, as it becomes too easy to reproduce epic situations and feel overpowered. We feel that we’ve lost a little of the challenge in the game's higher difficulties.
A more minor issue is the fact that there are major imbalances in the crit chances and crit damage builds. This results in certain build configurations literally flying in terms of damage figures that unbalance the game dramatically 😄
There you go! We got a bit candid here in our analysis of the feedback received from the Fall of Avalon update. We hope you enjoy this kind of design-nerd talk as much as we do, and that it helps the community understand the changes we make in the balancing of the game. Currently, we’re testing out a few solutions to improve the feeling of being “overpowered” without sacrificing the fun and satisfaction of going crazy with the builds. As mentioned before, we quite like the current challenge of the Adventure mode so we’re looking more into having an economy that complexifies the other difficulty modes. We’ll share more on this matter when we’ll be confident about our changes!
Road to 1.0
Now what? It’s already been a month since the release of the Fall of Avalon update.
Most of the team has been focusing on version 1.0 and the console versions, and this has become our priority. We want to focus all our efforts on finishing this Early Access development by providing the community with a polished final experience.
We've got lots of ideas to implement and lots of player suggestions to incorporate, so it's going to take some time. Don't worry if we become a little quieter and less regular in releasing content/patches, we’ll share our progress along the way. We are considering releasing a balancing patch in the coming weeks, but that would slow down our 1.0. progress, so we're still debating the idea! Stay tuned for that!
Here’s a reminder of our plans for the full release of Ravenswatch:
- Final confrontation against a special someone…
- A new Hero joins the Ravenswatch!
- Achievements
- Skins
- Vocal chat
- Consoles: PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch
- And more we’re hushing for now…
Check our updated Roadmap below:
That is it for today’s Dev diary, we hope you enjoyed this long read. You can always ask your questions or share your feedback on the Steam forums or our official Discord. Talk to you soon!
- The Passtech Team 🍉
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