Dear Queens and Kings,
The new level, Wildbach, is out now!
You find yourself in a lush jungle with various veins of water throughout. Everything seems a bit larger than usual, and not just the trees, but also the creatures. Perhaps that is why nobody has dared to set foot here in a while? Wait, was that a pair of eyes in that tree? Many think you’re a fool to settle here, but that’s not among the things that would stop you from trying.
A Mini-Map!
We added yet another map to the game (two new maps in one update if you will): a mini-map! It's been one of the most asked for features and here it is. From now on you’ll have a full overview over the entire battlefield in the bottom right corner of your screen during the night.
New Building: The Temple!
Which gods will you befriend? Be wise! Wildbach also features a new building, the Temple, granting you temporary buffs and spells for one night only. You can use it up to 3 times per match and it gets both more powerful *and* more expensive every time.
We want you to craft your own strategies and think the temple opens up some awesome new possibilities in that regard! It is the first building with a whopping 6 upgrade choices:
With its temporary upgrades the temple should also help to ease some difficulty spikes within a level if you struggle with specific waves. We hope you‘re going to enjoy it. Go wild!
New Weapon and more!
With the new map also comes a new weapon. We don’t want to spoil it all just yet, but we’ll give you the name: Falchion & Traps (We almost called it the “Hunting Kit” which should give you a rough idea, hehe.)
Here is the full list of all the new content:
- New Map: Wildbach
- New Building: Temple
- New Weapon: Falchion & Traps
- Added Minimap
- 8 New Enemy Types
- 6 New Perks
- 1 New Mutator
The new content has been added to the Eternal Trials game mode as well.
Announcing Our Release Roadmap!
As always, we want to talk about what’s next and be as transparent with you as we can. We are slowly nearing the end of our early access period and are aiming for a full release hopefully this year!
We’ve deliberately never published any specific roadmaps during the Early Access period of the game to be able to adjust to your feedback as best as possible. However the months leading up to the full release are going to be a bit more structured. We want you to know what to expect from them and would love to hear what you think. Here’s what we’ve planned:
Progression System & Tutorial Update (Upcoming)
Thronefall has grown tremendously since the Early Access release, but the tutorial and progression system is still in its original state. This causes a couple of issues for new players:
- As the tutorial does not teach any of the quality of life features (such as the select army hotkeys)many players miss out on those awesome features.
- Since all the perks, weapons and mutators grew quite a bit in numbers, unlocking all of them feels very grindy now. A lot of players make it through the campaign while only unlocking a fraction of the content, which is not what we intended.
The tutorial needs an update, that’s for certain. The bigger change though will likely be the new progression system and we’d love to hear your thoughts on that:
Our current idea is to remove the level grinding from Thronefall completely and just unlock perks and weapons every time you beat a campaign level. Most of our players are here to play through the campaign and not much more (which is fine!), so we want to make sure you can unlock all of the tools you need without asking you to replay content if you don’t want to. If you’re into optimizing your strategy and replaying the levels over and over again that’s also great, and having access to all the content at an earlier point will hopefully open the highscore hunt up for more people to enjoy as well!
We feel like these changes will make the game more beginner friendly while also fitting our design philosophy of respecting the time of our players. We’re giving you an early heads up on this now so you can have a say in how exactly these changes should best look like.
Small Balancing Patch
After that we would love to do another quick balancing patch to hopefully address some common pain points. In general we think we might have gone a bit too wild with nerfs in the past and would love to do a bit of an everything-buff to make upgrade and perk choices feel a bit more impactful again, especially the currently underpowered ones.
And That’s It!
That’s all our plans for the remaining Early Access Period. After those updates we’ll put our heads down for a while and create 2-3 more levels that we want to publish with the full release of Thronefall. During this period we won’t be publishing regular updates, but rather do some (open) beta testing of the new content. Check out our discord for more on that!
We also want to be absolutely transparent with our post release plans upfront: The development of Thronefall has been a wild ride. We’re just two people making this game, and the last 2 years have been exciting, incredibly fun and very demanding. We love Thronefall with all of our heart, but we also really need a break. The end of the Early Access period will also mark the end of Thronefall’s active development. Once Thronefall is fully released we’ll be taking some time off to replenish our energies. After that we’re keen to further explore the waters of making games and dive into exciting new projects.
As always, thanks so much for all your love and continued support! Thanks for helping us make Thronefall what it is now (and what it will be on launch day).
All the best,
Jonas and Paul