A Protean Check-In With Elandrian
Defenders Assemble! Sound the horns of Dragonfall! I come bearing beans!
Well, I have some beans, but I also wanted to talk about the recent launch of Protean Shift. It’s been a busy past two weeks for us here at Trendy and it’s great to finally get the expansion into everyone's hands. We’ve been scouring the forums and our various social platforms for comments and feedback, and it’s tremendously valuable for helping us shape what’s coming soon in upcoming patches. I also want to give you guys a glimpse at the future of the game as well, so read everything for all the juicy details.
In response to feedback (and just our planning in general), we have a bundle of changes, new content, and bug fixes coming soon. I’m not going to give any real time-frames… our goal is to get new changes and content out as quick as possible for everyone, but we’re a tiny team and we’re working as fast as we can! Here’s a quick list of some of our targets:
Short Term
- Bug Fixes (duh.)
- Buyback Functionality
- This is currently in testing/iteration and we want to get it out soon. We really want to make sure there’s a way to get back items you’ve sold by accident. It will most likely just save some of the items you’ve been selling until you leave the Town or Tavern.
- Better Sorting/Filtering of the Inventory
- One thing we want to improve is your ability to find your good items in an easier way. This will take a little more work, but we’re going to try to give you better sorting of item types, as well as possible sorting by your strong MOD rolls… or should I say “those big 5/5 Qualibeans.”
- This also might include some changes to help find Shards and manage them better, but that might require additional time as well.
- Materials Vault Tabs?
- This is something we’re investigating too. We saw some players talking about this so we’re looking at making a section of the vault be able to support bigger stacks of materials and connect to all the places you want to spend them. We’re aiming for this to be a “short term” add… but it might end up taking a little longer.
Medium Term
- Onslaught Changes
- I’m not going to go into TOO many details, as it’s still being discussed among the Design team… but I will say we have some goals for these changes. We want to make it easier for players to play and progress together. We want to make the floors more significant to progress between. We want to make it easier to make meaningful progression and less punishing. (Aka. Three map floors might go the way of Skill Spheres.)
- Ancient Power Changes
- These are going to be some changes to make it fit more in line with the Onslaught changes.
- We’re also looking at making the resets more forgiving as you gain Ancient Power too. Again, not going to go into specifics as this is still an active discussion… but we ARE reading/discussing all the various opinions from the community and our testing teams.
Longer Term (But maybe shorter than you expect?)
- Better party functionality.
- We’re trying to add more social functionality here… Things like better party leader knowledge in matchmaking, inviting/kicking from parties, a friends list? There’s a lot on the schedule to add here, we’re going to get to as much as possible.
- Increased Multiplayer Incentive
- We want people to be enjoying Dungeon Defenders together, but we know there’s not a lot of reasons to do so at the moment. We’re aiming at changing this, while still keeping solo-play viable.
- Better Matchmaking.
- This is another laundry list of changes, but we want it to be easier for people to play together and stay together. We also want to make the flow to get into gameplay much easier and with less interruptions and disconnects.
- Guilds
- Secrets...
Now all these updates and changes are well and good, but we’ve also seen a certain desire from one or two community members. It’s been spoken of only occasionally… and by so few that we weren’t sure if it was important or not to everyone...
/endsarcasm
Our heroes will be receiving some calls to action to various regions of Etheria very soon. The first region our heroes will be heading to will be a somewhat familiar location. The distress call will come from a certain coastal region...
Just for some extra beanage at the end here: There will be a new region to go to, new things to get, and possibly some new threats to face…
We appreciate all our players sticking with us as we continue to evolve and release our vision for Year Two of Dungeon Defenders II. We couldn’t have done any of this without all of your help.
Thank you from all of us here at Trendy Entertainment.
Sincerely,
Colin “Elandrian” Fisher