Hello again everyone. I hope you've all been having a good start to your spooky month. This week has been stressful, but rewarding! While the team has been away focusing on catching up with life, I've been pounding away at Verdant and been making some really great progress. At the same time I was able to bust out the Hallowing Event and develop an entire Public Dungeon with a bunch of new loot. Anyways, this week we have a lot to go over it so I won't yap here too long.
Is ManaSoul Dead?
There has been some minor discussion and comments here and there about ManaSoul's current player counts so I just want to delve into that a bit and talk about game development, why things are the way they are right now, and how/why they will improve in the future.
No. ManaSoul is not dead. It hasn't even been born yet. Despite what the larger gaming community may think thanks to hundreds of publishers and games abusing it, Early Access is NOT a channel for you to release your basically finished game and have a shield for glaring gameplay issues. Early Access is intended as a relationship between the core players who are interested in your idea, and you as a developer. When working on such an ambitious project such an indie mmo, its foolish to think that you would just get everything right on the first try, and by developing so much of your game privately before it touches player's hands, you leave yourself open to unfixable core problems later down the line. We are striving to use Early Access for its intended purpose. To actively develop the game alongside players and use their feedback to shape the development process from Alpha all the way through to a final realized product.
This has setbacks however that we were more than aware of when going in. Most players DO have the expectation that an Early Access game should be mostly 100% completed with just some small jank. Many players when booting up ManaSoul for the first time are not necessarily prepared for a game that is still in fully active development, nor are many players as interested in helping test games as they are just playing a finished one. We were fully aware that during Early Access our numbers would be low.
"But you said that we would have a bunch more players for 0.3!" You would be correct, we definitely did not pull as big of traction as we expected from the 0.3 push, and that actually ended up being a very good thing. While I can't speak for the entire development team, I at least was extremely excited and bouncing off the walls with all of our progress, new features, tools, and developer-side stuff, as well as our new levelling formula and other things. But what most players want is a complete experience, and with an MMO that includes a replayable endgame, which 0.3 completely lacked.
As for *why* 0.3 didn't pull in many players, there are a few factors that we'll be working on as we approach full release. 1) We need a new trailer of a professional quality that showcases the best ManaSoul has to offer. 2) We need to plan a coordinated advertisement push alongside a Steam visibility round and let people know about ManaSoul. And 3) We need to streamline the onboarding experience to better acquaint long time RPG enjoyers with some of ManaSoul's more unique systems and provide a more clear path for new players through the levelling experience.
We understand that for testers it can kill some of the enjoyment of the game when not many people are online, or you're even the only one online, so we don't want to just do nothing until full release, and as such we will be doing another Steam Visibility Round for the release of 0.4 in which ManaSoul will finally have both a fully realized levelling experience, but also a fully realized endgame gameplay loop that can keep players having fun for months, leaving us with time to develop new content without leaving you guys hanging in a big content draught.
Alchemy Is Here
We've been wrestling with the idea of crafting for quite some time now. While crafting and gathering are RPG staples, ManaSoul isn't your traditional RPG and it always felt quite strange picturing a wizard with his big grey beard and impressive hat to be swinging away a pickaxe at some rocks. Not only that but Crafting in general is typically hugely expensive in terms of development time. We wanted to do it right and in a way that wasn't overbearing on future development time budgets.
Enter Alchemy. A simple to understand crafting system that can easily be maintained and expanded by the development team in the future, as well as offering more rewards to players and things to chase without being haunted by that one weapon you just cant roll. Here is a quick bullet point breakdown of how Alchemy works.
- Players can visit Alchemists in various towns and locations to perform Alchemy
- Each Alchemy Station contains different recipes to craft
- All crafts require a combination of Ore/Lumber/Fabric/Herbs + Gold + Prismatic Materials
- Certain Alchemists possess "Advanced Recipes". All Advanced Recipes require Lumin per craft
- Ore/Lumber/Fabric/Herbs come in all rarities, indicated by a colored outline
- Ore/Lumber/Fabric/Herbs can be acquired from a wide range of sources
- Most enemies will only drop 1 type of material, such as only Fabric, or only Ore
- Some recipes also require certain Monster Trophies as reagents
- Some recipes may have a chance to fail, consuming your materials and cancelling the craft
Alchemy will be launching alongside Patch 0.4 with Verdant Boughs.
Delve and Dungeon Update
I believe that ManaSoul's PvE content has become a bit too "hardcore" skewed. I have played MMOs for a very long time, both 2d and 3d, and have been really sweaty at quite a few. It comes naturally to me and I enjoy really masochistic challenges and difficulty. Because of this I feel as though I have left a gap in the available content for the more midcore or casual players. This is where Delves were supposed to come in but the comparison between rewards for a player clearing Delves and Dungeons was far too great. There just really wasn't any reason to run them.
Going forward we are going to be shifting focus a bit from Dungeons to Delves and try to make them far more fleshed out, fun, and rewarding. But we're not just going to be vague about it, here is our gameplan for improving Delves:
- Going forward Level 50 Delves will be larger and take more time to complete
- Delves are balanced around 2 players, but you may enter with up to 4
- Going forward all Level 50 Delves will have 3 bosses
- All Bosses in Delves will now drop loot
- All Mobs in Delves will now drop loot
- Secret paths can be found within certain Delves
- Delves now contain special Chests that can only be opened with a special key obtained via Alchemy
- Dungeons will still release, though there will be less of them, typically 1 per major zone release
- Delves now have more mechanics, but are not as punishing as Dungeons
And thats all for this week. See you guys with hopefully a less massive wall next week!