First off—thank you! Our recent playtest was a massive success, with almost 4,000 players diving into the game, giving feedback, and helping shape its future. Seeing so many of you play and discuss the game reinforced something important: Shadows of Chroma Tower has the potential to be something truly special.
Since Discord has a character limit on messages, we’re linking our Playtest Results page for those interested in checking out our analysis. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be fixing bugs, addressing balance issues, and implementing missing features based on your feedback.
Today, we want to share a MAJOR DECISION about the game’s direction. We know this won’t appeal to everyone, and it’s not a decision we’ve made lightly. With that in mind, keep discussions respectful, even if this change isn’t aligned with your personal taste. We are always open to feedback as long as it’s respectful.
❌ Shadows of Chroma Tower will no longer be PvPvE
After careful analysis of the playtest data, community feedback, and our long-term goals, we’ve made the difficult (but necessary) decision to remove PvP from dungeons. Shadows of Chroma Tower will now be a fully PvE-focused game. But we’re developing competitive features to maintain intensity and excitement.
❓ Why Are We Removing PvP?
The short answer? Sustainability. We want SoCT to be an enjoyable game to play 5 years from now as much as it will be on release. We don't want to plan it in such a way that, if we end up with 100 daily users eventually, it becomes a barren shell of what it was in its launch week.
The long answer? PvP creates and catalyzes several major issues for a small studio with an even smaller budget such as ours:
1️⃣ The Population Problem (Critical Mass)
A PvPvE game needs a consistently large player base to work. If lobbies aren’t full, PvP encounters feel rare, unfair, or frustrating.
Without tens of thousands of daily players, PvP won’t feel rewarding, and players will leave due to long wait times or empty matches.
In games like this, if we fail to hit that "critical mass" of players, we don’t just disappoint one group of players—we disappoint all of them as we've seen happen to other games in the past:
PvPers get bored due to rare fights.
PvE players feel forced into PvP situations they didn’t want.
Social/exploration-focused players struggle to find trade or co-op partners.
We have analyzed alternatives to our current approach to reduce population segmentation, and I do not have enough characters in this Discord Announcement to go through it. Suffice to say we'd need MILLIONS of dollars to penetrate the market and guarantee we'd reach AND MAINTAIN critical mass population.
I have read your suggestion threads and there's no silver bullet to this issue that is accessible to us as a studio and doesn't infringe our vision for the game. Your suggestions were not ignored and are very much appreciated.
2️⃣ The Cost & Technical Burden of PvP
PvP increases the cost of dedicated servers, anti-cheat, and backend: all of which are already expensive and difficult to maintain for a smaller studio.
Balance costs: With our very limited team size and budget, PvP draws a lot of our game design and programming efforts to ensuring balance among all classes and viable builds.
Development slows down: Every new skill, enemy, or system needs double the balancing and implementation effort.
3️⃣ The Gameplay Limitations under PvPvE
Level design is rigid to prevent unfair PvP fights, spawn rushing and other frustrating scenarios (and even while aware of these issues, solving them is difficult and requires many iterations to get right).
PvE encounters have to be "toned down" to account for spontaneous PvP encounters.
Creativity becomes limited by cost, since everything must be implemented for both PvP and PvE and designed with two very distinct crowds and gameplay styles in mind.
The overarching game design becomes limited and we can't lean into a design that 100% satisfies either crowd. Adding a 5th difficulty, for instance, becomes unfeasible due to population segmentation, adding a new equipment rarity/tier becomes unfeasible due to gear/stat gaps, even more 'innocent' things such as character customization becomes limited (or at the very least more costly) because we need to make sure character classes are very easily distinguishable from one another in PvP encounters.
🔄 What This Means for Gameplay
Dungeons will now be purely PvE, with a focus on challenging, hand-crafted enemy encounters.
Matchmaking remains co-op, with teams of up to 3 players tackling the dungeon together.
More design freedom, allowing for bigger, more unique enemy types, class abilities, PvE mechanics, and maps that wouldn’t have been possible before.
Faster Content Output, since our team will have a lot less to worry about when designing content and it will be MUCH easier to iterate over developed content.
Clearer Class Roles, meaning we get a chance to fulfill our vision of sticking to more traditional RPG party roles - tank, support, DPS. And don't worry, all classes will be viable for solo gameplay.
✅ How We’re Keeping the Competitive Thrill Alive
We know many of you love competition, so we’re shifting that focus towards asynchronous and parallel competitive systems, including:
🏆 Leaderboards – Seasonal Leaderboards like the ones you saw during the January Playtest.
🗺️ Factions & Territories (F&T) – A global war where players conquer and defend territories while the Archmage’s forces fight back. Players may affiliate with one of the two factions and each conquered territory within the tower confers perks and bonuses to players of that faction. We have teased this feature in the past, but if you've missed the teaser, this is not too distinct from Helldivers 2's overarching metagame.
🎮 Parallel-Play PvP - Together with the asynchronous PvP activities (leaderboards and F&T), we will introduce seasonal Parallel-Play PvP activities where there is no direct PvP encounter, but teams compete within the same match to win, being able to disrupt each other's gameplay in various ways. If you have ever played Hero Line Wars or Rabbits vs Sheep in the old Warcraft 3 days, you might have an idea of what we're aiming for.
⚔️ Post-Launch PvP Roadmap – Our future as a studio is hanging on the commercial performance of SoCT. If we achieve an initial success great enough to keep us afloat for another few months, we will dedicate a chunk of our efforts to making PvP gamemodes such as an Arena mode, or, if the success is great enough to mitigate all of the problems previously mentioned, even bring back opt-in PvP to dungeons.
💬 Let Us Know Your Thoughts
This decision wasn’t made lightly, and we know it might be unexpected for some of you. However, we strongly believe this is the best path forward for Shadows of Chroma Tower to thrive long-term.
We’d love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to use any of the discussion channels to express your feelings (in a respectful way), and help us shape this game together.
