Greetings Wildkeepers,
After a bit over 2 weeks, we're about to close the Alpha Playtest. The results have exceeded our wildest expectations. Almost 2,000 people took part in the playtest, with an average playtime of over 1.5 hours, well over what's typical for a demo in Steam!
A heartfelt thank you to everyone who played.
Show me the data
We collect some anonymous data to better understand the balance of the game. Here are some of the results we got, which we thought were really helpful.
Mission Results
First, let's look at how easy or difficult the game is. This is a very popular topic, on both sides. Excluding the tutorial mission with Korin, which you're expected to lose, here is the data for mission success rates:
Only about 5.7% of players had to repeat the mission with Ophelia and Grampth, which is a reasonable result. We weren't sure about requiring success in that mission, but we felt it helped keep the story more cohesive. The first real mission, Monoliths has a completion rate of 39% - again, pretty good as this is the first real test of skill.
The rest of the missions tend to be in the "maybe it's too easy" category, except for the Rescue Reeza mission, which is unquestionably too hard. Results for some of the later missions (anything after opening the bridges) will be skewed toward players who have played longer and have more skills and possibly upgrades, so that also needs to be considered.
The Wildkeepers
We were surprised that many more people preferred playing with Ophelia over Korin:
I'm sure part of that is due to Ophelia being generally more successful (powerful), with a win rate of 78% compared with 67%. Anecdotally, we've heard of some players who have done really well beating the boss with just Ophelia and no Guardians. While we don't directly recommend it, we're glad the game provides this option.
The Guardians
We were very curious to find out who your favorite Guardians are. According to the data, this is who you picked:
And sorted by pick rate %:
Now, obviously the Guardians who are available at the start of the campaign will be seen by more players, so that's why you see the drop in the first chart after Grampth. Out of those, Grampth seems to be the most popular, with a pick rate of 40%, followed by Smack at 31%. Interestingly, if everything was balanced perfectly you'd expect to see a pick rate of 33%, so that chart looks reasonably good. And I don't blame you for choosing Reeza a whopping 65% of the time - she's awesome!
Besides the data, we also had a survey, where we asked you to choose your favorite Guardians directly. Out of the few people who replied, the most popular was Nipper, followed closely by Coal and Murkle. Interestingly, Grampth and Smack weren't as popular, so maybe people picked them because they're very effective? Definitely food for thought.
We have lots more data, things like Sigil pick rates, currency spending, Guardian win rates, etc, but we felt this was the most relevant information, and we didn't want to fill this page with charts 📈
Content Creators enjoy it too
A number of content creators were also kind enough to stream the playtest. We learn a lot both watching the footage as well as listening to the comments, often very insightful. Here are a few of our favorites (heavily edited for lack of space, please go to YouTube to find many more wonderful playthroughs of the playtest):
An unusual thumbnail 😅
And if you speak German or Japanese (we'll localize to many languages, including those, before full release):
Feedback and changes
Lastly for today, I want to go over some of the most common feedback we've heard, either through the form (thank you if you filled it out) or through our Discord.
Overall, we're really pleased with how the game has been received. It seems you really connected with our vision to take the Bullet Heaven genre further by adding the Guardians and some ingredients from RPGs. Thank you all for your kind words, it really means the world to us.
Of course, there are many things that we're already hard at work improving. Let's talk about a few of them.
- Level Up: Some of you mentioned that stat upgrades are not very interesting and we agree. We're reworking the Level Up system a bit to make it more varied, and incorporating Sigils in the mix to add more build possibilities and synergies.
- Story: Our goal is to create an immersive world, and we felt that having a bit of story helped make it seem more alive. We do agree that the cutscenes in the playtest didn't reach the quality that we wanted - part of that is they were missing lots of animations, which is why Ophelia is always pointing her bow at everyone! Moving forward we're going to re-evaluate what we can realistically deliver and we'll likely delay most of the story cutscenes until full release, as we don't think story is a good fit for iteration during Early Access.
- Dash: Yeah, the dash in this build doesn't feel great, and you don't really need it. We already knew that, and we're fixing it.
- Lots of other little things, like balance issues, missing polish, UI confusion and quality of life suggestions. This feedback is gold for us, we have a long list and we're checking it twice.
I think that's it for today - this is already long enough.
We couldn't be more excited to continue to work on this game as we get closer to our spring release date. In the meantime, Happy Holidays to everyone and thanks again for helping us make Wildkeepers Rising the best it can be.
Sergio.