Last week saw the premiere of Spires, a 3v3 game mode we’ve been excited to test with our community for some time— as well as several major gameplay changes to healing and fortitude, a wide swath of Eternal Items, and bugfixes to boot. Testing these changes with players is crucial to our game development process, so shoutout to everyone who logged in to help us out! We learned a lot from your feedback, so stay tuned for more updates later this week.
We also started our weekly Community Night event in North America, adding more opportunities to hop in queue and play Arkheron. We kicked off Community Night with our Game Director, our Spires Engineer, and our beloved community member Burb taking a deep dive into the making of Spires and a walkthrough on how to play.
On Friday, we kept the Spires party going with evening queues across Asia, Europe, and North America!
In case you missed it: we switched from our Experimental Client to the Arkheron Playtest Client to prepare for inviting more new players. Check out this post for more information on how to make the switch.
Patch Notes Highlights
Last week we deployed the massive 0.20c patch, followed up with 0.20d. Some highlights were:
Massive changes to health, fortitude, healing, and armor break mechanics.
Corresponding changes to Eternal Relic damage numbers pertaining to armor break mechanics (examples of affected items: Grimwold’s Charged Rings, Edani’s Lunging Hook)
Eternal Relics saw many adjustments across the board.
Voice volume sliders were added for party and team members, accessible via the Party View menu, Social menu, Party and Team channel member menu (new), and Custom Game member menu.
Upon team elimination, players will now see a “placement” message about which place their team finished in, instead of just “Eliminated” text.
For our patch notes scholars, read on here.
Community Night - May 7
On Thursday, we introduced Spires mode on Arkheron’s channels and in our Discord with the help of Game Director Jeremy “SunsetLion” and Engineer Case “someguyordude,” who walked us through the new mode live and chatted about how Spires came to be, the purpose it fulfills, and more! Check it out here.
Spires queues ran in North America from 7 pm PT to 9 pm PT, and afterwards, we hosted some Custom lobbies through our Discord.
Friday Night Fights - May 8
On Friday, we kept the party going with our usual FNF queues, and we brought back the weekly leaderboard for parties of all sizes, tracking everyone’s best 3 Spires runs to determine placement.
Once NA queues came to a close, we ran After Hours Custom Games, hosted by longtime playtester Nethy and his deadly squad.
Take a moment to watch this insane final fight, where playing around the Shrine, Anchor Abilities, Empowered mechanics and the environment made all the difference.
More Community Highlights
ItanoCircus was busy last week covering Patch 0.20c, and sharing his thoughts on Spires!
TwentyFiveEx/rinaruu also went live on YouTube to test out Spires. Check out this incredible highlight reel (with music to set the mood)!