Lots of updates since I last posted. We've sort of been circling the issue of a full campaign mode for Deadhold in one way or another since the early days of the project. The TLDR is we are going to do a full story driven campaign and we will probably push our launch date back to give ourselves more time to get the first part of that ready for Early Access.

This has been a bit of slippery slope for us trying to balance our resources and knowing what we could do really well. Deadhold is two pieces, there's the multiplayer side where you can hop in and compete with your friends or others in stuff like deathmatch and king of the hill, and then there is the part we've been calling "Adventure Mode" that is about experiencing light story elements of the Deadhold universe in this sort of blend of "drop in multiplayer coop" for lack of a more elegant way to describe it. Basically when fisj and I sit back and talk we always say "I want to be like playing this scenario against enemies and I want to hop into this with my friends if they are around". So Adventure Mode was sort of spun up as that experience, as a way of playing through maps and scenarios in a way that's re-playable with or without friends. In the last few weeks we've taken the next step to just say we're going to tie all of this together into a real story driven experience with prologue and mission objectives.

Thrown into this mix is another aspect of the game that we have really wanted to develop which is replay-ability. During the campaign, as you play you will be rewarded with drops from NPC's and completion of objectives with runes, gems, and XP points. As you gain experience you'll unlock new spell abilities in the whatever deity you are spec'ed into, and you can use runes and gems to customize those abilities further. Runes and gems will have various quality levels, so playing campaign missions on something like "epic" difficulty will give you higher quality drops.

Part of the ability replay missions is dynamic difficulty and difficulty tiers, where the missions system will increase the difficulty to match your level as you play. Missions you played on lower tiers will be harder as you progress through the difficulty tiers and loot quality increases.

All of this will be combined with secondary mission objectives which may be really difficulty to do without help, and we are having some conversations about having special events with certain Boss's that drop special loot only being around during certain windows of time, fun stuff like that.