Hi, Everybody!
We’re kicking off a pretty big week at Spiritwalk - we’ve got some major changes coming to the game this week in our patch, which is tentatively scheduled to drop on Thursday instead of our typical Tuesday update. We’re working on a number of long term progression systems, so we wanted to secure a few days of extra testing to ensure a smooth rollout.
Incoming: Shardfall System Revisions
The changes to the Shardfall system we alluded to last week are expected to come in our upcoming patch. In order to address the problems we’ve heard from players around unlocking vaults, we’ve decided to detach the central progression system of the game (Unlocking Vaults) from the House System. Here’s what you can expect:
- Your House affiliations will be unchanged.
- All players will have their own Shardfalls.
- Shards will have 3 Pylons, consisting of a Play Games Pylon, Win Games Pylon, and a Unique Pylon that will encourage unique strategies.
- Pylons, if triggered, will unlock one of 9 seals on the vault. Three can be triggered by a single game. This replaces the percentage based completion system.
- House play continues to be very important to us, and will be reintroduced in a future patch.
All in all, we are hoping this system addresses the very consistent feedback we’ve received on the existing system, particularly around the inconsistency in the rate of unlocking vaults, difficulty for new players, and situations where players were not being appropriately rewarded for their efforts.
For more context and information, please check out the VOD of our most recent Dev Stream.
Here’s a link for precisely when we dive into the details: April 20 Dev Stream @ 17:30
Incoming: Rewards System Enhancements
We’re introducing some new systems with this patch as well, also targeting the rate players are acquiring rewards and loot in the game. Expect to see these new systems in play:
- An explicit reward for your First Win of the Day.
- Bonus loot for your First Vault of the Day.
- Three rewards that can be unlocked on a weekly basis by acquiring wins.
- A suite of in-game achievements which drop rewards and unlock steam achievements.
Previously, we only had the notion of a First Win of the Day, which impacted your vault opening in inconsistent ways and could be wasted on nearly unlocked vaults. With its overhaul and the addition of these new systems, there should be a lot more loot to earn in Shardbound, and new players should have a much easier time building up their collections. Note that these systems will replace the initial grant of 30 boxes we are currently issuing upon completion of the tutorial, and should amount to much greater total rewards.
Will plan on adding additional achievements over time in our patches, so be sure to let us know which ones you enjoy the most!
Hunter will be firing up the Spiritwalk Dev Stream at 4pm on Thursday to chat, answer your questions, and possibly try to farm himself some achievements himself! Join us here!
Incoming: Packrunner Revisions (Part 2)
Juro and his Primal friends will continue to see some reworks and new content this week as well.
Exactly what’s coming with this week’s patch isn’t locked down as of the writing of this update, but you can certainly expect something to be dropping each week (from tuning to full reworks) for the foreseeable future.
In other news, the Eagle Primal has been redubbed the Splinterwing Primal, gaining its art treatment and new gameplay around dealing double damage to wounded minions.
Fan Art Friday
We’re huge fans of Shardbound Fan Art! We will be featuring our favorite piece that gets posted on Twitter this week with the hashtag #ShardboundFanArt, and its creator will receive 10 Card Boxes. Artists have until 10AM PDT on Friday to post and tag their submissions. Good luck!
And More…
While the team has been very focused for the most part on the Shardfall System and Reward updates, some additional things are in flight. The engineers are continuing to work on client stability, and will be ushering a host of backend changes to our next build. These include a fix to some installation issues keeping players from getting into the game, and some disconnects that are periodically causing trouble at the end of matches. Also, we’re excited to get some of the digital rewards out to our Kickstarter backers this week!
Remember to join us on social media, hop in our discord or subreddit, and catch our weekly dev streams. Have a great week, and hope to see you in Shardbound!
- Your friends at Spiritwalk