Hello, Rangers!
Today we’re kicking off a new series of weekly updates that are designed to start your week with some deeper insight into what’s going on here at Spiritwalk Games. If you’ve joined our official Discord channel or caught our weekly livestreams, you know we take the idea of transparent, community-informed development very seriously. Hopefully this series gives you an easy one-stop shop for news on Shardbound and what we’ve got in development.
Shardfall System Revisions
We’ve gotten a lot of fantastic feedback over the past month on our most recent version of the Shardfall system, and now that we’ve seen how it’s impacted by player account progression, we’re ready to address some of that feedback with system changes. Some problems we’ve heard:
- Huge swings in power rewarded by matches make Vault progress frustrating and confusing
- Enemy concedes can be punishing by robbing you of Pylon triggers
- Some Shards are much harder than others to power, especially for new players
- Matches which generate a lot of power (such as those where First Win of the Day triggers) can feel wasted when a vault is nearly complete
All of this feedback is fantastic, agreed with, and exactly why we like to release our systems to you guys as early as possible. Expect some changes to the Shardfall system to start coming as early as next week, targeting these issues and more.
Alex and Hunter will be discussing the revisions on our weekly Dev Livestream on Thursday the 20th at 4pm PDT. Join us at https://www.twitch.tv/spiritwalkgames.
Packrunner Reworks
Content designer Dan (“Dibs”) Gibson isn’t happy with the cohesiveness of the Packrunner faction’s playstyles, and community sentiment suggests that the faction is slightly underpowered with the exception of a few highly specific yet powerful combos. Since we’re prioritizing the mechanics of play over pure numerical balance at this point in development, it’s a great opportunity to dig in and make some significant changes instead of applying some stat adjustments.
In some cases, cards will be replaced by entirely new ones. Your ownership of cards (such as Beloved Trainer) will simply transfer over to ownership of a replacement unit. Expect new and adjusted cards to better support the faction’s “win through swarming the board” playstyle and also have some stronger unique minion effects.
Check out the patch notes as they drop tomorrow for the details of how these first batch of Packrunner cards are changing, and please keep slinging feedback our way.
Performance Optimizations
The engineers have continued to focus on work to improve client performance and stability. This week’s patch is an additional step to address framerate issues on lower end GPUs, and you can expect work to continue for at least the next few weeks as we keep making incremental progress on this front. As always, please keep us apprised* on how these updates impact your Shardbound experience!
And More…
Your friendly neighborhood Quartermaster will be receiving the art treatment in this week’s patch. You should expect to see a decent amount of the combat veteran in your games, as he’s one of the top 3 most utilized non-basic cards in the game.
Other things going on in the studio include enhancements to to card art, design revisions on new map layouts, and getting our footing around new community initiatives like this weekly update! We hope it proves informative.
Look forward to all of this work rolling out over the next series of patches.
We hope you have a great week, and we’ll see you Shardbound!
- Your friends at Spiritwalk
PS:
* Keep in touch with us during the week through:
Our Steam Community Hub (Right here)
Our delightful Discord
The Shardbound Subreddit
Our Twitter Feed
Our Facebook Page