Howdy oh Guardians.
We’re finally here. Or rather, the Rogue’n’Roll Steam public playtest is finally here.
The update will officially land on all platforms in one or two weeks from now.
But here are the highlights of this version and the complete patch-notes.
Before diving into it though, we just wanted to say a few things about the changes.
The Rogue’n’Roll update brings changes to some of the systems you’ve been accustomed to such as cells, weapon categories and perks. We haven’t talked about it in our devblogs because they were still WIP and we were intensively testing those to make sure they were improving the Roboquest experience.
We think those changes were necessary to the game in its current state but also to continue healthily expanding it. We’ll talk in detail about the reasons and consequences in the ‘highlights’ section below.
We hope you’ll give those changes a chance and test them before making up your mind about whether you like them or not. We’ll be following your feedback on that, but please note that the new systems are in their first iteration phase and that we will keep improving them.
That being said, let's move on to the real deal, the good stuff, the big guns.
Note: Anyone may access the public playtest by going into its Steam Library, right-clicking Roboquest then going intro properties, hop over the 'Beta' tab and select the 'rqtestbuild' branch. It will start downloading the playtest version (note that your progress is separated between the normal and the playtest branch, you start the playtest with enough Wrenches to purchases every basecamp upgrades and you have everything unlocked, if the playtest branch doesn't appear in your Roboquest properties, please restart Steam).
Cross-Platform
You may now invite brobots from other platforms to your game by sending them your session ID (found in the multiplayer menu, use the ‘copy’ button). Your brobot will then have to enter this ID in the multiplayer menu to join your game. This will work regardless of what region you’re playing in.
The friend list currently does not support displaying friends from other platforms, but that’s something we’re working on.
Please note that this is the first iteration of this system and that you may encounter problems, we’ll be monitoring that and working on it. Implementing such a feature was a hard task for our studio and we aren’t unable to extensively try things out. We will especially keep an eye on it during the public playtest, so please send us F10 feedback whenever you’re encountering issues.
Public Matchmaking
You may now search for brobots directly in the multiplayer menu of the game using the ‘quick play’ button. The matchmaking will find another player looking for a brobot in your selected region and let you play with one another. For now the search criteria are completely wide and won’t take into account things such as basecamp progression (and you may be matched with players with a different progression level than yours), but that’s something we’ll be looking to improve.
Looking for brobots outside of your region will likely result in high-latency games. The available regions are as follows: North America, South America, Asia, Oceania, Africa and Europe and you can change directly in the multiplayer menu.
Like the previous system, this was something that was hard to implement for us and that will likely require updates to be fully operational and pleasing to use. Please, report us any issue using the F10 in-game report system if you were to come across any.
Note: You might currently be stuck in a state where the game does not manage to generate a session ID for you (infinite session loading displayed in the multiplayer menu), making you unable to either host or use the public matchmaking system. Restarting your game will fix that issue.
Weapons Update
We have removed the weapon categories from the game (and relocated the increase of power coming from category bonuses to level-ups).
This was one of our most ancient systems (if not the most) and it was primarily used to help create a sense of build and to distinguish classes from one another (one would be using precision when another would be using demolition in most builds for example).
But with the evolution of other systems and time passing, it started to grow as an obsolete and limiting system. The perk system was also becoming the real factor of build-orientation and class distinction and the category system started to feel like a burden for the game and for the run diversity: playing one class meant playing the same weapons over and over.
In addition, the item selection process (choosing a category to buff) was never a compelling choice to make for you, regardless of how we implemented it (and some of you might remember, we tried many things).
As a result, the category system was no longer useful or bringing anything to the table and we simply removed it.
Doing so makes us able to more easily implement new weapons, new classes and makes sure a greater amount of loot is viable for your current run (effectively increasing run diversity). This also made us able to make you loot a bit less weapons considering more weapons than before are viable for your current build and consequently remove the weapon drops on enemies (which was a system breaking the combat flow).
But then you might be wondering, what about the items?
Perk & Item Merging
And that would be a good question.
With the removal of weapon categories, items no longer make any sense in their previous format, as they were made to increase your stats in different categories.
So we removed them as well. Or rather, we merged the item and the perk systems.
But in order to explain that, we had to talk about a few of the issues we were facing with the previous perk system.
We identified two issues within the perk system, the first one (and primary one) was that each run felt the same as you were able to follow the exact same build almost every run (to a degree where not being able to was feeling unfair and frustrating). This was going against the replayability of the game and fixing this issue will increase run diversity and make trying out a new run more compelling.
Another issue was that the build diversity was pretty low despite the fact that creating and designing new perks on our side was pretty hard. This was a very limiting factor for us in case we wanted to add new classes to the game.
Looping back to items, what does it have to do with perks?
You now get to loot perks whenever you would previously get to find items and you get to stack up to 15+ perks in the same run to make up your build. You no longer get perks when you level-up.
But we needed far more perks than before for a system like this to work. So we created a lot of perks by extracting every bit of interesting content we had, from perks to perk upgrades and we splitted them into two categories: class-specific perks and ‘neutral’ perks that any class is able to loot. And we increased the diversity to up to 50+ different perks.
This new system makes it easier to create new classes for multiple reasons, the main one being that a class is far less static and constrained than before due to the removal of the categories and the simplification of perks as a system.
However, we’ve already identified one issue with this new system: classes feel less unique than before. Don’t worry though, we’re on it and we’re looking to improve it in the short and mid-term.
Health Flow Rework
We’ve reworked health flow yet again.
The previous system had several issues:
• Taking damage from the last enemy in an encounter made it impossible to regenerate your health (as there weren’t any more enemy left to pick-up cells from)
• You were recovering health at a too high rate with every other healing effects
• The high healing possibilities made it so the only way to ‘lose’ was to take a very high amount of damage at once. This forced us to increase enemy damage, but that’s not really pleasing for a roguelite where it’s more interesting to slowly but regularly lose health when making mistakes, up to the point where any damage would kill you
• It was pretty hard to create interesting yet not overpowered healing effect
• In multiplayer, receiving heals from your brobot picking up cells kinda felt weird when you weren’t even around
We tackled those issues by preventing the damage bar from fading and by splitting the damage between permanent and temporary damage.
Basically, when taking damage, half is stored into the ‘scratch damage’ bar and half is taken off your health.
The scratch damage no longer fades over time (like described above) and gathering pick-ups from enemies ‘repairs your scratch damage’ (restores health contained within the scratch damage bar).
This allows us to create many ‘repair scratch damage’ effects which effectively heal you without being overpowered while still slowly grinding your health when making mistakes (the Repair-o-Bot still restores a part of your missing health). This also makes us able to better control enemy damage to avoid ‘unfair’ spikes of damage.
Experience System
This was one of the most debated features in Roboquest and many of you request us to change it. That made us think long and hard about it.
The idea of forcing players to gather cells was initially to encourage going forward.
But after our internal analysis, we spotted a few issues:
• Gathering the cells felt more like a zigzag movement than a forward movement
• We can encourage player to go forward through other game mechanics such as weapons, perks, affixes and health flow
• It wasn’t letting you play the way you want
• A lot of players did not gather the cells and that was slowly making them underpowered, consequently increasing the time-to-kill enemies (which feels really awful in Roboquest)
So we changed it: destroying enemies will now automatically grant you experience.
Max’s Crew
Max just added a group of friendly robots to help you through your runs.
These friendbots can craft weapons, reroll affixes, sell you special types of items among other things.
Though they need ‘Powercells’ for that. ‘Powercells’ is a new in-run currency that can be found in challenge rooms and is granted as a reward at the end of each level. Later down the road, it will also be tied to the Elite enemy system.
This group of friendbots replaces the old ‘console’ system. You can upgrade your basecamp to encounter more friendbot in your runs. You can also trade ‘Wrenches’ for ‘Powercells’ once your Basecamp is fully upgraded.
The main idea behind the removal of the ‘consoles’ was to allow us to add a ‘shop’ system right at the beginning of the game (which we couldn’t previously since they were costing ‘Wrenches’). In addition, the simplification of the perk, weapon and item systems makes it easier to implement such shops.
And that’s it for the highlights of the Rogue’n’Roll update.
There were a lot of changes and we would love your help regarding balancing (whether it’d be about weapons, perks or anything else) during this playtest. We thank you in advance for everyone involved.
In addition, we might have missed a few changes in the patch-note, if you happen to find one of them, please let us know and we’ll add it before the update officially lands.
On a final note, we’d like to warn you that all languages in the game aside from English aren’t translated yet (and maybe for an extended duration).
See you in the public playtest Guardians!