Hello Warriors!
Open alpha was a very important milestone for the team, enabling us to run our servers for the longest period so far. With your participation and feedback, we were able to have over ten thousand players help us test Kingshunt and provide us with hugely important, valuable feedback.
We’ve said it before and we’ll carry on saying it - THANK YOU. To all of you who joined in, we simply can’t do this without you and all your awesome feedback which has gone toward the ongoing development of Kingshunt.
Below, we’ve compiled a summary of how we think Alpha went. We also want to give some insight into how our decision making is informed and share some focus points that we’re now working hard on - check it out:
HOW CLOSED BETA WENT AND WHAT WE SAW DURING IT:
- There was great participation from both new and returning players, both in-game and across our community channels, contributing to the amount of invaluable feedback we received.
- While general optimization and performance improves with every iteration of Kingshunt, there is still a lot of room for improvement, and we understand how important this is. This continues to be an ongoing focus for us.
- Finding the right balance for towers, minions and heroes is also an ongoing effort for us, and something that we’ll continually update. We are not happy with the current game mode phasing and we will introduce updated game mode for next test.
- There was some inconsistency in the experience across different regions due to matchmaking times and session sizes, related to low population areas/timezones. We’ll be looking for ways to help improve this. NA server times were hard for the players.
- Something heard loud and clear was the request for more clarity around enemy UI, combat elements and visual queues (FX). We’ll be making key refinements in this area.
WHAT'S GOING INTO OUR DECISION MAKING:
- We rely heavily on the data and telemetry systems we have in the game. Your participation in our playtest helps us build out this data, which in turn helps us continue to refine and improve Kingshunt!
- We pay very close attention to community feedback provided via the in our Discord feedback channels, and community chat in general. If you still have feedback, please continue sharing them with us!
- Finally, we appreciate the valuable and in-depth feedback given from our growing content creator community, who put aside their time to share thoughts and ideas. If you’re a content creator or want to be a community representative of our game, email us at [email protected] or reach out on Discord or Twitter with the Kingshunt content you’ve made and let’s chat!
WHAT WE’RE FOCUSING ON IMPROVING NEXT AND WHY:
- Console and crossplay availability were also popular topics of discussion. They are very important to us too, since we want to make Kingshunt available to as many people as possible. While there are no dates or times to share on these topics, rest assured that we’re working on them.
- We’ll be working on the expansion of the Rune and Summon system, as well as more tower variants and minion variations.
- Next playable hero! Yes this something which many of you asked. Prosecutor is an exciting guy to play and we will do a hero overview about him. We also have a new support hero in the pipeline which we will also reveal soon.
- We’ll be doing an in-game economy pass to allow for a more enjoyable and engaging progression system, as well as rewards.
- We received great feedback and ideas from players and content creators especially, about rewards, leaderboards and other systems.. We’ll be investigating these suggestions.
- We’re looking at ways to refine the minimap to improve the PvP experience. For example, ways to make it harder for players to track other players over long distances, and providing more counter-play options for those who want to avoid detection as a tactical strategy.
- Another topic we saw frequently being discussed on our Discord channels was around the disconnects and leavers in a match. We’re working on the match experience around the game to enable more ways to finish a session, example surrender or give missing players team buffs or more resources. Penalty for leaving the match is something we will add too.
- The biggest problem with the game is now the first time experience, jumping directly to the PvP game is really punishing and causes bad experiences for new players. Tutorial is a high priority now.
- We’ll be heavily investing in social systems to address factors like party-up capabilities, friends lists, allow players to communicate with Ping-system, smarter matchmaking algorithms and more.
- We’re exploring and testing a number of features, including on Twitch. You might see some activity on our Twitch channel and from our dev team on there soon. We won’t be streaming any Kingshunt game footage but we wanted to give you the heads up, in case some of the very eagle-eyed among you spot movement happening there!
What’s next? That’s likely your question. The answer is - very exciting times!
We’re aiming to be back online and welcoming players back into Kingshunt Soon!
We’re very excited about the next stage of Kingshunt and we’re looking forward to sharing more details and info with you soon.
Until then, we’re focusing on addressing all the feedback points we’ve mentioned in this blog, working hard to continue improving Kingshunt and getting ready for the next time you’re in-game.
Stay safe
Vaki