Background
Changing the composition of SinorCreate
Unfortunately, in mid-August 2021, one of the founders of SinorCreate, an artist and graphic designer, LIlianne, who has been working on the project since its inception in 2018, left our team. It was caused by the too high workload at the university and the inability to work on the project further. Thanks to her, Season of War exists at all. Her departure was a great loss for the entire SinorCreate.
Lilianne communicates to players that she was delighted to be working on the entire game during Pre-Alpha and the Alpha version already out on Steam in 2019 and to see how the game develops. She wishes the players to continue to enjoy SinorCreate products, and the team to go only forward!
Fortunately, on September 12, 2021, a new artist and graphic designer joined us, welcome - Ralina Kamalova!
Lilianne failed to bring Season of War's new graphic style and biggest graphics update ever. Now the continuation of this path will be taken up by FreezRoom.
Reminder: why was such a long Alpha test needed?
The alpha test was intended for SinorCreate to make a good basic concept of Season of War, finding its audience, as well as being able to bring to mind a lot of experimental ideas, bringing to life a very original and colourful game with a good storyline, music and mechanics, together with a formed community. Now that Season of War received high marks from critics and players after Alpha 1.4.0, and sales immediately increased after the release of English localization in the latest update of Alpha 1.4.5 (2), SinorCreate needed to go further and make a real breakthrough in Season of War Worthy of the Name Beta 1.0.0
Beta to Release. Acceptance of a new and final concept of the whole game
The SinorCreate team has finally accepted the final concept of the entire game, of course, we will continue to edit it, if the players don't like something, remember for us - you are the most important :)
However, there will never be such major changes as it was in Alpha, except for Beta 1.0.0.
We want to make the final release of the game in October - December 2023.
And the release of the future update in April - May 2022.
Beta 1.0.0 "Reload of memories" - Most likely the latest update from the incredibly global cycle. This is the latest update, which will expand the Season of War concept and rework the existing content again + add new story content inside it, for example, some cut-scenes that expand the understanding of the current plot. Immediately after this version, we will finally begin to continue the Chapters, as it was in Alpha 1.1.0 "Invasion to Engelm" and very quickly. The beta test will be small compared to the Alpha version and will be no more than 1.5 years old. Next, a Pre-release test is planned, created for the final preparation of the game for release. Well, the final release, of course :)
For old players, note. Yes, at one time, when we were just working on Alpha 1.4.0 "Reworked" to release it early, we wanted to shorten the list of changes, and also did not add some of the global changes. But after the success of Alpha 1.4.0, we realized that those changes that we did not add were not necessary for Season of War, we did not like our way of the game development and we agreed with the opinion of the players that we should change some of the mechanics and features of Season of War for ourselves. more expensive and discarded the old developments.
Now that we have finalized the current concept that suits Season of War the best, we start working. That is, we are starting to make this update from scratch and today.
Changes (We will not disclose everything, but let's talk about the main thing):
Subject changes:
1) In general, the main plot remains unchanged. For the English version, some dialogues will be corrected to better convey context. In the Russian version, some dialogues will also be changed for a more beautiful sentence structure.
2) (May appear in this update) Additional tasks will appear.
Side missions in Season of War will represent a non-obvious way to expand the plot. Additional tasks will be unlocked by unlocking skills (we will explain what skills are below). How do you unlock skills? Answer: you have to guess based on their description, you will only know one thing for sure - different skills are unlocked at different levels of difficulty. But let's not talk about them yet, but about the additional tasks themselves.
Additional tasks will allow:
1. Make some missions less linear, while maintaining a linear plot. This is because after taking an additional task, the Game will expand your location or allow you to partially go beyond the limits of the location itself. This allows you to interact with new non-player characters (NPCs) and opens up whole new quest chains for you to complete, for the completion of which you will be rewarded.
Simply put,
You unlock the skill -> The skill unlocks an additional task inside some about a plot fragment at a certain level of difficulty -> an additional task opens some kind of chain of these tasks -> for completing a chain of tasks you will be given a reward.
2. Give the person a more open world and broaden understanding of the plot
3. Some quest chains open up additional battles. Additional battles - battles available only during the execution of a chain of additional tasks.
Graphic changes:
Beta 1.0.0 "Reload of memories" will be the biggest graphical update ever, well:
1) About 90 - 99% of all textures will change. Only a small amount of textures will remain in the game, which will look good or combine with the new style of Season of War. This should take the project to a whole new level of graphics.
2) And, yes, Season of War is finally switching to a completely new style, which will add emotionality, as well as give a living world and beautiful new characters to the game
3) Dialog boxes will be reworked. Their interface will become fantasy and completely change the visual style.
4) The portraits of the characters will change. Now, in fact, in the portraits, we see our hero from above, just in a larger size, while the new portraits will show the face and appearance of the character. That is, they will show the player the character from the first person.
5) The long-awaited global change in the game interface. That is, it will become completely different.
The new interface will be based on the bottom panel and will add things like:
1. minimap
2. world map (More on that below)
3. Wardrobe (More on that below)
4. display the experience bar
5. permanent display of abilities, even in story missions
6. Additional tabs (Help, skills, abilities, specializations, etc.)
7. Extended health indicator. Let's say right away for old players, no health bar will appear, everything is in order, we will not change the element of the feeling of our hero, it is just that now the game will have the Hero's health states, there are 5 of them in total: Excellent health, good, average, bad, critical. This will allow and retain the element of surprise and a constant feeling of the player's character, but it will also allow the implementation of new mechanics.
6) Change all interfaces except the game
7) Reworking hints
8) Adding new graphic elements + animations
9) The most interesting thing - Adding visual inserts inside the plot.
Visual inserts are inserts that show you an important cut-scene from the third person or in the form of art to enhance the experience.
But what will change further in the schedule, you will see!
10) The system of appearances. Now each playable hero will have the ability to choose a skin. Skins are the main reward for side missions. It will be impossible to buy skins in the game, skins can only be obtained by exploring the world or for titles in hard difficulty rank
Music and Sounds:
1) Most likely the Soundtracks will remain untouched, but it is possible to add new Soundtracks
2) A huge number of new sounds will appear.
Locations:
1) Recycling of locations (For the last time) will happen. But we won't say a word more about locations
Gameplay (Constructive changes): [/ h2] It’s precisely the mechanics that I don’t want to reveal at all, but we’ll tell you briefly so that there is intrigue. 1) We will redo the damage system again. Damage will now be physical and magical 2) We will remake Antonizar 3) We will redo specializations 4) We will redo the specialization bonuses 5) We will remake the level system 6) We will completely redo the Medium Difficulty Rank and bring back a new Hard Difficulty Rank 7) We will return the new save system 8) The balance will change 9) We will finalize the Bosses
Gameplay (New Mechanics):
1) there will be a mechanic for pumping abilities for Easy and Medium ranks, and on Hard, it will be possible to select any ability within the framework of specializations
2) Now we will introduce a system of skills, skills give resistance to certain physical and magical attacks
3) Wardrobe mechanics. A separate tab for all characters with a choice of available skins (The selected skin is saved everywhere)
4) Some new systems that we will not talk about for now
Technical changes
1) Voice acting will appear in the game. Voice acting will not apply to dialogue but will be during when you use abilities or during side missions
2) We will redo the training
3) The game will return the ability to talk with characters but in a new way
4) The game will run in a resolution of 1366x768, instead of 1080x680 and will be redone for it
5) The game will become more demanding (The minimum threshold will be available from 4 GB of RAM)
Let's finish this, for now, let's just say about the date.
Beta 1.0.0 is one of the most global versions in the history of Season of War, so the update will not be released earlier than April - May 2022.
Nevertheless, the current Alpha 1.4.5 (2) is quite good and by this time the game will need a global update and players will return to restore their memories and start all over again!
We love you and say thank you for being so long with us! We hope that the Beta test will set a new benchmark for Season of War quality and give everyone unforgettable emotions.
SinorCreate Team