Welcome back to our Game Design Blog!
This month, we have a lot of exciting news to go over, from Unspeakable updates and balancing to the results of recent polls and the Systems Team's upcoming projects. So without further ado, let’s dive in!
GAUNTLETS
This past month, we released our first ever gauntlet, Revenant, for all graduates. Our biggest goal when releasing the Gauntlet was returning a player-favorite experience while also showcasing the new tech that we’ll be using in the future. While we feel that we’ve achieved these goals, there are a few places where we feel the experience could be made much better.
Game Design Philosophy and Decisions Made Prior to ReleaseWhen we first began planning Gauntlets & Dungeons, we held internal discussions over if we should return a fan-favorite in the form of the Revenant Gauntlet, or a new Dungeon, which we began work on, but it quickly became too large of a project for our first outing with the technology needed behind the Gauntlets/Dungeons. We opted, at that point, to pursue Revenant, as we knew more about what we wanted to accomplish with the gameplay and we already had many of the building blocks already available to us, instead of having to start from scratch. This allowed us to instead focus our energy on ensuring that everything was properly working, and simply bringing the old content up to new standards, which included revamping the bosses, as well as reworking some of the mobs in the hallways with new tech. We wanted to make sure all of our tech was functioning properly, and most of our time working and reworking everything was dedicated to getting everything to actually work.
Post Release and Lessons LearnedThe first few days were extremely rough, as we faced a multitude of issues with the Gauntlet, despite quite a lot of testing. Initially, we were seeing incredible results, with tons of games being played per day, but that slowly stagnated. We heard a lot of complaints from players about the Gauntlet not being worth the time, the Gauntlet being too hard, and not being able to get enough players to actually be able to play the Gauntlet. We’ve taken a look at all of the feedback, and we’d like to implement a few changes that we think should alleviate some of the issues.
Upcoming Patch
In the next few days, we’ll be launching a patch of Revenant that we’re hoping will address many of the concerns we’ve seen since Revenant was launched.
Player Count: We understand that it may be difficult to gather 5 people to be able to play a round of Revenant. To that end, we’ll be lowering the minimum amount of required players to play, from 5 down to 3.
Balancing: One of the things we’ve noticed is that many of the boss fights simply take too long. It’s not really an epic boss fight and more of spamming a boss for 15 minutes with various spells. We want this to be exciting, with you constantly moving through the Gauntlet, and so we’re going to be going back and rebalancing the bosses to lower their health. We anticipate that their damage will stay roughly the same, but you should find defeating bosses will be much easier now. This also means that if you fail a stage, you’re not completely doomed, as you’ll still have time to reach further bosses. Not only that, but we’ve upped the chances to get food and potions in hidden chests, which are extremely useful to have within the Gauntlet, so make sure to stockpile those.
Rewards: We understand that the rewards for Revenant don’t quite match up with what else you could be doing in that span of time. To that end, we’ll be introducing a new currency, and a new way to get exclusive rewards, including the long-awaited return of Lacerum Incisis. Once the patch goes live, the Ghost Prince in Hogsworth will be asking you to collect soul essences, which only drop from what we're calling "elite bosses", found only within Gauntlets and Dungeons. Each boss will drop a different number of Soul Essences, with the Enchantress dropping the least amount of Essence for defeating her, and Zirxas dropping the most. Do note, that these do stack per Gauntlet run, meaning that successfully defeating Zirxas gives you the total for defeating The Enchantress, The Butcher, The Wraith, and Zirxas. So, if you can’t get to Zirxas, no worries! You can run the Gauntlet and defeat the Enchantress a bunch of times, and you’ll be able to get up to the amount needed to claim the rewards. Please note, as well, that we’ll be adding a limit to the number of Soul Essences you can collect- meaning you’ll only be able to collect enough essence to buy everything the Ghost Prince has to offer at that given time. This allows us to ensure that as we continue to add things using the currency in the future, it can’t be stockpiled.
REPUTATIONS
We’ve continued to work at a steady pace on Reputation. We’re targeting to release this in batches, so you’ll see certain towns’ reputations released before others, but fear not, they’re all coming along! Another detail I can now share includes some of the rewards we’ll be offering for leveling up your reputation in specific towns. These include specific town-themed wands, hats, collectables, housing sceneries, and pets. You can see a sneak peek of some of the rewards below!
DISCOVERIES
This month, we also released a surprise addition of Discoveries! This added a brand new way to learn about our world, and we’re continuing to examine great ways to work with this system in the future. Not only that, but we’ll have a brand new reward coming soon for those who have found all of the discoveries. Keep in mind, as we continue to expand the world, more Discovery locations will be added, and we’ve even begun work on something new in the future that will make Discoveries even more entwined further into our gameplay, so keep an eye out for more details about this in the future!
UPCOMING CONTENT & GOALS
- New Questlines, spanning multiple regions, like Relics of the Past.
- The release of Woodshire, a new town!
- New forms of engaging gameplay, like the morality score in the Walden Dilemma questline.
- Cutscenes and other elements to engage players with the story more directly, like those in recent event quests.
- Redesign First Year quests entirely. We want to put our best foot forward for when new players join the server, which means reworking our entire First Year quests into a First-Year Experience, which will act as a tutorial for the players, and will guide them more directly to get to Year 2.
- Continue adding Gauntlets & Dungeons, with a new one already in active development.
- Greater transparency and communication with the community in the form of Daily Diviner Articles, Q&As, as well as these GD Blog posts.
LATEST POLL RESULTS
Late last month we sent a poll to the community regarding our past and present leveling systems, which can be seen below:
The results of the poll fall in line with a direction shift we want to take in the future with leveling. We would like to bring back the freedom a player gets from being able to choose the order of spells they learn as they level up. One change to that old system we would like to make in the future is the ability to attain the "Key Spells" (all spells that interact with blocks out in the world, e.g. Avomora, Divindo, etc.)When to expect this change?
We are working on documenting and redesigning core elements of our leveling experience for the future. Currently, there is no set timeframe. We are excited that our players are willing to share their preferences for us as we continue to shape and evolve our core systems for a better gameplay experience, and more information will be shared in the near future!
Thank you for reading our Game Design Blog! We cannot wait to share more details and the upcoming changes in the near future, and we hope you enjoy all of the content on the horizon!