Rivals Beta Now Available

Rivals Beta Released!

It’s finally here! You can now find and fight your rivals. They won’t go down easy though and will put up a good fight, with mages from each school of magic bringing it’s own unique challenges and strategies to the battlefield. We released the beta on Friday of last week, and so far early feedback from the weekend has been positive.

Here are a few of the new things that come with this update:

  • New enemy types to fight: Fire Mage, Ice Mage, Earth Mage, Storm Mage. Each mage type has it's own unique challenges to face

  • New option to attack your rival when you meet them

  • Rivals are now more difficult to locate. NPCs will not easily divulge their locations.

  • Bribe or schmooze Conclave Chapterheads to discover the location of your rivals

  • New NPC greetings - now NPCs comment on you based on a variety of factors (your appearance, their relationship with you, how long ago they last saw you, etc)

  • Gain additional legacy bonuses for eliminating a rival

  • You can now hunt down and kill your primary rival in the Mabren's Tower quest after you've completed the quest

  • New combat arena - Town Street

  • New death animation over rival portrait after killing that rival

  • Plus other improvements and bug fixes

You can now try out the new Rivals update by switching to the Beta branch in Steam. We’ll be Beta testing it for at least the next week or two for some extra polishing and optimizing before we release it to the main Steam branch. If you try it out, let us know what you think, we’d love to get your feedback on it!

EXPLORATION:

Mark and the rest of the team are continuing to plow forward on the next big Exploration update. For those of you who ready our last weekly dev update, this list hasn’t changed much, but we’re continuing to make progress on all of these areas:

  • Michal, James, Nolan, Mark - Exploration Events/Encounters.

  • Tyler - Revised Skill/Stat System

  • Zach - Dynamic Quests

  • Jonathan, Jessi, Phil - Continuing on UI/UX Overhaul + Controller Support

Other News:

By request of some in our Steam and Discord communities, we’re working on putting together a “Known Issues” list that will be publicly available on both the Discord server and the Wiki (which we can hopefully now put a little more attention too now that we’ve got some additional help).

Just a reminder, if you do try out the new Rivals beta, let us know what you think!

Development Priorities Week of Apr 29

We are winding down on the final touches to the Rivals combat update, and ramping up on what is shaping up to be our biggest update ever!

Here’s what folks are working on this coming week (and beyond):

Rivals Wrap-Up:

We are so very close to putting a lid on the Rivals combat update, at least as far as being able to push the update to the Beta branch. Thomas and Phil are both pleased with how it all plays in general, with just a few more important bug fixes to squash.

Once we finish those, we’ll release it to the Beta branch for another round of testing where players can try it out, we can find any other bugs that may have slipped through the cracks, do some more final tune-ups before finally releasing it to the main public branch.

Phil will be heading the charge on this with the assistance of D2. Alex will also join the fray later this week (more on that later).

EXPLORATION:

Mark and the rest of the team are full steam ahead on what is currently known as the “Exploration” update, which essentially (as of now anyway) will be our biggest update/release between now and our 1.0 launch!

This is what we’re focusing on this week:

  • Michal, James, Nolan, Mark - Exploration Events/Encounters.

  • Tyler - Revised Skill/Stat System

  • Zach - Dynamic Quests

  • Jonathan, Jessi, Phil - Continuing on UI/UX Overhaul

We’re all very excited with how exploration will be improved in this coming update, which will (at least in Phil’s perspective) make the game feel a lot more like a TTRPG-like experience. BTW, an easy way to get Phil’s stamp of approval internally is to compare how the feature/idea we are working on is like D&D and he’s pretty much on board 😆. For those of you who might be worried about the game losing that feel, you can rest easy knowing that you’ve got several torch bearer’s within the team carrying that torch for you!

OTHER NEWS:

We’ve got 3 new team members joining us this week! Starting on Wednesday, joining us on our quest are:

  • Emily: project management and helping us all stay on task and hitting our goals

  • Alex: QA testing and running our regular patch updates

  • Andrey: For the summer he’ll be joining us as a developer before returning to his teaching work

Next week our new artist Lucas will be joining us as well. Would love for you to give them a warm welcome!