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Dev Log 77: Power Up on July 5th!
Feel the power, Kronk: We’re releasing the Power Up update July 5th on PC and PS4! This update contains the Gun Witch, the Game Browser, buffs to the four original heroes, our first armor set, passive changes and more! For more information, visit the update page. If you haven't already, meet the Gun Witch in her official trailer below:
In this update, we’re spreading out our unique legendary loot so almost every map has something unique to farm! Just like the recent Incursion weapons, these are guaranteed drops every time you win the map. Here’s a teaser of where you’ll find some of these items, but we’ll leave it to you to discover where the other items live:
Dragonfall Bazaar: Toxic Shock Bow
Forgotten Ruins: Charge of the Harbinger Sword (DPS)
Liferoot Forest Incursion: Armageddon Staff
Ramparts Incursion: Purge Evil Polearm
The different pieces of the first armor set are also spread throughout Etheria. Find them all!
As part of our hero buffs, we're updating some of our old passives to a new system, removing some passives and combining others into a single passive on a single item. As a result, we will be rerolling a number of passives. If the passive is getting updated to a new system, the value will be rerolled to either a higher or lower number than what you currently have. If the passive is being removed, it will be rerolled into another passive of a similar type (so if it’s a defense passive, it’ll be rolled to another defense passive). Here’s a tentative list of which passives will be affected, but keep in mind this list isn’t final. The end result should be that the four original heroes are on par with the new heroes, giving you more defense setup variety. From there, we’re working on changes in future updates to make the game more challenging and rewarding!
Here’s what we’re working on this week:
Elliot Cannon, Creative Director
Power Up! Our next release, Power Up, arrives next week! Look for it the day after July 4. The studio cranked very hard on this release package, so we’re stoked to get it into your hands, especially the Gun Witch.
Gun Witch
We took this archived character under our wing and infused her with tons of incredible shooter-style tools and movement all in the spirit of witchcraft and gun brooms! I was one of the original senior level designers on Unreal and Unreal Tournament (back in the ‘90s), so as an old school deathmatcher and CTF player, movement is everything. Her ability to deliver up close and long-range damage works amazingly well with her agility. You can lay back and blast away like a sniper, or work in close and drop point-blank carnage in Dark Mage face while knowing you can get out of harm’s way with a simple key tap or mouse click if you’re a Naga fan. Timing and delivering massive damage is super fun, especially when you feel untouchable. Her mobility is three-dimensional so you’ll be back flipping, strafe double jumping, leaping, and hovering in midair with awesome air control as you teach those dumb baddies what real skill is.
At the same time, the power of her mischievous witchcraft inspired CC, stuns, and immobilizations make face-smashing powerful enemies laughably fun. We even tossed in some ice magic for the RPG fans who secretly wanted her to be a sorceress. Now that we’re getting the hero library built up, we hope you’ll find her a fun complement to your Hero Deck, serving the role of lane executioner. Build up impenetrable defenses with your favorite builder, swap to the Gun Witch and PWN, leaving the scene of the crime in style.
Hero Buffs
Beyond just the Gun Witch, look for a Phase One rollout of hero buffs. The plan here is obvious. Power up the default heroes! As we’ve shifted the game from one hero at a time to a full-fledged four heroes anytime, anywhere deck, it’s crucial that each slot in your deck is adding to your fun and power. The depth of the changes extends deep, with almost every dial and knob on the core four heroes adjusted. We want to keep the entire mix in tune so we will definitely watch for your forum feedback, and to make that easier, we’ll release detailed patch notes that list out every change. That way you know the behind-the-scenes details for the diehard theorycrafter. Everyone has his or her own way to play and we know this, so if you have feedback on the changes or see something we never thought of, let us know on the forums so we can work that in Phase Two!
A majority of cooldowns are gone. Yep, gone. Melee damage increases incrementally. We’re trying out the removal of root motion for melee characters so they can use player movement to control what’s happening as you time damage delivery skillfully. Look for the full notes with the release.
Game Browser
If you have not heard, we’re jamming up the War Table to function more like a traditional server browser! You’ll be able to make your own games, give them custom names, search for open games, see what mode, skill level, and wave those games are on, and even restrict iPWR if you need better control over who enters your public game. I’m excited we’ve finally gotten this going, and this is something we started back in January iterating on it internally while also doing everything else! This is a Phase One rollout, so again, share your feedback! We have a lot more slicker options and features already scoped out for Phase Two, but we did not want you to have to wait until then, especially since we are adding map-specific content. Hats off to Brys Sepluveda who’s been hands-on making this dream a reality while navigating the mystical layers of PlayVerse matchmaking code.
Carl Sagan once said, "The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition!”
Looking to the future from the mid-year Crow’s Nest
We’re working through a four-milestone plan to complete the game’s feature set. In the next few weeks, you’ll start to hear more about the big improvements to the core enemy system to make it squad based, ultimately with a dynamic spawning twist, gear sets, cooler loot systems, a reimagined core campaign structure, better progression loops, longer-term hero tweaking, and much more. Everything is about player-driven goals for new, returning, and hardcore players, so know we have each banner firmly in hand and we’re working on jamming the game up into something that can be a real fun hobby with gobs of fun progression.
In the meantime, we’ll keep the fun content with powerful (and sometimes zany and niche variable roll mayhem) rewards coming your way through new Challenges (which is what we’re calling Incursions now). We’re settling into a better rhythm of delivering heroes and new content at a frenetic pace. The year’s half over, and although we’ve done a lot, we’re not done yet!
Daniel Diaz, World Builder (DanielKaMi)
I’m also working on a full collision pass for the Endless Spires remake level, making sure you can't make mischief. :-)
There's plenty of areas to explore as you can see on the pic below:
Jesus Diaz, World Builder (N3oDoc)
Working this week on the collision pass for the Endless Spires remake.
As you can see in the pic, you'll be able to get to the upper areas of the level (you might need Series EV2 to achieve that) and get some nice views of the environment from there!
Josh Isom, Community Manager (iamisom)
It took a herculean effort from our team to get the PS4 version caught up to the PC version, so a big round of applause to our team for persevering and making that a reality. I know our PS4 fans are stoked to get content around the same time as our PC fans.
With that done, our big focus on the live side is crushing our technical issues. We’ve seen a dramatic decrease in server crashes (in fact, we’ve almost wiped them out from what Tim has told me), and we’re continuing to work through the client crashes. This week’s PS4 hotfix wiped out a massive number of crashes. Almost every patch we’ve pushed out over the past few months has contained some form of crash fix, and we’re hoping to keep that going. So if you’re having trouble launching or playing the game, fear not: Like Harvey Birdman, we’re on the case!
We’ve also seen a number of feedback threads about the new Daily Missions. In next week’s patch, we’re reducing the chances of seeing the “Complete X Area Maps” Dailies, and we’re reducing the overall number of maps needed to complete the Dailies. So it should take less time to complete Dailies, and you should see more general “Complete X Number of Any Map” Dailies.
James Reid, Software Engineer (Driscan)
I’ve been in serious bug squashing mode.
Fix one bug and three more pop up. It’s like battling Hydra or something. Finally got a handle on a lot of UI related bugs with the Game Browser. Speaking of the Game Browser, I’ve been working with QA, Bank, and a few others on a particularly nasty bug related to the onscreen keyboard that comes up for PS4 users. That… was fun….
Anyway, enough with the blathering, you came here wanting to see some progress on the Game Browser...well here ya go!
As Elliot said, this is Phase 1 and we’re already hard at work on Phase 2. Can’t wait to get y‘alls feedback!
Steven Collins, Lead Level Designer (Esorath)
Thanks to everyone for the awesome incursion ideas that got sent my way! sirozan had a particularly intriguing suggestion regarding the Frozen Keep map.
As for my work right now, we’ve got another Incursion starting on one of the current in-game levels. Since Molten Citadel won the Influence Vote, I’m making sure the Molten Citadel is going to be as awesome as it can be.
I know after the past few Devstreams, a few of you guys are hungry for secrets. So I’m looking into maybe a rather interesting Molten Citadel secret...
John Muscarella, Digital Puppet Master (Muskie4242)
Building melee combos for the Lavamancer. :)
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