Hello everyone!
The Royal Wing Update is almost ready, and it will be available next week! Today also marks the 2-year anniversary of The Slormancer’s Early Access! Two years of Updates, Patches, and Chronicles!
The Royal Wing Update, Part I
We’ve been talking about upcoming content in our latest Chronicle, so I’ll only briefly recap what has been said and move on: The Royal Wing Update, Part I comes with a new environment called “The Royal Wing” (duh) and 5 new enemies, tied to that environment.
Oh, and it will be availble on April 11th!
Now, we’ve been working on a couple of new exciting stuff that will be available with this update:
Battlefield Expedition Changes
As you can see in the screenshot above, we’ve added a couple of choices to Battlefield Expeditions.
We wanted to fix different issues we’ve been having with Battlefield Expeditions:
- Playing in the same environment over and over gets boring, especially when you’ve been dealt with an environment you don’t really like.
- Battlefield Expeditions lack special events / changes of pace.
- If you wish to play in a specific environment, you have to fish for the correct environment by entering/leaving Battlefield Expeditions until you get the one you want.
- For the same reason, once we introduce the Influence feature tied to Environments, players will want to farm in specific environments, so this has to be doable.
Now, you will get to “Choose your Adventure”:
- You can either choose the Battlefield Journey which is the default option. “Random and Everchanging Environment. Boss Events.” If you choose “Battlefield Journey”, you will get to face a boss every few floors (with appropriate loot :o). We’ve been working on a nice staging, similar to the one we’ve made for Story Bosses: The entire floor is dedicated to the Boss fight, just you and him.
Once you’ve dealt with the boss, the Expedition will then continue on a different environment so it never gets boring.
- Or you can choose the Careful Examination option. This alternative allows you to choose the Environment you want to venture in. However, you will face no bosses and the environment will, obviously, never change.
This comes with a change: Super Elites that you could sometimes find in Battlefield Expeditions can no longer be found in a regular Expedition floor. We felt that they didn’t have the set-up they deserved and were not noticeable enough to cause the change of pace we wanted them to cause.
So we’ve actually been working from what we had with these Super Elites and turned them into the Battlefield Journey Bosses mentioned above. The changes we’ve made should hopefully create more epic/memorable fights.
The Legendary Chest
This is step 1 of the “Loadouts & Smart Stashes” line from our Early Access Road Map. We’re introducing a new Storage Chest where you will be able to store one of each Legendary item available in The Slormancer.
We really like collectible stuff so it felt like the most natural option for The Slormancer. And since we plan to have about 200 Legendary items for the 1.0 release, it was almost mandatory to add more storage options. And depending on how much it is needed, we will eventually increase the number of basic stashes later on.
Two years of Early Access
This is a particular milestone because we originally planned to get from Early Access to the 1.0 within two years. Well… We were wrong. Very very wrong.
For the purpose of the Steam Q&A about Early Access that you can read on our Steam Page, we had to give an estimate of how much time we expected our Early Access to last. In which we said “About 2 years”.
I believe that we were expecting to have no issues whatsoever, no bugs or setbacks, and less sales (so less feedback to manage). Let’s call it optimistic ignorance.
If you’ve been eagerly waiting for the 1.0 release of the game, then sorry for being optimistic ignorants. We’ll do better.
As of right now, we will soon update the Q&A with an honest (yet desappointing) release date answer: We don’t know. We have a release date in mind, but we don’t trust our own prediction anymore. We would love to get to 1.0 before that date, but we’ve been reminded many times that developing a game takes time. So we will keep that date to ourselves. I think it’s too optimistic anyway :).
On the bright side, we’re making good and tangible progress and our to-do list never felt so small and manageable. We still have lots of things to work on, but we can see the end. It’s far. But we can see it.
The goal always was to get the best possible game. We know that The Slormancer has the potential to be much more than it currently is. So we’ll try our best not to waste it.
That’s about it!
Thanks for reading! See you on April 11 for the release of The Royal Wing Update!