This is the third dev stream, hosted by Mike Weicker, which originally aired on March 12, 2021. I’ve transcribed the video below, but you can watch it for yourself here. I’ve done my best to capture Mike’s responses as accurately as possible (nearly word for word in most cases), but please consult the video for precise phrasing and/or context.
Currently, these streams take place every Friday at 4pm EST on Twitch. You can check the schedule here to see when it starts in your region.
Q: Will you add skin colour change when making a new character?
A: So there’s a big thread up on the forums about character customizations, in general. It originally started out as a gender conversation, but it really applies to every part of character customization. It’s something that would be really nice to add, but it’s not something that we’re going to be adding pre-1.0. It’s a feature we’ll look at down the road once we’ve got the game out. It’s something that we’d love to have, character customization in general, but we’ve just got to keep the scope of the project in check if we’re going to have a successful launch. Getting to release with the features we’ve already scoped in is really important.
Timestamp: 04:45-05:40
Q: Will we get Runemaster, Warlock, and Falconer at the same time? Or will they drop 1 by 1?
A: I don’t know [laughter]. Yeah, I don’t know.
Timestamp: 07:30-07:45
Q: Will you add random generated maps?
A: It’s a very difficult thing to do and set up. It’s something we’re still working on. We’ll let you know if it’s possible to get it in anytime soon.
Timestamp: 09:55-10:10
Q: On the roadmap there is the Bazaar (a trade market/auction house). Do you guys really think this is healthy for a grinding game and if you implement it, can you already tell with what kind of philosophy/plans there are for it?
A: We have a lot of plans for that. It’s something that will change as multiplayer gets implemented and tested. I fully get what you’re saying about the grinding game and all that sort of stuff. It’s a fine line to walk because if you have quick and easy access to any gear you want whenever you want it and all you need to do is get enough of currency X to purchase the exact gear for your build, does it kind of invalidate the gear hunt – in a sense. I assume that’s the danger you’re implying here with that question. Yeah, it’s all stuff we’re looking at. We want to create a social game where people can interact with people if they want to and have ways to share in that experience, and part of that experience is the loot hunt. Personally, I have a lot of fond memories of trading in Diablo 2. It is a fun experience and being a part of that community is a really positive option to have – for people that want to be involved in that. We are still going to support SSF and have that be an optional way to play and have it still be fun for sure. Having that community aspect through trading is a great way to build that community. I hope that partially answers your question at least.
Timestamp: 10:35-12:55
Q: Did you check Titan Quest pet stance for some inspiration? It’s basic but works very well.
A: Yes. Titan Quest is one of lead designer’s favourite games and it frequently gets brought up in design discussions – so I can assure you that it has been noted [laughs].
Timestamp: 13:00-13:20
Q: Thoughts on skills that proc without being on your skill bar (specifically the ones that proc with no cooldown and no mana cost)?
A: Yeah, there’s a really fine line because it’s really fun to build up – I imagine most of this is coming from Idols that proc other abilities – it’s a really fun thing to do…to set up an engine where, ‘oh like I cast this spell which proc’s this spell which proc’s that spell’ and it’s sort of this trickledown effect of proc’s. That’s a very fun thing to build. It’s a little dangerous in the sense of just the number of assets that get created and the performance implications of it and also the balance aspects of it – like what’s the sense of casting that spell manually if it can be proc’d for free. I think having those inter-skill interactions where you are building up those things with your gear is fun to have happen so I don’t think we’re going to get rid of those things anytime soon. We start emphasizing when abilities are cast by you – we’ve got some new tech as of the Rogue patch that lets us detect more easily the mutation functions of where the skill came from. This tech was built for the shadows. So we can say, ‘if the spell was cast by you do something specific’.
Timestamp: 13:30-15:50
Q: What’s your philosophy for mana management today? There is very poor support for it. For example, the new version of Focus is way worse than before.
A: We are trying to take a hardline stance on mana being the primary limiting factor in casting your abilities frequently. So those skills that don’t have cooldowns on them. Typically the skills that have cooldowns on them are the ones that have very severe screen clutter implications – like Volcanic Orb for example, or things that have mobility implications such as Fury Leap. We try to keep cooldowns out of it as much as we can. We have this discussion a lot – like how can we limit this ability without giving it a cooldown and having it take so much mana makes it feel bad. When so much power comes from interactions between skills and other abilities and proc’d effects and things like that. So it’s a really difficult thing to set up properly. We do try to make it so that mana feels good with most builds. My advice would be if you’re having trouble with mana and Focus isn’t quite doing it for you than possibly building in a second attack ability that can be used at low or no mana. Yeah, Reimerh’s got a good answer there too, I think:
I think most of that feedback is from players who previously used Focus. Yes old Focus was a lot better and I don’t think new Focus is in a super spot yet. I also think other options than Focus might be good. Or we could make Focus have better interactions with maximum mana. -Reimerh
Timestamp: 16:15-18:10
Q: What kind of currency do you have in mind for the auction house / trade market or is it trading actual item vs item? Will it have a trader in game or some crap mechanic like PoE?
A: Regarding the currencies that’ll be used in the auction house that’s still stuff that will come through testing, and we haven’t done a ton of testing with it yet. We don’t have a large population in there yet. I’m sure you guys would have heard rumours of a large population in our multiplayer testing – even if NDA’s were signed.
Timestamp: 20:38-21:10
Q: Has there been any discussion or thought about earning additional inventory space like in Grim Dawn?
A: Yes, we have. Mostly due to the inventory already being decently large we decided we didn’t want to do it. We actually did bring up Grim Dawn as an example.
Timestamp: 21:15-21:40
Q: Thoughts on adding Void damage to more sub classes through item or just to the to the unreleased sub classes?
A: Okay, I just want to be clear – I’m not saying that the unreleased sub-classes are going to get void damage in any way, and I’m not saying they’re not going to get void damage in any way. In general, we do have plans for expanding void damage access to the player. I don’t want to give you any hope on how quick that will happen, but we do have plans on expanding void access. Basically right now it is just one classes theme. You look at the characters and one class has access to this [pointing at Void damage], basically every class has access to this [pointing at Fire damage], most classes have access to Cold, everyone has Physical, most of them have Poison – Sorc doesn’t really have Poison, Necrotic damage is basically limited to Acolyte. There’s good and bad things about having those things be limited to individual classes. It helps to make them feel unique and all those things like that. Having it restricted to just one can sometimes make certain items – like if there’s an item that’s really Void damage related and it explicitly requires your character to already be dealing Void damage it limits who that item is good for pretty heavily. Suddenly you have an item that is only good for one sub-class and one Mastery class. When you have items that are for only one Mastery class it’s difficult to those items be in the item pool at the same rate as the other items. Suddenly you got this item dropping for a lot of people that find it useless or this item that is almost impossible to find for people that actually need it. We can put things like this on class specific items – a helmet, chest, relic – to keep that impact minimal, for sure…it’s still one in three. It’s nice to be able to put those things on weapons – apart from bows – weapons are not class locked.
Timestamp: 22:10-25:02
Q: Merging throwing and ranged damage when?
A: We probably won’t do that. It’s pretty intrinsically different. Like if a bow gives throwing damage it feels really weird, you know. The sort of stuff for the back-end of that is pretty different from each other so we probably won’t be merging them anytime soon, if at all.
Timestamp: 25:50-26:40
Q: What’s your thoughts on making weapons not just stat sticks mostly for melee weapons and bows so finding a high damage weapon feels good?
A: So taking a one-handed sword, for example, added melee physical damage doesn’t appear very often at all and you almost only ever see it on weapons and that’s specifically done so that the majority of your melee attack damage is coming from your weapon. You’re not going to see that plus melee physical damage basically anywhere else but as prefixes on a weapon or the weapon itself. That’s specifically done so that weapons feel less like stat sticks. It’s a decision we made very early on in development and it has a lot of implications for how everything’s been built around it. It is possible to undue this – it would take a very long time and would basically preclude cutting out huge sections of other content that the people that would have to make it would be working on. So…we probably won’t be changing that any time soon. I personally prefer this method. While it’s not exactly the same the effect is basically there and it lets it do a lot of cool stuff.
Timestamp: 27:40-29:15
Q: What are your plans on item sets/set bonuses? I know you don’t want to have them be mandatory like Diablo 3 right now, but they mostly aren’t used right now unless for meme builds.
A: We started looking at some unique items last patch, we did some sets too. Set items are really hard to get into a place where they are either good to mix and match or they’re mandatory to use the whole thing. There’s lots of games that completely avoided them because of this difficulty. We do have a lot less slots in general, there’s no pants or shoulder slots so it’s harder to get bigger sets where you can have part of the set and still have it feel good. We do want Sets to be part of your possible endgame loadout. The ideal endgame loadout for the majority of characters – not saying like 99% of characters, but more like half – we’d want people to be wearing some combination of Sets/Unqiues/Rare items so that it’s a variety of things instead of just all one thing. Also, a caveat to that, build to build/character to character/class to class having it be different pieces so that it’s not always the same. We don’t want item slots to be dominated by individual item types – like people always put a Rare item in their relic slot because Rare relics are always the best and no one ever uses a Set relic but they always use a Set helmet because Set helmets are the best. We don’t want this to happen either. Having it be spread out and mix and match so that there is a difference in your gear so that there is that gearing diversity. That’s the ideal way to have it line up, but we’re still working on item balancing in general.
Timestamp: 32:05-34:30
Q: When is the game releasing?
A: This year.*
Timestamp: 38:25-38:30
*Sarno has since clarified this statement while in one of @McFluffin Twitch streams:
Mike misspoke. We [EHG] discussed that after the stream. He’s used to “when?” being about Multiplayer. I don’t think he misunderstood the question. It’s more a matter of… sometimes you get into the habit of answering questions a certain way, if that makes sense?
Unless the developers say differently, basically the game will ship when it’s ready.
Q: Are you doing a new roadmap for this year?
A: We’ve got the same roadmap that we’ll be updating as we go. Everything is when it’s ready really. We release content when it’s ready, we release patches when they’re ready, we release updates when they’re ready…like we’re not going to release anything before it’s ready. Roadmaps are a rough guideline for the order in which we’re working on things. Every time we release a patch we cross things off the list of that.
Timestamp: 38:35-39:10
Q: What other languages are planned for the final version?
A: I don’t have the exact list of the languages we’re planning on localizing to. I would say that the more people that play our game from whatever region it is, it is a higher likelihood that the game will be localized to the language of that region.
Timestamp: 39:15-39:40
Q: Will there be servers or p2p?
A: This is something we’ve said from the very beginning of our plans from Kickstarter is that we will be doing server authoritative multiplayer.
Timestamp: 40:05-40:12
Q: Any plans to allow more camera adjustments to see bottom side of screen at a further distance?
A: Unlikely I would say. We tried rotating the camera angle once upon a time actually, and level design hates it…hates it so much [laughs]. So this statue right here, it has to look good from this angle but it doesn’t have to look good from the other side – if the camera was rotated 180 degrees. It has a lot of extra work that suddenly comes in – and I know we’re talking about changing the camera angle to be further up so that you can see down more, but that also changes things. There’s a lot of considerations we’d have to make if we were to change the camera angle. A lot of them are level design stuff, a lot are – even enemy layouts in zones would have to change. We’ve talked about making changes like that, but we don’t plan to at the moment.
Timestamp: 40:25-42:25
Q: Can you talk a little bit about the other sub classes, Falconer, Runemaster, and Warlock, and tell us some more details?
A: I can’t actually give you anything about the other sub-classes right now. They’re going to be unique, interesting, fun, and be integrated into their other classes very well. We’re building each of them all together – like we’re building all of Falconer together, we’re building all of Runemaster together, we’re building all of Warlock together…and please don’t take the order that I’ve said this in to mean anything [laughter]. It’s so that we can get the integration of the base classes and their Masteries to feel really good.
Timestamp: 42:35-43:20
Q: Will there be systems/game modes that makes people want to party together? Or is multiplayer something that’s just “there”, with nothing specific to incentivize or disincentivize grouping?
A: So this is a really deep, deep, deeeeep topic. There’s really two main sides; the people that really want to play with other people and people that don’t want to play with other people – and people that really don’t care. We want all of those people to feel like they’re not forced into going one way or the other, and we want them to be able to play the way they want to play. So if someone is interested in playing this game completely solo but they still want to be online to interact with the trading systems or online to interact with leaderboards, things like that – we want them to feel like they still have a fun environment to play in. We don’t want to have a system where there’s a boss that can only be completed with four people in your group because there’s some mechanic that just doesn’t work unless you have four people in your group, so there’s no way to solo it, and it drops a very specific item that enables a very popular build that is very popular. That would be a very bad thing, because all the people that don’t want to play with other people are completely locked out of that build option and that boss is completely unavailable to them. So we want those people to still have access to those bosses. Now there are some cool things you can do in party mechanics that we’re exploring and looking at so that there’s a different experience in multiplayer. As an example, in Diablo 2 when you’re fighting Diablo himself he has an ability where he grabs someone – there’s a bone prison that comes up from the ground and it grabs someone – and they’re effectively stuck there and someone else has to destroy the bone prison to free them. It’s not a dangerous mechanic in that fight, but say it was and you needed someone to come and break you out quickly – that mechanic would be really cool in a party environment but not so much in a solo environment. So there’s things we’re looking at doing to give cool interactions in multiplayer, and make playing together be a more interactive experience so that you and your friends have a story to tell afterwards. So it would be cool to have that teamwork element.
Timestamp: 43:30-47:20
Q: Are there plans to add guilds to the game at some point? I want to be able to join a guild with my friends/other streamers/content creators and players from early access, so we don’t get lost in the crowd when the 150k concurrent players come at release.
A: Guilds are an awesome social feature. They’re not in our 1.0 scope so I wouldn’t expect to see them immediately. It’s definitely something we’re talked about. It’s a great way to maintain a smaller sub community inside the game. I played WoW for years and was a part of three guilds over those years, but it’s a lot of fun to hop online and see those friends consistently. In fact, there’s still friends I keep in touch with now – that I’ve never met in person – only through the guilds. So I think it’s a really cool thing to have, but it’s back to the scope problem. We’ve got to launch the game first.
Timestamp: 48:50-50:00
A little leak Mike showed off during the stream:
A: So this is a concept design. It’s not actually finished or in-game right now. We get a lot of questions regarding whether or not the bonuses that Blessings offer are global for their character, or if they’re specific to Monolith/the timeline that they’re currently in. I think we can fix this by making your Blessings a part of the inventory screen so that it looks more like gear that you’re actually wearing – which is how they’re implemented. So this would give you more global information about the progress of your Blessings – where they came from, other ones you’ve discovered. It won’t leak which Blessings are possible for each timeline unless you’ve found them. So they won’t just show up here, it’ll be a blank icon until you’ve discovered them.
Timestamp: 53:55-55:10
Q: What’s your favourite chocolate bar?
A: I’m so glad you asked. If I’m picking a chocolate bar from the grocery store, gas station, or corner store its got to be a Caramilk. I’m going to show my Canadian here because I’m not sure if these things are everywhere, but it’s chocolate with caramel inside and I love caramel. If it’s just any chocolate you can find there’s this fancy place near where I live that sells weird imported chocolate bars – really dark chocolate, the best ones have a little salt on them…like big salt crystals right on the chocolate bar. Oh, those are the best.
Timestamp: 57:10-57:58
Q: Once skills trees are done for 1.0, any thoughts on what would be the key approach to keeping skills fresh? Should we expect skill tree changes across cycles? Or more items that changes the way skills play?
A: Kind of all of the above I would say. I’m sure we’ll see patterns start to immerge of skills that aren’t used very much on the leaderboards and skills that are very heavily use on the leaderboards. I’m not saying that’s the only thing we’ll use to decide what we buff and nerf and change and rework and all that sort of stuff. At a very cursory glance I think that might be a very decent to guess what might be looked at. We’ll likely be taking things – our general approach it to take the stuff that’s the oldest and start reworking it. Taking the stuff that is the oldest will likely happen for the first little bit because not every single skill will have a tree made in the last year. After launch – I don’t know what the one’s are to be done now because we still have a lot to be done before launch anyways. But things that aren’t getting used because they don’t interact with enough other skills, things that maybe aren’t getting used because they’re not powerful enough, maybe things that are clunky to use because they don’t feel good, there’s some sort of mechanical problem with them – those are sort of how we look at what needs to get reworked. Adding a new item that interacts with a specific skill or two specific skills can sometimes have a pretty big impact on how skills are played and shake things up quite a bit. Even without doing much else, adding an item like that can be an easy way to shake things up.
Timestamp: 58:30-1:00:50
Q: Will there be added skills for classes? Or just reworks?
A: I would say that we will be adding new skills post launch. I don’t know how long that’ll be post launch, I don’t know if that’ll involve removing other skills post launch, but it’s something we’d likely do. If you look at the passive trees there’s still some gaps/room for further skills to go in there.
Timestamp: 1:00:55-1:01:30
Q: Are there going to be support builds similar to the aura-bot support in PoE / curse-bot or other builds designed just to buff everyone in multiplayer?
A: Yeah, we do look at support builds as we’re designing things. You can make a pretty heavy support build already, but not quite fully. There’s already a lot of stuff you can do to make a pretty heavy support build. There are a lot of skills with nodes that benefit allies, which aren’t taken very often in a single player focused game but they are there for when multiplayer arrives. I’d say the classes in which you’d be able to work support in the easiest will be Primalist, Paladin, Acolyte actually will be easy to make support builds just because there’s a lot of debuffing, and there’s some area control stuff. I think it’ll be possible for the other but you’ll have to get a lot more creative to do it with things like the Mage or Rogue sub-classes. I’m sure it’ll be possible for someone to figure out how. I hope someone just proves me wrong completely and it’s awesome.
Timestamp: 1:01:40-1:03:30
Q: Will there be a competitive aspect to the game as in leagues, etc.
A: Yes. We already do as much as we can to get a competitive nature with the ladder that exists now. I mean, there’s still lots of things that are tough to do because it’s still an offline game, but we do try to keep the ladder as engaging as possible. I think people are having a lot of fun with it. It’s something that drove a lot of engagement early on in development as well – is that ladder leaderboard system. That system will grow – we plan on having a leaderboard system being a very forward part of the competitive nature of the game. We think it’s an important thing.
Timestamp: 1:05:00-1:06:02
Q: What has been the largest hurdle that the EHG team has overcome?
A: That is a very hard question to answer because there’s so many little things that we’ve had to adapt to as we’ve gone through. A lot of the hurdles that you look back at, it ends up being a lot of fun so it’s difficult to say what the largest hurdle was. It’s all relative as well. The hardest that I’ve worked, and probably ever, was during the games Kickstarter. That was really difficult. It’s difficult to do a Kickstarter campaign, but looking back at it it’s a ton of fun to talk about it. In fact, we were just talking about it the other day. I wouldn’t have changed doing that at all, but I think that was the biggest hurdle we’ve had to overcome.
Timestamp: 1:06:20-1:07:40
Judd’s Answer: Kickstarter > 0.8 > Michael’s cat getting stuck in the blinds*
*This is not the actual picture, just how I imagine it. 
