[Unofficial] Roadmap to 1.0 and Beyond

AndrewTilley · October 13, 2023, 5:07pm

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Remaining Masteries

September 15, 2023
Q: Can you tell us if the falcon for the Falconer class is a minion? Is there any other minions in this class?

Mike: So I don’t have a ton of details that I can share about how exactly the Falconer is going to work or anything like that. I can basically just tell you what’s already been said. The Falcon will scale with minion stats. So if you want to focus on your Falcon as your primary damage source you’ll want to get increased minion damage for that. You won’t need the increased minion health stat as a Falconer. There might be ways that that can be used to scale things with the Falconer but barring other unforeseen things you won’t really need it as a stat. So yes-ish, it’s a minion-ish. Kind of, so to speak.

If you were to ask me if I think Falconer is a minion class I’d say yes. I know people would disagree with me. I know other people would very strongly agree with me because we’ve had this debate internally a few times – if it counts as a minion class or not. [Mike laughs] Generally I think it does count.

Source: YouTube Link

September 29, 2023
Q: I noticed today that Warlock was one of the original 10 masteries, yet it’s still not in the game even though later ones are there.

Mike: Very true.

Q: Is there something that held that mastery up?

Mike: Yeah, there is actually. We had a mechanic planned for the Warlock as it’s like keystone mechanic. If I talk about Runemaster then Runic Invocation and that combination of abilities is its keystone mechanic. If you look at Druids then shapeshifting is their keystone mechanic. So we try and – we don’t necessarily have one specific keystone mechanic for every single mastery. Sometimes there’s multiples, and all that sort of stuff, but the one that we had primarily planned for Warlock was one that we were not capable of doing at the time and we really wanted to do it. So we wanted to look at ways that we could get that into the game. Unfortunately, since then we’ve realized we can’t do it, or that we still don’t have the ability to do it. Maybe it’s possible eventually but we still don’t have the capabilities of doing it right now.

So, in order to try and fix that – we tried a lot of things trying to fix it but we were unable to. So we redesigned the class, approached it from a different angle, and I think it’s way better now…which is funny. We worked in a couple nods to that original thing but I much prefer the way that we went, which is great. Maybe that type of mechanic can show up later on a different mastery or something like that, but that’s mainly why it got delayed so much. Our inability to complete our initial vision for Warlock, I think, is one of the driving factors as to why we went to a three mastery system originally. That was a big contributing factor for it.

So yeah, we were just incapable of completing it. That’s what held it up, but it’s good. It’s one of those like happy problems, I think, in the end because we’ve ended up with something that I think is more fun. The other one it trampled on, I think, Necromancer a little too hard. It’s funny, it’s actually a similar problem to – like problems you can actively see in other ARPG’s and how they’ve solved them and things like that and given how it’s not really been solved in other ARPG’s very well in the last decade I think it’s unsurprising that we weren’t able to solve it either. [Mike laughs] Sometimes we can get in front of things but not this time.

Source: Forum Link

September 29, 2023
Q: How are the implementation of the new masteries going, have you worked on any?

Mike: Yes.

Q: Also, are the uniques for the new masteries being worked alongside or are they done after the masteries are finished?

Mike: Usually the unique items get added after the mastery itself gets completed just because there’s more quality checks that need to happen for a skill than a single unique and quite often the uniques will rely on code that the skills have created as well. So we usually get the skills in first and the uniques in after.

Warlock first pass implementation is done and we’re just starting to implement the skills trees for Falconer right now. I just created the mutator for the main passive – like this equivalent ability [Mike hovers over each mastery skill for Sorcerer (Meteor), Runemaster (Runic Invocation), and Spellblade (Shatter Strike)] for Falconer yesterday. I almost said the name of it too. [Mike laughs] It’s just called something generic – the Falconer gets Falconry! [Mike laughs] There we go, I’ll just call it that. That way I can’t spoil it.

Source: Forum Link

September 29, 2023
Q: Will Warlock have minions?

Mike: Um, the primary minion class on Acolyte is the Necromancer. One of our core game design pillars is class identity. The Necromancer maintaining its identity as the minion class on Acolyte is really important to us. You technically do have access to minions on Warlock because there are minions on Acolyte. So yes, kind of. None of the skills we’re adding for Warlock have the minion tag, I can tell you that.

However, that doesn’t mean that a minion centric build is not viable on Warlock. I’m sure someone will come up with a minion centric Warlock build and it’s going to be awesome, but it’s going to be heavily specialized into Necromancer. Because you can do a minion Lich but I don’t think Lich has any abilities that are minion tagged. Does it? Let’s go check. Shout-out to Dammitt. Lich does not have minion tagged skills on it but you can still make a minion Lich. So I’m going to say technically the answer to your question is yes, but functionally the purpose of your question the answer, I think, is no.

Source: Forum Link

Missing Skills

Skill Updates

Passives

September 8, 2023
Q: Is there going to be any changes to Sorcerer to redefine or clarify its class fantasy now that it’s not the only elemental spellcaster for Mage?

Mike: Yeah, I mean, we did make some changes in Sorcerer already. [Mike hovers over three passives for Sorcerer; Dragon Mage, Dragon Breath, and Mirror Breath] Never mind, these nodes are still here. These nodes are going to go and new cool stuff will be put in their place. So yes, there’s stuff happening for Sorcerer still to help it fit a little bit better.

I think there’s definitely room for two elemental spellcasters, and even on the same mastery. Runic Invocation alone is such a huge change in how gameplay works that like – yeah, there’s not some big mechanic like that on Sorcerer but because they both exist as a Mage mastery class the big thing on Sorcerer is it doesn’t have this mechanic to monitor and to interact with. A lot of people don’t want something that complex and we know that they don’t want something that complex, which is part of the reason why we’ve added it here is because it’s very much an opt-in situation.

Source: YouTube Link

Chapters 10-12

September 15, 2023
Q: When will we get more story content? It cuts off at the last area but it’s obviously not done yet.

Mike: That’s true, it’s not done yet. There will be more story content added post 1.0. It’ll start pretty quickly post 1.0 and there’s still three chapters left to go. The story content won’t be completely done after that, that’s just where the campaign will stop. That’ll be the end of what we had mapped out as the main primary story arc and then there’s still room for more stories. It’s a time travel game. There’s room for other stories to happen really easily where you can just be like ‘well, you pull someone out of the storyline at this point and have them go do an adventure and then come back at the same point and it’s like they never left’. That sort of thing is really easy to do. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s plenty of room for future cycles to add on story content through endgame systems where it doesn’t extend the campaign but it still expands on the story in the world as a whole.

A lot of people have a big problem with a long campaign so in the future we don’t want to be just adding chapters onto the campaign because it can get really bloated. Maybe we introduce something like alternate chapters. I know that’s something people have talked about a lot where the storyline can branch and you can pick a different chapter to go do. However, there’s some tricky problems with that because say you’re part way through one side of that and then go play multiplayer with someone and they’re on the other side of it. How does that work? Yada, yada, yada. So it can get messy, but we really want to explore the options we have for expanding the storyline as a whole without necessarily bloating the campaign.

Source: YouTube Link

Campaign Skip

UI Changes/Updates

Stash

Passives Reset Button

Blessings

Player Power

September 29, 2023
Q: What’s your current view on balance of player power coming from 3 sources - skill trees, passives, items? Are there any plans to maybe shift that around in any direction?

Mike: Um, so there’s also Blessings which are kind of pseudo items/passives – it’s kind of hard to describe what they are, but there is that fourth source as well. I think it’s not really a secret, I think if you’re asking this question you probably agree with what I’m about to say, is that it’s too heavily skewed towards the skill trees themselves for raw damage power and that we need a way to take some of that power and at least anchor it to items a little bit better.

Generally a pretty key way of doing that is by having a node scale off of an attribute. So where’s an example of that? [Mike opens the Skills & Specializations window and selects the Runic Invocation skill] Okay, so this Cosmic Mind node – so this is defensive not offensive but it’s the same idea. So when casting an invocation using a sequence of three different runes you gain ward per point of intelligence. So this node can be really powerful. Maybe you can say it does 10% more damage per intelligence or whatever…per three points of intelligence or whatever. The primary way you get intelligence is from, well your passives, but also from items. So this anchors the power of this node relative to your items and it means that, without changing your skill at all, you can get more power out of your skills by upgrading your gear as well. Here’s the actual node, Elemental Lore, I should have been using as a reference because that’s a perfect example right there. [Mike laughs]

So yeah, we’ve started to try and increase the emphasis on power from gear and one of the ways we’re doing that is through nodes like this. I’d say that more nodes like this are going to be finding their way into skill trees, and it’s not strictly intelligence – it can be all sorts of things. Trying to tie that a little bit more to items themselves I think is really important and then you’ll also just see more power coming from items in general as item acquisition becomes more consistent, which will happen as soon as you see the Item Factions get added. So there’s little shifts like that which are happening. We’re also just toning down some nodes and how much power they give on skill trees and toning up some items and how much power they give. So I guess you could say that we’re trying to take a multipronged approach to it and I think it’s going to be good.

I don’t think you’ll see a huge, like some patch note that’s weirdly short but has gigantic implications where it’ll be like – I don’t think you’ll ever see a patch note that says something along the lines of something like, ‘Rebalanced every skill in the game to increase the damage percentage required through items’ or something like that. I don’t think it’ll be some big sweeping thing like that. It’ll be, and has been, kind of smaller changes that’ll keep getting improved.

Source: Forum Link

Dodge-roll Mechanic

September 29, 2023
Q: Have you discussed implementing a dodge-roll or something similar? What is the general stance on that kind of thing?

Mike: We’ve discussed it ad nauseam. We even implemented it at one point, internally…briefly. We’ve looked at it many times. We’ve looked at having it be its own ability, having it be one ability for every class and then have each class have ways to augment it individually, we’ve looked at it where every class has the same way to augment it collectively, we’ve looked at it as having items to augment it, we’ve looked at giving it a skill tree, giving it a skill tree per class, we’ve looked at giving it a single skill tree with specific nodes per nodes. Yeah, we’ve talked about it a lot.

One of the big problems – one of our primary design pillars is class identity. We do everything that we can to make every class feel and play and look and all that differently than every other class. That’s not just like we want Mages to be different than Rogues. We want the Bladedancer to be different than a Marksman. So there’s a lot there that we do to try to keep everything unique and distinct and interesting. Having the same dodge-roll on every class kind of undermines that. A generic dodge-roll also undermines movement abilities that are already around. I’m not saying all of this to say that it’s never going to happen, but this is kind of why it hasn’t happened.

I don’t know if we’re going to add one or not at this point. There won’t be one for 1.0, I can tell you that much. 1.0 is coming sans a generic dodge-roll. So it’s not something that we’re planning on adding right now but it’s not something that we’re 100% forever against. I hope that makes sense.

Source: Forum Link

Marketing

Localizations

Controller Support

UI Scaling

WASD Movement

Player Housing

API

Console Port

September 29, 2023
Q: I’d love to play this on my PS5, any plans for it?

Mike: Yes, we will be going to console eventually. These are very long-term plans. We do not have any specific timeline on when we’ll go to console. We are looking at both Sony and Microsoft for console releases. This is not something that we’ve started. It’s funny, there’s a few Reddit posts out there that I’ve left feedback on the topic and they really frequently get necro’d with someone being like, ‘Oh my God, I want this! Any updates on this?’ or something like that. I’m like, ‘Nope, no updates. Sorry, it’s still long-term plans.’

So we know there’s a market out there for it but we’ve just really got to get the game out the door at a high quality and if we were to try to tack console support onto that right now it would do one of two things; it’d either tank quality or it’d cause a big delay. We’re not prepared to have either of those two things happen so we’re not prepared to include console support right now. We haven’t started talking to Sony or Microsoft about getting onto their consoles at all. We don’t have any internal roadmap for who needs to do what to make that happen.

We don’t even know the requirements we need for it yet. It’s a long-term goal. It’s something where we’re like, ‘Hey, yes we want to do that. We want to get it onto console. We’re going to completely ignore it until we’re past 1.0 and then we’ll start figuring out what we need to do.’ So it’s long-term plans. We are planning on doing it. It will not be available by 1.0. After 1.0 and it’s stable and we’re happy with it then we’ll start to look at what we need to do to add it. It’s a ways off. The biggest thing is controller support, which we’ve been doing the whole time, and being in an engine that can then port to those consoles, which we are. So the major things are there, but there’s a few things I know we’re going to need that we don’t have yet.

Kain: We’ll likely introduce console at some point, but not currently in the works.

Source: Forum Link