[Unofficial] Roadmap to 1.0 and Beyond

AndrewTilley · July 24, 2023, 6:15pm

Endgame

Arena

There really hasn’t been any relevant information concerning updates to the arena. There’ll likely be more arena champions at some point but don’t expect much to change with 1.0.

June 30, 2023
Q: Are arenas going to be enhanced further, like different modes of competitive models or are arenas finalized?

Aaron: I believe – well we have all the different ladders for the arena. Um…maybe like expanding arena champions? Mike, anything like that or…?

Mike: Yeah, there won’t be much different with arena for 1.0. I’d really like to get some more arena champions in. I know this is kind of something that I’ve talked about in the past, of like what some early ideas for arena champions and things like that were. I’d love to see us – and I have no idea if we’re going to do this…this is just a, ‘If someone asked me tomorrow if I wanted this I’d say yes.’ At the end of maybe…like before 0.9.2 starts or something and in preparation for 1.0, looking at who was sitting on top of the ladder and trying to make arena champions similar to those classes and characters and things like that. Maybe nods to some people who won on the ladders. Something like that. I’d love to do something like that, to make new arena champions. I don’t know if we have time. I don’t know if there’s going to be any differences for arena champions, or anything in the arena for 1.0. I know that’s definitely a back-burner feature right now.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Dungeons

No new dungeons are planned for 1.0, but there have been several dungeon ideas thrown around during the dev streams. They’re also looking to improve the procedural generation of the areas prior to the boss.

June 16, 2023
Q: Will current dungeons get some overhaul in the future?

Mike: Overhaul is an extreme word.

Q: Particularly the map generation?

Mike: I mean, yeah, the map generation I can see being looked at much more closely as a larger change, but the overall functionality of the dungeons – I really like those where they are.

Q: It’s really tedious to just always dodge random barricades in all of them. I’d love to see a bit more playful design around their unique mechanics.

Mike: I think that it falls victim to some psychological trap that we had no idea existed and don’t know enough about it to articulate properly the details around it, but I’d put up for debate that there’s likely some feels bad moment or some negative reaction to – like if you were to draw the same pathways and have… Let’s draw again because I’m not going to be able to explain this well. [Mike opens Paint and starts drawing]

Say you had two random maps that you were drawing, number one and number two. Let’s say you had these two layouts. Then in number one you just put a large barricade here but you can still see this pathway here, and then in number two you instead just had a line with no pathways. You can’t see the path that was there, and maybe there’s a way to get over here – there’s another thing that goes off to the side. So it’s over there but there’s no connection that’s been blocked off – it’s like a full-on severed connection.

I think, and I have nothing to back this up apart from observations and comments I’ve been reading about our game compared to other games and things like that, is that I bet number one feels way worse than number two even though they are functionally identical. I think in number two your brain goes, ‘Oh there’s no path there’ and in number one your brain goes, ‘Oh the path got blocked.’ I have nothing to back this up academically whatsoever, so if anyone has any information on this that they think is relevant I’m very interested to read it or watch it, if it’s a video.

I think we’re falling victim to this right now. I think that the experience people are having in the dungeons is pretty significantly hampered because they can see a path that was blocked rather than just not having a path there in the first place, and I don’t know how to fix that. With our current system and the current tools we have available we can’t fix that. We need to figure out a way to fix it, if that’s the problem. Maybe there’s another problem, I don’t know.

We did reduce the number of blocks that get put in, in general, so there’s just more open paths on average and you’ll just naturally run into that situation less.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Monolith of Fate

The MoF is expected to see a few minor improvements, most of which are likely to arrive with 1.0; from putting more weight behind corruption rather than enemy modifiers, making it faster to progress to empowered on follow-up characters, and being able to swap between previously earned blessings. After launch there’s several expansions already planned for it.

April 28, 2023
Q: What do you think of lowering the leveling process in normal mono’s? So farming them is meaningful and not just a rush as fast as possible to skip to empowered as right now normal mono’s feel bad after your first character.

Mike: I think that there is room for a system which increases the speed at which empowered monoliths are unlocked at for secondary characters, for follow-up characters that are not your initial first character. That was probably too gentle of wording. I think there’s a need for some system that increases the speed at which you unlock empowered monoliths for follow-up characters. Just straight up reducing the number for follow-up characters is not something we’re interested in because there’s a few issues there. We do have a system planned, hopefully for next patch, that will start the ball on that process a little bit. It’s still a little up in the air so maybe not.

Source: YouTube Link

May 5, 2023
Q: Any plans on expanding endgame content horizontally? As in entirely new systems alongside the monolith and dungeons or do you guys plan on expanding the monolith system more before 1.0?

Mike: I would say we’ll see vertical expansion for the endgame systems at 1.0, and both vertical and horizontal expansions for the endgame systems post 1.0. So 1.0 will launch with the core endgame systems being what they are now. So you’ll have monoliths, dungeons, arenas and that’s about it, as far as overarching core endgame systems.

We don’t think that the monolith, or the dungeons for that matter, are quite at a stage where they are 1.0 ready yet. So we’re still going to be expanding the content that’s there, like the types of things that show up. This is where I usually give the example of a treasure goblin as the style of content that we are looking to add to the monolith and things like that to make it less expected, more interesting, and that sort of stuff. We do have plans for new endgame content systems that will start to show up, but we’d prefer to have fewer higher quality systems at launch than more lower quality systems at launch.

Source: YouTube Link

June 23, 2023
Q: When can we expect an overhaul of the monolith to make them less monotonous? I know it’s been on the to do list for a while.

Mike: I think there’s maybe miscommunication here because an overhaul to the monolith has not been on the to do list for a long time. We’re really happy with the monolith system. However, it does lack unexpected content. And maybe that ends up overhaul enough of changes for you, but it doesn’t involve changing anything that’s there already. It’s more around – because the monolith system, and when we talk about the monolith system we’re talking about the different timelines, the different echoes, and things like that. That core interaction and progression loop and that sort of stuff, that’s something we’re very happy with. If we were looking at an overhaul then that’s something I’d consider would be changed. Previously the monolith didn’t have a grid to pick the individual nodes from, it was just pick echo 1 or echo 2. So every time you went into an echo you were dealing with only two options for that echo, and then we changed to the current system. That was an overhaul.

As far as adding in unexpected content – things that can happen in the monolith that you don’t expect. Right now when you enter an echo there’s a high probability that you know, if you’ve played a thousand echoes, there’s a pretty high probability that you can tell most of what’s going to happen in that echo. That’s the problematic part of it really that you find yourself just racing to the finish and you know where the finish is. There’s nothing like, ‘maybe this cool thing could happen here.’ No, there’s no option for that cool thing to happen because it doesn’t exist. So adding this unexpected content – and the most basic example I always bring up when I talk about this is, and sorry if you’ve heard this before, is the…and this is not, we do have plans to add something but this is not the first things we’re planning on adding, but the easy example I like to share is a treasure goblin. It’s a really basic thing, it’s an implied quest, it’s unexpected content. You see a goblin and it runs away so you go chase him and if you can kill him before he teleports away you get a big reward. Great. Unexpected content, implied quest…awesome. It shakes things up and you get a reward. Fantastic.

That’s the style of content the monolith is really missing because the term you used was monotonous and I think something that really leads to monotony feeling that way is knowing what’s going to come and not having any surprises really. Currently the only real surprises that happen are the gear that drops, so you’re surprised by the gear that dropped and you’re like, ‘oh cool this gear dropped, that’s awesome’, and by which echoes are revealed after completing an echo on the monolith map as there’s an element of surprise there and you’re like, ‘oh what did I unlock, what are the next things available.’ So there’s not a lot of unexpected things that can happen in the monolith which is one of the major problems with it, I think. So that’s in the works – having something that’s unexpected show up/to do while you’re playing the monolith, and other endgame content too, is something we’re working on.

Source: Forum Link

June 23, 2023
Q: What about changing the mods in echoes? Instead of just basic damage/hp/defense mods, have more interesting things like environmental effects, unique enemy modifiers, etc.

Mike: I will say that the things that we do have for unique enemy modifiers those are the ones we get complaints about the most by far. But yeah, adding more modifiers to the monolith is definitely something that we want to do and will do. There’s quite often very subtle reasons why something doesn’t… [Mike died and lost his train of thought] There’s a lot of modifiers that were chopped/that have gotten cut that might seem like obvious slam dunks. But yeah, there are more that we’ve got sort of it the list of, ‘okay, we want to add that but we need to add this text to do that and oh well, this other thing is higher priority so we got to do that first.’ There are a lot of things that fall into categories like that.

Source: Forum Link

June 23, 2023
Q: Are there going to be additional monolith timelines with new bosses and blessings?

Mike: Um, I’d say there’s – likely yes. I’d say there’s a good chance we’ll probably start – because there’s an upper limit on the number of timelines you can have in a monolith system like this and have it still feel good, I think. I think we’re pretty close to the upper limit on it. So there’s a good chance that you’ll start to see things like cycle out in cycles. So maybe one of them gets replaced for a different one for a cycle and then it comes back in to replace another one for a cycle and things start getting shuffled around in cycles. You have a similar total number of them. Maybe it goes up by one or down by two or something like that and it changes a little bit, but for the most part there’s a similar quantity but different ones that are there. Maybe we take a timeline out but take it boss and slap it in another system…I don’t know. I think that’s the sort of thing that’s actually really cool to do in cycle, to shake things up a little bit. Keep things fresh and interesting, but there’s a point where there’s too many of them. So we’ll have to be aware of that.

Source: Forum Link

June 30, 2023
Q: Will randomization come to the monolith?

Mike: Yeah, that’s a big one.

Aaron: I feel like that is huge. That is going to be a big one and I think you’ve alluded to that as something that’s the goal or at least is the hope by 1.0. Correct? Or at least a refresh to the mono.

Mike: The thing I’ve talked about and I’ve always been very careful to try and word this this way, is that the goal there – the initial goal for something like this is not, ‘Hey the zones are randomized layouts.’ I’ve never said that. [Mike laughs] I’ve very carefully never said that because that’s a huge change. I think that’s something that’s sort of been in the back of all of our minds for a long time, getting these procedurally generated levels into the game. It’s sort of been one of those things that we’ve always kind of gone, ‘Can we do this? Do we have time to get this in? Do we know how to do this? Is there a way we can do this?’ It always comes up a little short on the doable category.

Aaron: Well it’s funny because I’ve been playing the game long enough where it was just you start here and you end here and that’s it for every map. Then it was like, ‘Now you can start at the back or in the middle and there’s different objectives and things like that’ but obviously the map is always the same. It’s just what the objective is and then where you travel on the map, but a lot of people want randomization.

Mike: So this is the thing that I’ve been talking about the last few months on stream about – is this like unexpected content. This is the type of stuff we are working on that is much more doable and much less involved. So this is having some sort of content that you don’t know – like an example I always use is treasure goblins, which is not where we’re starting with this but that’s just the example I use. That’s the style. It’s having things where you don’t know what’s going to happen next. For example, you start the monolith and let’s say there’s something that draws your attention to go this way and there’s something that draws your attention to go this way. I think that’ll be really valuable, really useful, really good, and all that sort of stuff.

Aaron: Everybody likes treasure goblins, even though it’s not going to be treasure goblins!

Mike: Yeah, I mean, I will still push for treasure goblins to exist at some point because I love that as a mechanic. It’s so simple. It works so well. I feel like it’s one of those things that someone could probably slap in in like an afternoon, like functionality wise because it’s not that hard.

Source: YouTube Link

July 14, 2023
Q: Will we get something extra to do in the upcoming major patch before 1.0? I would love anything extra similar to Strongboxes in PoE or really anything.

Mike: Yeah, there’s activity based features arriving. I don’t want to oversell it or go too deep. There’s nothing on the same scale as a major full system like dungeons or monolith or arena. Those will still be the three main endgame systems that you can interact with.

I guess it’s kind of on a similar scale to Strongboxes-ish. Not really. There’s nothing major really, but there’s stuff. [Mike laughs] I’m not allowed to talk about what it is so I don’t want to go into any detail at all. There’s something. Ooh! [Mike laughs]

Strongboxes got a little deep with how you can soup them up and all sorts of stuff like that. There’s nuances to Strongboxes that I know I don’t even know.

Source: YouTube Link

September 6, 2023
LizardIRL: Talking about the monolith, a lot of people have been asking for a faster way to progress towards monolith, especially with second characters – how to get too empowered faster, especially if you’re a bit experienced. Is this something that EHG is considering?

Mike: Yeah absolutely. We’re pretty happy with how the first character experience is when you first get into the monolith and you’re still learning how things are going or you’re at the start of a cycle start and your character doesn’t have any gear that it’s relying on from previous characters you’ve been playing or you’re playing solo or something like that. So we’re pretty happy with how that progression and pacing is going. There’ll be some changes there but we’re really looking at targeting changes on follow-up characters, like you said, where you already maybe have a bunch of gear stashed and you don’t need to grind at all for some key pieces for your build and you’re already up and running and online. So you’re maybe a little bit more powerful than you would be if you were going through for the first time.

So these follow-up characters, we’ve got some changes planned and they’ll be coming in 1.0 primarily that will help with these secondary characters getting to empowered faster and really just staying challenged is really the important part. It’s so you’re not feeling like you’re going through stuff that you’re maybe over leveled or overpowered for and you still feel like what you’re doing is progressing your character and not just getting through some checkpoints.

Source: YouTube Link

September 6, 2023
Terek: Currently, the way corruption and echo modifiers interact between each other can create unpleasant difficulty spikes. Are there any plans to address this?

Karv: Absolutely. So currently there’s a bit of a problem where you can have a 200 corruption echo with a lot of modifiers and because the modifiers scale with corruption they can be way more difficult than say a 400 or even a 500 corruption echo that has no modifiers. So we want to change it so that corruption is the primary way to, I guess like, check your builds power and what the difficulty is so that it’s way easier, especially for the community, to discuss build power. This is so that you don’t just randomly see people making videos or talking about how their build is so good doing 600 corruption without modifiers and then you have people struggling with the same build trying to follow it doing crazy, crazy modifiers on like 300 corruption. Obviously we have other changes like Judd mentioned about expansions to the monolith that we want to do that are different, but the corruption changes are definitely coming.

Source: YouTube Link

September 6, 2023
McFluffin: So sticking with the monolith, another topic is blessings. So I personally really like blessings. I love that they’re target farmable and I can continue to farm the same boss until I get the blessing and the roll that I want but one pain point for a lot of players is that if you have a good blessing and you decide to replace it and then want to go back later you have to do the process all over again and that isn’t always necessarily the most fun thing to do. Do you all have any plans to address that?

Judd: Uh, yes. No, we completely agree with you. So we are making a change there, and I believe that this is new information. Whenever you obtain a blessing you will actually be able to store that permanently and then you’ll be able to swap between the different blessings that you have. Also, when you obtain the blessings and you swap between them they will retain the roll in which you received them. The mechanic in which we are going to allow players to swap between them is not completely defined yet but we don’t believe that’s going to be a hard thing to figure out and so this will be coming in the future.

Source: YouTube Link

September 8, 2023
Q: Do you plan any endgame content for monolith for the next patch?

Mike: We do have some plans for things to do with monolith next patch. Nothing on the same scale as like a new dungeon system. Nothing on that scale, but there’s some. This patch had a bunch of little tweaks and changes to the monolith system and next patch will have tweaks and changes to the monolith system too. Maybe something a little bit bigger, I don’t know yet. The main focus is not specifically on monolith changes. I think the monolith is in a really good spot.

Oh there’s, okay, what am I’m talking about – there’s definitely a change to the monolith coming because it didn’t quite making into this patch, though I thought in my head that it did. Yeah, there’s stuff coming – mechanical changes that will affect everyone. For example, there are changes to the blessings and how they work that are coming. So you’ll be able to switch blessings a lot easier than now for ones you’ve already earned. Also, we’re improving the unlock time for empowered monoliths for follow-up characters after your first playthrough in any given environment – so ladder, non-ladder, or whatever you want to call it. So yeah, there’s definitely room for improvements and there are things planned.

I still really want to add like a – monolith is really hard to add a pinnacle boss to because it has infinite corruption scaling. There’s always a situation you can be in where some boss is better than the uber boss of the monolith. So if you put a boss in the monolith that says like you have to beat every timeline in empowered to even attempt it, or maybe you have to find some specific item to even attempt it – if we were to hypothetically do something like that there’s always the potential for the Shade of Orobyss to be harder to fight based on corruption.

We’re also putting more weight behind corruption in the monolith as well, just so that you don’t get into situations where you’re like this build is a 6,000 corruption build but can’t do certain 200 corruption areas, you know, that sort of thing. I’m being a little hyperbolic but you get the idea.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Lost Memories

This endgame system is still very much in the early stages of development. Don’t expect any more information about it until sometime after launch.

August 19, 2022
Q: What can you tell us about Lost Memories?

Mike: Lost Memories is interesting because it was a system that we had planned a long time ago and talked about a long time ago and had sort of a rough outline of what we wanted it to be and then we made a bunch of changes to the Monolith system, we created the dungeon system, we changed how arenas work, and we did a lot of things and it kind of made Lost Memories not really – the original vision we had for them just sort of be like, ‘Well that’s not going to work.’

So a lot of the stuff we had considered sort of just went out the window but there’s some of the thematic stuff that it really hits, and we had a couple other ideas for ways it could work that were really good that we were like, ‘Okay let’s keep it on as like a name for a feature but we’re going to remake the feature as something completely different.’ That happened about two years ago now, I’d say, and we haven’t really done anything about it since then really. We haven’t added the features or really worked on them or specified exactly what they’re going to be.

Source: YouTube Link

June 16, 2023
Q: Can you talk about Lost Memories from a high level perspective?

Mike: So, I guess Lost Memories as a concept is – high-level concept for Lost Memories, like really broad…sort of like a general description of the system but not describing the details of how it would function or how it’d work, would be kind of a system to… Part of what it would be would be to draw in information from the world and help with storytelling, help with world building, would be a big part of it. So let’s assume Lost Memories, each one of them has like a story piece associated with them and you’re using these items as pieces of a story, and I just thought of an interesting and relevant example of a current game that just came out.

If you’ve played Tears of the Kingdom, the new Zelda game that just came out, one of the main story quests is to collect tears of something, I’m trying to say this without spoilers, but there’s these little teardrops you have to go around the world and collect. They’re in specific places and they have a big story moment that goes with them and when you get all them something happens and you get a big thing that does cool stuff. [Mike laughs] Awesome game if you haven’t played it everyone. I mean, it’s not like it needs championing because it’s a Zelda game. Anyways, having this like thematic tie-in to the storyline for a mechanical system that revolves around things to collect and, I’m sorry I’m being so vague…it’s really hard to talk about it without discussing what original plans were because, you know, you might still use something similar. I’m being so vague, I’m not really saying anything I’m sorry.

I think there’s still room to, and we still want to incorporate more of a storyline interaction with an endgame system like that that really draws on the time travel elements and draws on the fact that there could be alternate timelines maybe or there could be things that you maybe never knew about or other characters that have experienced this time traveling before without you or things like that – where there’s ways to explore the storyline through a mechanical system and having those be discreet “things” in the world. I think that broad description could still very well be used, and I’d like to see it.

I mean, the really obvious like – we can’t do this because of the way our crafting system works, but the really obvious example of this would be like, ‘Okay well here’s a memory and once you’ve collected all the pieces of the memory you’re like – it’s a memory about some character who was fighting Wengari and so you need to get like five drops from Wengari that are not items, but are like monster infrequents or something, and you combine them with the memory and it unlocks the memory and there’s like a story moment that you can watch/read if you want or something and then the item sockets to your gear or something’ – I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go. So something like that, if that makes any sense. Sorry for botching that question horribly.

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]

Favor System

We learned that the Favor System has been rolled up into the Faction System, which includes the previously announced Item Factions, and is a core element of them. Favor is required to perform most, or possibly all, actions within a given faction.

August 19, 2022
Q: What can you tell us about the Favor System?

Mike: As far as like a Favor System, that’s something we’ve talked about – I don’t know when we’ve talked about that or how much we’ve discussed what that’s going to be, but I think one of the key things about it is having a progression system that’s not tied as stringently to your character level but more tied to multiple systems throughout the game. So it’s something that you can advance without being like --when you’re playing Monolith you’re advancing your Monolith progression, when you’re playing dungeons you’re advancing and your dungeon progression…and there’s a little bit of crossover with the keys and the gear you get from things like that, but there’s no direct like – you can’t unlock a new dungeon tier by completing a Monolith, you can’t unlock any Monolith island by completing a dungeon, right. There’s no direct cross progression unlocks there.

I think that’s an important part about this nebulous Favor System we’ve sort of touched on, is having the progression to that not be tied directly to any one endgame system – any one game activity I think is a better way to put it, probably, so you’re still a little bit more able to have that progression where it’s not tied to your character level or any other endgame systems as much. Where you could focus on it or ignore it and you might see like a level, I don’t know, a level 70 and a level 100 character that have the same Favor progressions. That’d be pretty unlikely but I bet it could be done, sort of thing. This is all still very much up in the air on details for it and that’s why I’m talking in such broad strokes for it. I think that’s some of the general overarching mechanical goals for what it does, why it’s there, and reasons for it existing.

Source: YouTube Link

June 16, 2023
Q: With Item Factions requiring “favor” to perform actions within it, where does that leave the once touted Favor System?

Mike: It just got implemented early with Item Factions, is all it really was. So, this is an endgame progression system that is not tied to experience because you’ll use favor to progress along these Faction Systems. I think one thing that may not have been clear in the initial post, but I’m pretty sure was mentioned, is that this Item Faction system is an early part of an overarching Favor System. We’re building the UI for this, we’re building the design for it, in a way that we are planning to have other factions show up that will work in different ways. So it won’t be like a – okay, so I don’t know why I love drawing on my screen to explain stuff but I just do. [Mike laughs]

[Mike opens Paint and starts drawing] Items, so you’ll have the items category of factions and then you’ll have that split into Merchants Guild and Circle of Fortune and then you’ll have like another different faction they’ll be split into two and then you might have another pair of factions that are split into two, and you’ll be able to pick one and then pick this one and then pick this one. So they’re not exclusive with each – like if you pick one out of this group you can still pick one out of this group, and maybe this one is actually four factions and you have to pick one and four, or something like that.

We’re building it as a larger Faction System and just the first piece of it to show up is the Item Factions. And yes, things have changed a little bit but that’s just what happens as you implement systems, they adjust slightly but nothing major. There wasn’t like a big paradigm shift or anything like that. It was just sort of a, ‘Hey we’ve got this Faction System that is coming, can we use it to implement a trade/not trade optional system as well at the same time.’

Source: YouTube Link

[ Table of Contents ]