Hello friends,
Aesop here with a preview of what’s to come in Eternal Return Season 4!
Season 3 of Eternal Return is wrapping up which saw the addition of a lot of new things: new characters, items, item effects, objectives, skins, a replay system, a release on the Microsoft Store, and more.
Today, I’ll be giving you all an update on everything that we’re working on for Season 4 of Eternal Return and beyond. I’ll even be giving you a sneak peek at some of the upcoming characters and new skins!
Let’s just dive right into it! Woooo!!
[h3]
Season 4[/h3]
Eternal Return faces some issues at its core. It feels bad getting into a game, setting up your character, looting, hitting your power spike, dying to someone third-partying, and then re-queuing and waiting again.
This also can be a pretty negative feedback loop as a newer player - looting and dying to some level 100 titan player.
We’re not opposed to knocking everything over and starting from the bottom, so we’re trying a couple of things. The gameplay loop itself is fun, but there’s just a few things that are missing.
We even sketched out a “gulag” system, similar to the one seen in Call of Duty: Warzone. It... doesn’t work well in Eternal Return.
[h3]
New Players[/h3]
The difficulty curve is a huge challenge to overcome. Ideally, we want a game that is easy for new players to pick up, but also rich enough to keep players invested and interested.
According to our data, user retention after 1 day is considerably above average, but the 28-day average reverts to the mean. We’re trying to figure out what happens in-between those days that players dislike the most. Perhaps it’s the seemingly high amount of complexity?
To fix this, many have suggested less items, less weapons, less food, but we’re trying to find something that totally works. Really, there’s no easy solution.
There are about 6 “core” things that players have to focus on each game: Your character, weapon, plan, item skill, map objectives, and augments.
To start with, we’re going to simplify a few things, namely food and mastery.
We’re getting rid of some food recipes and moving things around so that it’s easier to grasp food as a new player. It’s a little bit much to have to remember all the food recipes in each zone that effectively heal for the same amount.
There are also currently 9 masteries. We’re going to condense them to 7.
I’ll be giving you more details on these once they’re fleshed out and developed.
[h3]
Augments[/h3]
Season 4 will feature the new Augment system.
Augments will initially be pretty simple as we expand our Augment system.
(They aren’t as exciting as you had probably hoped.)
Augments do, however, bring some customization and skill expression to the game. Some of them may seem like “character hard counters” but the intentions aren’t to entirely nullify characters. Core augments should enable or strengthen a specific playstyle with the sub augments to complement it as such.
When the full rollout approaches and during the pre-season, we’ll be trying to put a magnifying glass on augments and how they perform and making changes as needed.
We started out with some really fun and unique ideas, but they came with technical limitations and ultimately needed more time to implement and develop.
For example, we had one where a cat would follow you around and check bushes or bring back loot! We have a lot of other really cool ideas that we sketched out and tried to implement, but for simplicity’s sake, we’re keeping them pretty easy to implement for now. Once things settle in, we’re hoping to be able to have more fun augments!
We’ll be modifying Augments in the (probably near) future and keeping an eye on them and how they’re used once the system is more robust and developed.
[h3]
Battle Pass[/h3]
*The provided image is a sample and likely to be changed.Season 4 will feature our first Battle Pass. You’ll be able to unlock a lot of things with the battle pass: Unique Skins, Announcer Packs, Character Voice Packs, Emotes, Rest Effects, and more!
The Battle Pass will also grant you enough NP to unlock a new one if you level it up high enough! It rewards players that main Eternal Return.
If a new battle pass doesn’t feature a character that you play, but an older one does, you’ll be able to purchase and level up the older one instead!
[h3]
New Lobby[/h3]
*The provided images are a sample and likely to be changed.We just like to keep things fresh and make the player experience a little easy to follow, so we’re putting together a nice new lobby for you all to look at. Respectfully.
[h3]
New Mode[/h3]
We’ve begun working on a new map and game mode. Naturally, this takes time, but we’ve started!
Our initial plan is having a random-pick mode where we assign you a random test subject and pit you against other players in a king-of-the-kill type match.
It’ll be Eternal Return with a focus on the combat. Less looting, more fighting.
This is intended to be a more casual mode, making it easier for new players to learn the game and characters, but also giving experienced players a little change of flavor.
More details to come!
[h3]
New Characters[/h3]
We actually would’ve liked to have JP released by now, but we’re still not ready to implement hacking. Sorry JP fans. The problems at the core of Eternal Return may be even more magnified with the introduction of hacking, so we’re waiting on that.
We’re going to continue to release new characters every 2 weeks until we hit 70 characters.
One of those new characters will be Eternal Return’s first original character, Felix.
Felix Green is a 25 year old American who works as a regular cashier with an affinity with spears.
We’ll also have the American mercenary, Aiden, coming too!
The 2-week cadence may seem quick and it may seem like we’re focusing primarily on making new characters over game optimization, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive! We have separate teams working on game optimization, client improvements, UI adjustments, map features, etc.
We’ll have elevation changes addressed and fixed, and we’re even aiming to reduce input lag to be minimal and as smooth as possible.
[h3]
New Skins[/h3]
The skins aren’t totally finalized yet, so they might be a bit different when you see them in the future!
Anyways, that’s all I have for you today, but keep your eyes peeled for more details coming your way soon!
Thank you all so much for reading.
