Mist Legacy News

[p][/p][p]Greetings Mistwalkers,[/p][p][/p][p]We know it's been a while since we have given some news, so here it is. [/p][p][/p][p]Since our last post there was no tangible progression on the game, We will not get in the "why" here, but the short story is that it did not work. We are now correcting the situation with a change of plan.[/p][p][/p][h3]And the plan is?[/h3][p]We are creating a secondary team dedicated to the game that will be directed by us (. Work has already begun, training is ongoing with the first member of the new team.[/p][p][/p][p]We are also creating a Players Council that will help with player inputs on what we should do.[/p][p][/p][h3]What to expect?[/h3][p]We will first create small updates to test the release pipeline and make sure the team is able to create releases. We expect the first update to be called something like "Quick Wins" where we target a few evident things of the game that we can change. The team will then analyze progression vectors and create new content to get to theses. The game engine will not change anymore, we will be focusing on game content.[/p][p][/p][p]Falkarma will act as Creative Director for the game, making sure we respect our original planning and that the new content match the quality we want for the game. He have been busy preparing an overview of the current state of the game, to set targets for the new team. [/p]

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[p]As an example, we are categorizing the part of the game map that is not yet opened. Making them available and meaningful could be a viable long-term target for the team.[/p]

[p]The overview also include the progression of the players, your capabilities, where are your caps, what you need to finish the current raids, what you can or can't craft, etc. For this I will need the cooperation of the community via the Council, because checking value in the database is never the whole story.[/p][p][/p][p]Cloudigger is revisiting the storyline and world lore, to see how it can be transferred to the new team and how he can help with that. Sicklab will keep an eye on the build process and be ready to intervene when needed.[/p][p][/p][h3]How does this plan will work? [/h3][p](bonus part, not really news)[/p][p]Mist Legacy was created as a forever game, meaning the engine is made to consume data stored in a database. We have an homebrew editor that helps create any type of content in this database, may it be quests, monsters, talents, crafts, regions, etc., etc. [/p][p][/p][p]Here are some pictures of what the new team has to learn. It's a complex editor, but once you get the way it works, you'll be creating dungeons and epic story all night.[/p]

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[p]The cartographic view of the starting area. You can see Leonidas and his dialog tree on the right. On the map you can see all kinds of nodes that represent gameplay elements.[/p]

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[p]A "worktree" is a group of elements related to a specific part of the game. Here is the last adventure we created in the Lithofortress. You can see the parameters of Gularzob when he is possessed. On the right is another worktree for the monster talents and who has them.[/p]

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[p]Here are some crafting and balancing views. The list of metal in the worktree shows us where you can get them. The pivot grid will help us create some kind of balance in the skills. And the "Armes" worktree will show you all the weapons and how they are crafted.[/p]

[p](This table was sponsored by the new visual editor of Steam! It works like a charm!)[/p][p][/p][p]As for the Council, we will create public and private topic on the Discord server. That will give us a better feeling of what and how we need the game to progress. We will also open more data to help player analyze our system.[/p][p][/p][h3]Conclusion[/h3][p]We are very happy with the new plan for the project, it was painful to watch the game being idle because we could not get back to it.[/p][p][/p][p]In short, we have a new plan, work has begun and we expect to have results.[/p][p][/p][p]Thanks for playing with us![/p][p][/p]

Greeetings Mistwalkers,

We will be doing some work on the servers. No new content will be added this time, it's all boring technicalities.

Thanks for playing!

Greetings Mistwalkers and Therians,

We hope you are enjoying your winter holidays. We have good news for you, but first here is what happened last year.

Our games are passion projects and we give everything we can to them, even when the odds are against us. That way of thinking can make us "overpromise", and this is what we did in the news about the 2024 planning, we would like to apologize for that.

Instead of doing half-baked updates to meet our promises, we decided to just stop, take a step back and rethink our situation. Getting out of the production for the games gave us the opportunity to explore new avenues for the studio.

Our first big news it that results for our exploration came in just a few weeks ago, and it was very positive! It's money stuff so we can't talk about it, but we can start talking about the future (without "overpromising").

As for today, our game engines are considered done, both systems are unique and offer a good support for gameplay and storytelling and they were designed for never-ending games. Future updates will be only game content, but we will have to change the way we do them.

In all Virtys history, we got an incredible help from the community. We think part of our future is to take that a step further. Our engines are built in a data-first way, meaning that we could have a community-based team thinking about new content and we could have a way to translate that to community-based game update.

What we will do starting in January is to give a better structure to this cooperation and see where is lead us. On the technical side, we already started work on the production pipeline for both games to be ready for new release and there will be an infrastructure upgrade in February to make sure our servers are up for the long run.

We won't do any promise on updates count and dates, this would be futile. We will give you everything we can.

The second big news is that Cloudigger, our lead writer on both Mist Legacy and Therian Saga, will come back to help us. He had to step away for a few years and we know the impact was felt a lot in the games. This is not a full-time return, but having one of the founders back home is really a big boost for us.

And finally, there is a third project for Virtys on the horizon, we are nowhere near the big reveal, but this project is the catalyst that allowed us to secure the future of the studio. In due time we will tell you more.

For Mistwalkers: Because of climate change in Valsonge, there won't be any snow for Christmas in your domain, but we reduced the price of all items in the game shop so you can make yourself well dressed for when the snow comes.

Thanks for playing with us!

Greeting Mistwalker,

Are you prepared for a new endgame adventure? Today, we are releasing an update focused on single-player character progression with a main story quest line, a dungeon challenge and an upgrade for companions.

You will also get to unlock a new part of the map that will open new resources for level 5. On the grand scheme of things, this update marks the end of the game content up to level 5. This means that the next player progression we will have to go to level 6 with everything that it implies (companions, buildings, artifacts, challenges, skills, etc.).

Nothing is fixed yet for next update, but we could have a more mid-game focused update to smooth the player progression before we can go forward with the next level of the game. The concept would be to find "holes" in the player progression and adding content to make sure more players stay engaged with the game to reach the level 50. We tested this concept in this update with a new quest line in Corrina Forest as this forest was almost empty. We also have room to advance the main storyline before upgrading the game content to level 6.

Thanks for playing!




https://store.steampowered.com/app/1259440/Mist_Legacy/


[h2]Content Change:[/h2]

• New questline in Corrina Forest for mid-levels.
  
• Main story questline for high levels.
  
• Singleplayer dungeons adventure at the Lithofortress.
  
• Access to the Tarzakon hills.
  
• The last level 5 materials.
  
• New substances and plants for level 5.
  
• Ovie, Badouk and Palenne upgrade to level 50.
  
• Bone drops for hunting level 5, and a new rare bone.
  
• All terrain skill bonus upgrade to 35.
  
• New shield recipe for tier 3 enchantments.
  
• Paladanthic Legs, Feets and Cape now drop from Gargar.
  

Greetings Therians and Mistwalkers

First we would like to wish you a very fun year for 2024, may your skill raises and your coffers be full of loot.

We decided to do a joint announcement because we are the same team working on both games. Many of you wanted to know what is up with the team, especially about Mist Legacy because of the post we did in the fall.

For the short version: we will continue our work on both games as much as we can in 2024.


[h3]Mist Legacy[/h3]
The change we did in the fall on monetization did have an impact, but what we still lack is volume. This means we have to ramp up the marketing. As you can expect, marketing is a time and cash-consuming task so it will impact the number of game updates we can do. But marketing, and you, need updates, so we will have a mix of marketing done and new content. So as for today, we are preparing the year with three updates: March, September and December.

We expect that the updates for 2024 will focus on the main story of the game. Each one will unlock a new sector of the map and propose adventures that will have the possibility to unlock upgrades for companions and for your character with the Mistwalker reputation. Also, Sorka wrote to us and asked if she could come back to meet this cute hero she met on the Troll Plateau, we’ll see what we can do with that.


[h3]Therian Saga[/h3]
For Therian Saga, we are very happy to keep this world alive and the way we handle the game is that we accumulate the revenues from the game and when we have enough we use it to create a game update for our players. Based on current income, we expect to have Falkarma working on the next update to be released in May so he can finish the new region of Arkubel and possibly open a few other territories.

There is something that is a big worry for us about Therian Saga. We are stretching our luck by continuing to use the same technological engine (Silverlight) as we were 10 years ago. There is a possibility that we wake up one morning and that Microsoft decides to turn the switch off for this technology. And having our first game disappears from the online world, with all the memories linked to it, is just not something we want. In June, Virtys created a checkpoint for the future of this game, and we will explore our available options at that moment.

[h2]In Conclusion[/h2]
As always, this is our planning for the year and we cannot guarantee the plan will work as we thought it would, but it’s an honest plan and we think it could hold on for a year. We locked our schedule for the three Mist Legacy updates and the Therian Saga update. Let's say that if something big happens (yeah, we are also looking for other secret options) this should only mean more cool stuff is coming.

Thanks for playing with us!