Lost Eidolons News

Happy Thanksgiving from ODS

Hello everyone!

Happy Thanksgiving! 2023 went so fast and I can’t believe it’s already November.

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2023 was exciting for everyone at Ocean Drive Studio! We started Early Access for Blackout Protocol, released Lost Eidolons on PS5 and Xbox Series, dropped the Dropkick Navvy demo, and of course, we announced Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch.

All of us working on these various projects are grateful for the ongoing support from everyone and hope to deliver something even more meaningful to our community in the upcoming months.

To share our plans going forward:

[h2]Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch[/h2]

As Lost Eidolons is a very important franchise for us, we are going to keep investing in the genre and IP. For Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch, our plan is to share regular updates via our Dev Logs, and plan to stream and showcase development progress. We are hoping to share the demo build with everyone early 2024—that is, unless we find critical issues during internal playtests! Please follow our social channels and Steam community hubs for more updates. All links below.

[h2]Blackout Protocol[/h2]

It was busy 4 months after we released Early Access in July! We learned a lot from the community feedback and have been working to improve the foundation of the game, pivoting from the content roadmap we announced at release. As we hope to have addressed most of the improvement points of the core gameplay, we think we can start adding new content again. If you haven’t tried out the game yet, now is the perfect time to give it a go since you will see the much-improved version of Blackout Protocol thanks to our community feedback. And it’s on Autumn Sale!

[h2]Dropkick Navvy and Unannounced Title[/h2]

Right after PAX West, we released an early demo entitled Dropkick Navvy: First Step! We are collecting feedback and reading the reviews for the game to better plan the development roadmap for the full game—Dropkick Navvy. If you haven’t tried the demo yet, please give it a try especially if you love physics based, sandbox games!

We have also been working on an unannounced title for quite a while! This unannounced title is one of the biggest development projects which we plan to officially announce in late 2024. So keep an eye out for future announcements.

Again, thank you so much for all the support you have given us and have a fantastic Thanksgiving Weekend!

Best,

Jungsoo Lee

Lost Eidolons 30% Off!

Tacticians,

Autumn is upon us, and leaves are changing both in this world and in Artemesia. In hopes of bringing the beauty of Artemesia to more Tacticians, everything Lost Eidolons–the base game, and the digital content–will be 30% off during Steam Autumn Sale 2023. Needless to say, this discount will make the digital deluxe an even more enticing deal!

If you’ve been keeping Lost Eidolons in your wishlist, this would be your chance to move it into your cart! If you are a seasoned Tactician, please introduce Lost Eidolons to fellow TRPG fans so that they can experience the classic turn-based combat as well.

Whether new or coming back with New Game +, your journey in Artemesia awaits you!

- ODS Team

DISCORD | TWITTER | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | YOUTUBE | TWITCH | KICK

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1580520/Lost_Eidolons/

For the Love of Eden… Vote for Us!

Tacticians,

It’s the most wonderful time of the year–Steam Awards nomination time.

This year, we celebrated our first anniversary on PC, as well as brought the game to consoles. We also had some patches to bring you various improvements and fixes, including more optional battle variety and expanded endings with epilogues.

If you enjoyed your time in Artemesia, show us your support by voting for Lost Eidolons under the Labor of Love category!

Lost Eidolons 30% Off!

Dev Log: The Fast-Paced Combat in Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch

When we started designing the gameplay experience for Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch, one of the very first things we knew we wanted was a faster pace to combat. If you play Lost Eidolons on harder difficulties or with permadeath on , some battles can take almost an hour. To create a turn-based SRPG with a lot of replayability, while providing a new experience each time, I felt shorter battles must be treated as a core pillar.

Today we’ll be taking a look at several new ways we’re speeding things up in Veil of the Witch, including:

1. Reducing the party size.
2. Shortening the prep time between battles.
3. Shortening combat animations.
4. Scaling down the size of combat maps.

Reducing the Party Size
Lost Eidolons has a massive cast of party members to choose from: you can recruit 25+ characters, and deploy up to 10 of them at a time (or 20, if you include those you set as Aides). That offers its own sort of fun, but comes at a cost: it tends to make battles quite time-consuming.
So for Veil of the Witch, we wanted to try something different. Initially, we set out with the idea of a party size ranging between 3 and 6 characters. Eventually, we settled on 5.

To put it another way: 5 was the minimum amount we felt we could get away with, without reducing what makes an SRPG fun.
The biggest challenge with reducing the party-size was how hard it became to utilize the monster weak point system, a battle mechanic in Lost Eidolons that I love. It’s a system that I think encourages the player to fully engage with all of the game’s mechanics, using smart positioning and a variety of weapons and abilities to maximize synergy as efficiently as possible. I felt that if the party size was too small, monster battles would lose that spark (and also just become too hard).
We tried out various options, and eventually found a party size of 5 to be the sweet spot.

Reducing the Time Spent Between Battles
Lost Eidolons has a fairly long preparation phase between battles. You have to manage equipment, classes, skills, and various other little details for at least 10 characters, and sometimes more. For Veil of the Witch, I wanted to cut that down dramatically, so players spend less time staring at menus and more time playing the game.
To reduce the time spent managing characters, we decided each character should have a fixed class, and advance within their own predefined perk tree. We also decided that each class should have a specific set of fixed equipment, to let us design their kit with a more cohesive, intentional feel.
Our goal is to give the player a balanced party of characters with distinct roles that feel unique (rather than basically interchangeable, as they were in Lost Eidolons), while still allowing for some variance in builds and abilities. We then layer additional depth on top of this, with the addition of the new roguelite elements, like unlocking new skills and upgrade cards right there in a middle of a battle.
It’s a direction I’m quite pleased with, as it results in a lot of exciting moments and really interesting synergies between characters. I look forward to sharing more about each individual character and class in future updates.

Shortening Animations
In addition to reducing the time between battles, we also did our best to reduce unnecessary downtime during battles.
Lost Eidolons featured frequent cinematic finisher animations, where the camera zooms in as a character delivers a particular spell or attack. While fun, these also slow down the pace of the game, and no matter how cool they are, they inevitably lose some charm after the 300th time you see them.
While the first game already provides options for 2x animation speed and skipping enemy turns (both of which will still be available in VotW), those are optional settings, not core changes. We wanted to take things further this time around, and design animations to play out quickly and snappily on the grid map itself.
We still use cinematic shots and effects for specific high-level skills. We’re just doing so more sparingly now – both to speed up the game, and so that when they do show up, they feel all the more exciting.

Scaling Down the Maps
Finally, a major departure from the first game is that the maps in this one are generally a lot smaller.
In Lost Eidolons, the sprawling battlefields were a necessity, because there were so many units running around on both sides, so we needed the ability to space out squads and skirmishes. With this game’s smaller party size, it’s just natural to shrink the levels, so players spend less time on those tedious in-between turns, where all you’re doing is trying to move a parade of party members across a huge empty section of the map.
We’re also reducing enemy numbers and density within each map — opting for shorter, more frequent battles, rather than long multistage ones with a huge number of enemy squads.

I hope fans will approach these new changes with an open mind. Rest assured, we’re not just removing features or reducing complexity for the sake of it. Our goal is to build on what worked in the first game, while streamlining parts where we think we can do better, to create a battle system that feels faster, more dynamic, strategically deeper, and just overall way more fun.
I look forward to sharing more in future updates!

Jin Sang Kim, Creative Director

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530490/Lost_Eidolons_Veil_of_the_Witch/