1. Ortharion : The Last Battle
  2. News

Ortharion : The Last Battle News

Quarterly Update 3

Hello Adventurer,
Here is Sylvain, what's new since our last news of March 1st?
Today, we're going to share information about the game's roadmap and development.

Let's start with the annoying things: we won't be participating in Steam Neo Fest in June, but it will be postponed to Steam Neo Fest in October. Why are you going to ask? Simply, because we seek to offer you the most optimized and polished game possible. So Adrien experiments to see what would be best for the player and for the developer. So he tried to offer an open world with a single map instead of 16 distinct levels. But it was not very conclusive technically.

There are also the vagaries of life and when bad luck mixes with development. So Adrien's hard drive gave up the ghost and we had to start from a version that dated back a month. Fortunately during this period many tests had been carried out, not always conclusive like the open world test. So in the end, the work could be caught up in 2 weeks by Adrien.

We also ask for quotes to offer prices on the different levels of the campaign, which takes some time. The first being, the use of a 3D modeler for the creation of the main character and all his armor.

Here is why, we prefer to postpone the release of the demo in October (even if it has been playable since April), just like the participative campaign, which allows us to take the time, because we remind that we are working on the project during our time. free.

During the summer, this will allow me to finish the story part of the game as well as the faction and secondary quests and perhaps the romances (if they are added. We are thinking about this possibility for the moment).

I now leave the floor to Adrien for the progress of the game.

Hello, as Sylvain already mentioned, I had a backup problem, which made me waste a lot of time.
I had greatly improved the visuals of the first terrain, adding many details and working on the verticality of the terrain, but a 1km by 1km map with a high level of detail took too long to load. over a minute! So I wanted to experiment on an open world.

The open world on the editor worked correctly. But alas, in game, Unity was just crashing. Crashes coming from the Unity Framework itself, I knew that I would have had a hard time fixing this kind of problem having read several posts on the forums without real corrections, neither from users nor from the Unity team. In addition, the open world adds a lot of constraints, so I stayed on the old version.

Then for the game itself, the demo is not just playable, but finished as far as quests are concerned. There are no more bugs, but new design elements need to be added, such as hidden chests with related achievements, item identification system, runeword crafting, and rune pillars. You can see in video what the first 15 minutes give (cut in 6 minutes of video). But the demo in its entirety easily lasts 1 hour, with the same level of quality.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Internal tools have been added to improve the visibility of the project for us, as well as increasing the speed at which we can create quests later. You can see what the possible scenario choices look like below.



Thereafter, I will have to work on functions specific to Steam: Steam Cloud, Steam ranking then a lot of work on the animations and the fights must be done, as much on the player, the pnjs as on the structure of the code to improve performance and more easily create rare/epic/legendary skills and gear later. Because the game is designed to last over time, so with regular content updates.

But let's stop there for now. And let us know in the comments if you have any questions, we'll try to answer you as best we can. See you soon adventurer.

Quarterly Update 2

Hello Adventurer,
Here is Sylvain. What's new since our last news on December 31? Yes, we indicated that we would do a quarterly post and it's only been two months! But we really wanted to communicate with you about Ortharion - The Last Battle.
In this post, we are going to tell you about three things: Our visions of what an action-RPG is, our roadmap and Adrien will conclude by explaining what he has been working on lately and next. Here we go !

[h3]Our visions[/h3]

What is interesting in our approach is that we (Adrien and I) have two different visions of what an action-RPG should be. Different (ouch!), but complementary (phew!), which brings a symbiosis in our approach.

Adrien the developer is more oriented towards action, theorycrafting, character evolution at its peak. And for my part, I'm more RPG oriented with customization and character development, interactions with the world and especially story.

So you see that the two of us are complementary and therefore Ortharion - The Last Battle will be a game for both categories of action-RPG players: Those who want to level and those who want to live an adventure. The leveling will be without limit and you will be able to evolve your character as you see fit even after the end of the campaign. As for those who buy the game to live a story, they will also be satisfied, because after the big end boss, they can move on to another adventure... or stay.

This is therefore what will make the strength of Ortharion - The last Battle, which will be a much more successful version than Ortharion Project, Adrien's first game (and in no case its sequel).

[h3]Roadmap[/h3]

If it would have been possible to release the demo of Ortharion - The Last Battle for the Steam Neo Fest in February (ha no! shouts Adrien at me), we decided to postpone it for the next one, that is to say June 2022. This will make it possible to control, debug and check if everything is working well and if this demo corresponds well to what was expected.
The result is a schedule, which logically must be respected on Steam, that is to say, a release of the game at the latest, 6 months after the exhibition of the game during the event.

We can therefore consider that Ortharion The Last Battle will be released in January 2023 in early access. In the meantime, two important things will have happened: The first is that during the June festival, we will be launching a Kickstarter campaign to finance the game, which will allow us to improve certain points - with in particular the improvement of the visuals of the character and a ranking system and seasons - and on the other hand, will allow us to take into account all your comments. Adrien will then decide whether or not to make changes. It's him who has his hands dirty, I remind you. I handle the pen.

Speaking of pen, I'm going to leave room for him to explain where he is in the development of the game.
I greet you and say see you very soon, advising you to continue to put Ortharion - the Last Battle in your Wish list. Yes, it makes Adrien work faster (!) and above all it motivates us both.
See you again… let’s say… June 1st. It will be 3 months…right? Yes, we have problems with the term “quarter”!

[h3]March 2022 development news[/h3]

the biggest part of the work in the recent months has been to overhaul the code that was present on Ortharion Project. I had already talked about it ici, so with saves and character movements, so in addition to continuing to improve the source code base I looked into the design:

The class system has been completely revised, you can now have up to 7 class choices in total on the same character. You could perfectly make a summoning necromancer who throws axes if you wish, or a warrior using magic.



Who says new class system, says new skills. I have therefore already added all the new skills in the game. There are currently 276 of them. They will still require work: the visual effects of certain skills were not done, for example, and I would like to improve the older.



It's not about adding to have big numbers, but about creating diversity in gameplay and theorycrafting, so new mechanics have been added. One of the most important is, for example, the separation between physical power and magic power and the taking into account, or not, of weapon damage in certain situations and therefore with the creation of hybrid builds.



Each class has its own talent tree, the image below is an alpha preview and is only there to show you what one of the 39 talent tree class will approximatly look like.
The talent trees are not limited to the class, it will simply be necessary to have points in the previous tree. For example, the Barbarian's talent tree can only be unlocked if the Warrior's has been sufficiently invested but you can invest point if you are not a warrior.



The last big job I have left to do is adding the quests, which is already done, but also the dialogues, on which Sylvain gave himself to his heart's content, leaving me to manage to put them in place then in game. Thank you Sylvain! There are a few new mechanics also related to these dialogues that will change the face of the world, but more on that later. Unfortunately, this won't be very visible in the demo much to my dismay.



Changes have been made to the battle structure. Already for performance, mainly for high level players, so builds based on attack speed will be much more effective than those you could have had in Ortharion Project.
I now have internal tools to have an effective global vision of all skills and to be able to change dozens of skills with a simple click or even add skills more quickly.

The structure of the lands has also changed. It goes from a size of 500m by 500m to 1km by 1km, i.e. an area 4 times larger. And so, 4 times more monsters and objects to create when launching each land. So improvements on that side have been made. Below you can see the added stats for creating 500 monsters.



Note that I am only talking about the attribution of statistics here, many improvements remain to be made to be close to an almost instantaneous loading and to maintain 60fps during gameplay phases with density and fast builds as we can see in Path of Exile for exemple.

But let's stop there for now. And let us know in the comments if you have any questions, we'll try to answer you as best we can.

See you soon adventurer.

Trimester update

Greetings, disciples of Ortharion!

Throughout development, I will share with you the evolution of the game, the ideas that are put in place, if I encounter any problems or if I have important information to share with you. So let's get to the heart of the matter, right away:

The first step in this development was to recover the basics of the old game, Ortharion Project, and to rethink some technical mechanics in depth:

Backups

The backup system has been completely revised. It's now faster, easier to read, and easier to delete for character creation. An encrypted cloud backup option has been implemented. This is probably the biggest part since this seemingly simple change took me over a month.

Movement

The movement and camera systems have been recreated from scratch. There will be no more collision issue, and you will have smoother movement animations. This new system also allows me to make movements for the character on moving platforms, to use the weight of his body, etc.

The world design



A world design and a scenario worthy of the great RPGs of the genre! An amateur / proofreader of paper role-playing games, Sylvain Mayet, joined me to work on this game as a screenwriter / dialogue writer He had only had a corrector role on the first, on this second he will have a plus big role! We will also see elements of gameplay together but especially of World / design quests and Lore. We hope that the game will have dynamic factions that you can join. The choices you make during the campaign will have a strong impact on the entire game!
The campaign is planned to last around 50 hours, compared to 12 on average on Ortharion Project, with an infinitely greater level of freedom and quality and additional content, we hope, dizzying! The size of the game being more than 10 times larger than the first, the use of many creation tools, will save us a lot of time.

Richness

In addition to the story, the number of possibilities for builds and gameplay will be much greater! With more combinations than you might see in any other Rpg ... except Path of Exile ... And I will talk about the "theorycrafting" aspect in a future news, very quickly I hope.

schedule

We are preparing a schedule for the future with the hope of a very early prologue / demo, in the first half of 2022.

Disciples of Ortharion, wishing you a happy new year 2022, we say "see you soon".