Greetings, friends! Project Director Luke here.
All of a sudden we’re less than a week away from the release of MythForce. Sorry it’s been a while since the last devblog. The team’s been focused on getting the game into the best shape possible for September 12, and I’m really proud of how much we’ve accomplished.
We’ve been teasing the new chapters and episodes on our socials, and I’m super excited to see how everyone likes the game.
This week, instead of a focused look at a single vendor or mechanic, I want to address the gameplay experience of MythForce and how we’ve addressed some of the feedback since we first got the game in your hands during Steam Next Fest.
Huge thanks to everyone who’s engaged with us on our Discord and other socials, where we’ve witnessed some awesome discussions around game mechanics from dedicated players. We appreciate all of you who answered our questionnaires to identify which parts you felt needed a bit more love. And that’s what this blog post is about: the ways we’ve polished the game to make your play experience even better.
I won’t be able to describe everything we’ve done, since there’s been so much going on in the last few months, but I want to touch on some broad themes.
Optimization and performance have been at the top of our list. We want the game to run as smoothly as possible for everyone. We’ve been profiling, improving, optimizing, and cleaning up as much as possible to deliver the most bang for your CPU and GPU buck. This has been especially important for our last-gen consoles, but the savings trickle up. You should find that your game just runs smoother—or, if it already ran smoothly—at least a bit cooler than before.
On a similar note, we also have been deeply focused on improving the multiplayer experience. As a peer-to-peer game, lag is still subject in part to your connection to the host player, but we’ve been working to migrate a number of actions to become client-authoritative. That means that—instead of the client’s telling the host, “I want to do this,” and the host’s needing to verify the action and pass it back to the client and any other players—now the client says, “I have done this,” and the host accepts and lets the other players know.
I’m sure network experts are shaking their heads, horrified by my gross underselling of the complexity of peer-to-peer client-host relationship, but you get the idea. All this is to say that the game should feel much smoother as a client player in a multiplayer game. You should rubberband much less often, and your attacks and spells should be much more usable.
Moving on from performance, another frequent topic of feedback concerns pace. MythForce has always been about tactical sword & sorcery action. We’ve done our best to strike a balance between action and resistance, but a few elements still felt less like deliberate friction and more like needless slowing of the pace.
We wanted combat to be tactical but also dynamic and interesting—hitting, fading, and frequently using your special abilities. In that spirit, we took another look at our special ability cooldowns and reduced them almost across the board. We’ve re-tuned the Energy cost of many combat actions so that you’ll find yourself exhausted less often. We’ve even disabled Energy loss entirely when you’re out of combat so you can run around and practice as much as you like when you aren’t actively fighting.
After much discussion, we also decided to turn the player speed up just a little. Now you’ll find that attacks and movement are about 10% faster than they used to be. This change is almost imperceptible but feels much smoother without sacrificing the deliberateness of pace that we’ve been striving for.
We’ve also done a pass on ability animations. Though visually snazzy, many of our ability animations took too long to actually do the thing they’re meant to, like throwing pocket sand, so we’ve trimmed a few frames off the top of a number of our special abilities, making it feel much less like your abilities come out on a delay.
Pace dealt with, we turned our attention to the actions that still weren’t fun enough. Some actions were impractical or just not fun to use, like the sprinting (or charge) attack. We found that players either weren’t understanding it or—even if they did—would frequently not use it. We’ve removed the requirement of sprinting and holding down an attack, so now if you’re sprinting, attacking executes the sprint attack right then and there. It’s a great starter when closing on an enemy, and still impractical enough to use that it doesn’t feel overpowered.
Speaking of things that were underpowered, a few weeks back we held a poll about the ways you like to play. If there’s one absolutely crystal clear thing I took away from it, it’s that few people enjoyed the Ice spellbook. In a beautifully evenly sliced “favorite weapon” pie, the Ice book was a pitiful little sliver. This just won’t do. Thus, Ice spikes now come in a volley of three, each capable of extra damage with a headshot, and the blizzard ticks much more often. Also, Freeze no longer makes the frozen creature warded against Ice damage. There may yet be some improvements to make, but the Ice spell is much more fun now.
By the way, did you notice that the blizzard VFX were upside-down? We’ve fixed that.
The Lightning spell has also received a few improvements, like reducing the re-cast speed for thrown lightning bolts, which now hit for a heavier stagger—and they can crit like any other pinpoint projectile.
Weapons no longer ricochet off of the environment. Walls, foliage, furniture, and the like no longer stop your weapon from traveling to its destination. That means greatswords no longer have one of their few drawbacks, but it also means less frustration when using other weapons.
Finally, a number of special abilities weren’t scaling in damage with player stats, so investing in your Constellation could cause your normal attacks to outpace your specials. It was a special kind of sad to execute Lion’s Roar and do half as much damage as you would do with a normal mace.
Our combat designers have done a huge pass on creature stats, reducing some enemy defensive stats so they’re less tanky—particularly our champions, who would accumulate so many stacking physical resistance bonuses that they would reduce incoming hits to a minimum. Rogue type enemies (dual-wielders) now do less damage per hit, since they usually do two- to three-hit combo attacks and could tear you apart deeper in the dungeon, and the goliaths have had a pass on their attributes too.
It hasn’t all been balance and stat changes. We’ve also done some work to make things more intuitive and readable, like making it more obvious which weapon Enchantments are applied to, with the weapon icon appearing at the top of each Enchantment card.
The Constellation menu, being arguably one of the most important screens in the Citadel, has had an overhaul. We’ve greatly expanded the information panel in the Constellation so you can see exactly what you’re doing when you add and remove Star Shards. We’ve also made opening and closing the Shard tray more intuitive, clicking the socket now to open it. The sockets also have gotten a visual upgrade to make it more obvious what they are, so you no longer need to memorize shapes to know which socket does what.
The vendors’ text has been revised to make their function easier to understand, the multiplayer flow has been simplified to favor parties and quickplay, removing the old server browser. And, of course, the Emporium, Conclave, and Bounty Board—which I’ve spoken about in other devblogs—are all now open for business.
This isn’t an exhaustive list of recent changes, but I hope it’s enough to get you excited about what’s right around the corner. You’ll have to wait for the full game to come out on September 12 to see the rest, but you won’t have to wait long.
Stay tuned!
