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Rivals of Aether News

Rivals Workshop Character Creation Contest

Today we’re kicking off a competition with one of the coolest prizes we can think of – a chance for your own character to officially join the Aether Universe! We’re inviting the community to create their dream character in our new contest and share it with the world for a chance to be added to Rivals 2.

If you’re new to Rivals or the Rivals Workshop and want to get involved, we’ve got great news because Rivals of Aether is currently on sale for 50% off! You can pick up the game at a discount (or any of our games) during the Steam Summer Sale for the next 2 weeks through 6/29/23 – 7/13/23.

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Ever since we added Steam Workshop support, our community has created over 3,000 characters and even more stages and buddies. It’s become such a fan-favorite that Workshop side events are now held at all Rivals Majors. On top of that - Workshop has even become such a core part of Rivals itself that we selected and adapted four of the best community-made characters to add as a free official update to the game in 2022. Now we’ve decided to turn our attention to our upcoming sequel with a public competition!

Starting today, 7/3/23, you’ll have until the end of the year to create and publish a brand new character with the chance to get it included in Rivals 2! We want to spur fresh ideas from the community, so we will only be allowing characters created and published after 7/3/23. Submissions are limited to one character per person and can be officially entered using our Google Form and publishing your character with the “Rivals 2 Contest” Steam Workshop tag. First place will receive $5,000 in exchange for rights to the character, while the winner and four runner-ups will receive exclusive cosmetics in Rivals 2.

While we're on the subject of community-made characters, be sure to check out the amazing characters featured above in our trailer: Lukastar, Rykenburn, and Zephrie.

Official Rules


As mentioned above, to enter you will need to create and submit a completely original character (with the “Rivals 2 Contest” tag) during the contest period of 7/3/23 – 12/31/23. This means entrants should not use movesets or sprites from previous works. In addition, any submissions contributed to by a team must be submitted and represented by a single individual that owns the character. Judging will be done by the Aether Studios dev team based on a number of criteria including:

  • Gameplay [1-10 points]
  • Visuals [1-5 points]
  • Character Background (Element Fit/Lore) [1-5 points]


The top choice will be awarded $5,000 in exchange for character rights and will guarantee the character’s inclusion in Rivals 2 sometime post-launch.



Participants must be at least 13 years old to participate. For complete contest details and requirements, check out our official Workshop Character Creation Contest rules.

Get Your Project Featured


While the competition’s underway we’d love to show off what our community is cooking. Working on something? Use our Highlight Form as many times as you’d like to submit video of your progress, process, or playtesting of your creation. You might be featured on our social media or game spotlights.

We hope everyone has fun with this competition and is excited as we are to see some awesome new characters make their way to the Rivals Universe. If you have any questions about the contest feel free to ask in the comments below, or on twitter, discord, or any of our other social media.

Get one of 2023's best roguelikes dirt cheap in new Steam sale

Well-known indie game developer and publisher Chucklefish is celebrating its anniversary this year with a commemorative Steam sale. There are heavy discounts on many of their most beloved titles, ranging from the older Starbound to the newer roguelike hit Wildfrost. With everything from single-player games to multiplayer, the titles included offer deals to a wide range of players. If you are a fan of fast-paced fights and pixelated adventures, then this birthday sale is definitely worth a look.


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NA RCS Season 7 June Online Major

Get ready for our first online event of Season 7! start.gg/RCSJune

Prizes


  • Champion Olympia skin for ALL participants.
  • $1000 in prize money provided by start.gg for premier RCS events!




Our first ever event on rollback netcode features Rivals Singles on Saturday, June 11th where all participants will earn a brand new Champion Olympia DLC skin and a chance at $1000 in prizes provided by start.gg. Compete for glory, League Points, and cash prizes in our first online major of Season 7.

Time & Dates

Registration Deadline - 6/10/21 @ 11:59 PM PT

Check In: All players must check in before bracket start so we can confirm attendance. This helps everything run smoothly because we can generate a bracket with only people who are online and ready to play - less waiting for everyone! Check-ins are available up to 30 minutes before bracket start by going to the event page.

Rivals Singles Check-ins - 6/11/2021 @ 12:30 PM PT / 2:30 CT / 3:30 ET
Event Link: start.gg/RCSJune

Rivals Singles (Stream) - 6/11/2021 @ 1 PM PT / 3 CT / 4 ET
twitch.tv/RivalsOfAether

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Entrants must show up and participate to be eligible for the Champion Olympia skin code. Codes will be emailed to players the week after the event after brackets and prizes are verified.

Rivals 2 Officially Announced

Last Friday we officially announced the sequel to Rivals of Aether through a trailer packed with fast-paced gameplay, beautiful stages, and even a tentative release date to look forward to. Zetterburn, Ranno, and Wrastor were revealed as the first three characters in the game, along with promises of more favorites returning.

We have an admittedly bad habit of making our biggest announcements on April 1st, so to assure you that you weren't having a fever dream on Friday - here's the serious news on our sequel's announcement and currently released details.

Announcement Trailer

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Our big reveal trailer capped off the Rivals Direct on Friday with the official announcement (and name reveal) of Rivals 2. Our release date is currently set in 2024. We know fans will have tons of questions, so we put together a page of answers to Frequently Asked Questions we've received so far as we teased development.

Game Details and Live Q&A

We also ran a live Q&A session that started with Dan and Trevor going through the FAQ and adding a few insights before taking questions from any twitch viewers who stuck around after the Rivals Direct 4.

You'll also want to make sure to sign up for our Rivals 2 newsletter on the new website to stay up to date on development. Updates won't be frequent yet since we're still deep in development, but you won't want to miss important announcements like the launch of closed beta testing. Sign up to make sure you have a chance to be one of the first to get your hands on the game.

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Press Kit and High Quality Renders




Be sure to check out the official press kit if you want to get some high quality renders of characters, stages, and our new logo. More will be added as updates release.

Jobs at Aether Studios

To make this project a reality, we've been building a bigger team over the last few years to bring our dream platform fighter to life. Along with the game trailer, website, and Rivals Direct on Friday we also announced 4 new positions on our jobs section of AetherStudios.com. If you'd like to work with us and are able to work remotely please apply.

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If you're excited about Rivals 2 so far, you can be sure we're just as excited to be making it! We know it's still a long way out but you can believe the wait will be worth it. Our team is small but our ambitions are high, and we aim to compete against the best games on the market. There is a lot that we want to build to make Rivals 2 the best fighting game that it can be and we know we can reach that goal with time.

Feel free to leave us a comment here or on social media with any questions about the game.

Rivals of Aether Balance Patch 2.1.2.0

After over a full month since the release of our four free newcomers, we are back once again with another round of balance changes!



Last patch aimed to clean up some obvious troublemakers and mechanics. This time we intend to really dig deep and focus on fine-tuning our new friends. This is not by any means our final balance patch, but this will be our last balance touch-up before Genesis 8 and Low Tide City in April. Players looking for changes for our earlier 14 characters can get excited for our next balance patch coming later this year, where we plan to continue work on our newcomers while giving some elbow grease to some of our other favorite Rivals!



  • Matches no longer desync when switching between rollback and non-rollback modes online.
  • Fixed Orcane’s explosive bubble rune crashing.
  • Fixed keyboard controls causing unintentional up/down hard presses while online.


WORKSHOP
  • Added attack property AG_NO_PARRY_STUN.
  • Added newcomer names to get_char_info.


As for balance changes to our four newcomers, there are a LOT of updates on this round, so please check them out on our website.