Archmage Rises News

[h2]NEW Combat Fixes[/h2]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

It is a huge relief to get the new combat and spell progression system out. We have something solid to build upon.

This week’s focus is fixing priority combat issues and letting the dust settle.

Here is what we are working on for a Thursday patch:

• We’ve read every bug reported, these are current priorities:
  
  
  • Clicking lag and other performance issues
    
  • Giant monster sprites taking up the whole battlefield
    
  • Weapons breaking combat
    
  • Equipment re-equipping bug/exploit
    
• Based on the feedback combat is too hard, we’re revisiting the tuning
  
  
• We’re revisiting Character Creation to get you more starting spells. This will address some of the “Combat too hard” issue.
  
  
• I made a bad call that led to errors in the quest quantities. Separate from the combat branch we made some fixes to the dialogue highlighting code. Then we merged it in last minute and it created problems. We got a hotfix out on Sat evening.
  
  
• We’re finishing off the Skeletons race to get them back into the game
  

- Temporarily disabled the highlighting of keywords in NPC conversations to resolve the issue of weird characters appearing in the middle of dialog. The highlighting will return in the next patch.

Today we are very proud to release our BIGGEST UPDATE EVER with a NEW Combat system. It changes almost every aspect of the game.

• All new combat with FIVE unique, full featured, spell schools, totaling 52 new spells!
  
• All new weapons, equipment, and protection system. Even magically charge your weapons!
  
• All new spell progression and learning system. Get learning bonuses and affinities.
  
• All monsters completely revamped, with all new abilities and AI
  
• New monster race: Crocodons
  

• Previous worlds and save files are not compatible. We tried really hard but couldn't do it. Sorry! Read more on how to switch to the Legacy branch to maintain your progress and update when you choose to here.
  
• Combat is intentionally challenging. Don't expect you can take on some monsters with the one spell you learn in school! Go to a chapter house and do some research. More info in this post.
• Skeletons are temporarily disabled until next week. It's complicated. :winter2019happyyul:
  
• We're still working on Combat. Testing, tuning, playing, reading your feedback. We feel this is a good first step.
  

More info on the thinking behind the Spell Schools:

• Introducing Storm Magic
• Introducing - Earth Magic
• Introducing - Fire Magic
• Introducing - Ice Magic

With changes this massive there are bound to be issues. We think we solved the major ones today with a short Beta. We appreciate your help and support!

Hey everyone!

We're getting really close to the launch of the new Combat Update we've been working hard at for the past little while. This is just a quick update to let you know that tomorrow we are planning to release a Beta version of combat earlier on in the day for those of you who want to jump in a little bit early and preview the new update before we launch it publicly later on in the day. We are doing this so that we can hopefully catch some more last might bugs that we may have missed, and would love your help in finding before we fully release the new combat to the wild.

If you'd like to get in on the beta release, be sure to switch your Archmage Rises' branch on Steam from "None" to "beta - External Beta Testing" so that you will be able to get the new update when it hits the beta branch.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I know you're going to ask us when to expect the update to release, and while I don't know 100% when it will get released, we're aiming for around a noon EST release for the beta and around 5pm EST for the public release. These are ballparks, so it's possible these timeframes may change...

As usual, I (Phil) will be available in Discord if you have any questions about the update or want to get more live updates on the progress of the release tomorrow :)

PS: If you do download the new combat update early, we'd love your bug reports! We'll be continuing to polish the update right up until the public release, so the more early feedback we can get, the better! Thanks for your help and patience :)

August of last year I said we would make best efforts to maintain player progress as we release updates to the game (you can read about that here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/506480/discussions/0/3809535864677346416/ )

Unfortunately, despite best efforts we won't be able to make old save games work in the new update. I'm really sorry. :crying_yeti:



NEW Combat is a massive undertaking rewriting how items, spells, player progress, character creation, monsters, abilities, and gear all work. With so much change we knew it would be challenging. We got sample save files from the Discord community to test with. We tasked a programmer with solely working on this problem.

He did, and hit a dead end.

We made another attempt, with a new programmer for new thinking. Today I got the results that it just isn't going to work. Now, the work on this is jeopardizing our ability to release NEW Combat on Friday.

The problem has to do with the simulator nature of the game and bad data which has accrued from several versions ago to today. We can load the data, world, progress. So on the one hand, loading previous saves actually works. But once you load your old save, you can't save it anymore... That's where things are currently breaking.

We really made best efforts on this to protect player progress, but it just can't be done.



If you would like to continue your existing save file, we've created a new branch called "legacy" that you will need to switch to before the new combat update releases on Friday.

If you haven't switched branches before, here's how to switch branches in Steam:

1. Open up Archmage Rises in your Steam Library

2. Click on the gear just below the banner on the far right

3. In the dropdown menu, click on "Properties"



4. In the new window that pops up, click on "Betas" on the left side menu

5. You should see an option called "Beta Participation" - click on the dropdown menu to the right of that and select "legacy - Legacy & Rivals (Pre-Combat Update)" which should now change your branch to the Legacy branch.



Now that you're on the new branch, it should prevent your game from auto-updating to the new combat update build that will release on Friday.

When you're ready to switch back to the most recent public build of the game, you can follow the same process to switch back to the "default" branch by selecting "None" under the Beta Participation dropdown menu.



Very unlikely.

The new data structure of everything is THE new data structure of everything. We see no reason to change it again. I was in a meeting yesterday about the rest of the roadmap and nothing coming is close to the work we've had to do for new combat. Adding features like factions, world spell casting, enchanting, it all builds on top of what we've got here. It doesn't change the base.

That being said, while we don't foresee any more issues in preserving save games from now on, in August I was smart enough to write the following so I'll repeat it here again:

Q: Are you promising I will never lose progress during Early Access?
A: No! I'm too experienced to make that naïve promise. I'm sure at some point, maybe more than once, it just won't be possible. What I am promising is much more effort and robust tech put into testing and preserving player progress. Dropping it from forced restarts 50x before 1.0 to maybe 5x.

Today is one of those "impossible points". Really sorry about it.