Open Development Week #98: Announcing the Combat 2.0 Update

Hey Hunters,

How have you been?

We're already in October, oh my! I heard our Community Manager Lucy and one of our Partners Sivicks are cooking up something nice for Halloween - make sure you're following us on social media to stay up to date!

We've been hard at work on what's next for Legend. Our Steam Early Access release is fast approaching, and we are trying to hurry up and cram it with as much love, polish, cool features and content that we can!



Our most handsome Team Voyager is still focusing 100% on story and the Secret Market - our Social Hub. I wish I could show all the cool things they are working on, but spoiling story stuff is a no-no.

What I can talk about though is how cool these story tools are!

Our story editor tool

We have taken the amazing open-source storytelling tool Fungus and made it ours - we have completely rewritten all commands to fit our game's architecture, while also improving the workflow and UX to fit our needs.

Gabe and Nathalia have done a great job at this, and if you've messed around with Chroma Squad's Episode Editor before (Gabe was the programmer for that!), this is similar but a thousand times more flexible and powerful. Our story designer Pedro is already working on many quests and side stories, and I can't wait to see them in-game.

Top View of the current state of The Secret Market development

Meanwhile, The Secret Market is also going super well. It is by far the biggest and most detailed location in the game, and we hope it will feel like home when you are there.

We are still holding back most details so that we don't spoil too much - that's why you are only getting the aerial view for now, sorry :p

Here are some non-spoilery information about the Market, though:

• It will be the Social Hub of Relic Hunters Legend with multiple online shards with lots of players in each of them.
  
• We still don't know how many online players we can fit into each shard because of performance (both CPU and server-side). We are aiming for as many as we can! The dream is 32 or more players, and hopefully it is feasible, but we will try our best to fit as many as we can.
  
• The Secret Market will be home to all kinds of vendors and quest givers, and most adventures will start there.
  
• If you backed the game on the NPC or Distinguished NPC tier, you will probably be a resident of the Secret Market, going about your day ;)
  
• The Market will have a day and night cycle of a couple of real-time hours.
  
• Spoiler-free lore information: the Market sits right in the middle of Hilltown, which is Ducan-controlled territory. The Market hides in plain sight from the Ducans though, using an ancient cloaking technology called The Perception Drive.
  
• The visual inspiration for the Secret Market is Brazilian favelas, especially the Santa Marta community in Rio. It is colorful and dynamic, full of art, music and creativity, contrasting with the dull, grey and sad Hilltown, which is controlled by Ducan forces.
  

We at Artemis have recently released the Full Party Update, which included Raff's full skill kit and general improvements on skills and our internal skill tools.

Moving on, we have decided to tackle something I am personally extremely excited for: combat.

The core combat mechanics of Legend have been largely untouched since the Kickstarter demo, almost 2 years ago. There was always something riskier, more technical, more important for the vision of the game, more requested by the Founders, etc.

We think now is the time to finally get the combat gameplay of Legend to match our original vision of the game. I'll try to explain the goals and major changes the best way I can, and I very much look forward to hearing your opinions on this - join us on Discord if you haven't already!

Design goal of Combat 2.0

To improve the flow of combat, increasing the relevance of Skill use, reading enemy behavior, and proper positioning. To improve co-op, making player collaboration more important. And finally, to improve the game's challenge in a fair way, allowing us to create meaningful challenge for an experienced group of 4 players.

What do we want to do to get there?

• Stagger System: enemies will have "Hit" animations that will not only make your attacks feel "heavier", but also interrupt their actions;
  
• Combo System: as promised since the Kickstarter video, we will introduce Skill Combos between the skills of different Hunters to encourage teamwork;
  
• Condition Triggers: all Damage Types (Impact, Frag, Magnetic, Fire, Water, Nature) will have a chance to trigger their respective Conditions (Stun, Injury, Silence, Burn, Freeze, Contagion);
  
• Ultimate Skills: all Hunters will charge and unleash their Ultimate skills through gameplay;
  
• Elite Rebalance: Elite enemies will appear on every Difficulty (but more of them will show up on Hard and Epic) and be significantly stronger to provide an "oh snap" moment and break the pacing of combat.
  

betu's concept of a new Kami enemy

• New Enemies and Bosses: Kami faction and more variants of Ducan troops;
  
• Improved Enemy Behavior: enemies will stop bouncing around all the time, will position themselves more sensibly and have clear attacks that can more easily be avoided;
  
• Major Life/Healing Rebalance: enemy attacks will be easier to read and avoid, but damage will be higher. Also, healing from the Potion will be on a drastically increased cooldown, which will increase the value of other healing sources such as Shield regen, Skills and items.
  
• Ammo Economy Rebalance: ammo will run out more quickly, especially for powerful weapons such as shotguns and marksman rifles, but will drop more often, especially during boss fights.
  
• Fixes: shotgun reloads, weapon reload animation speeds and other bugs that get in the way of combat gameplay more will be fixed;
  

Uh, not sure. We're focusing more on the quality than on a hard date for this one. Our internal goal is: before the end of the year. Does it mean November? December? One day before Christmas? Too early too tell. But I promise to keep you updated and give you more accurate estimates when we have them!



We probably won't be releasing it until we are very close to done (which should be right before our Steam Early Access release next year).



It's a surprise! But you can be the first to know by checking out our Social media and weekly Community livestreams on Twitch:

Twitch (Every Friday on Noon Pacific Time)

Twitter

Instagram

Facebook

That's it for today! Cheers!

~Mark, Lucy and all Rogue Snail Team