State of the Game and Future Development
Hey Hunters,
Welcome to our very first "State of the Game" post! My name is Mark, and I'm the Game Director for Relic Hunters Legend here at Rogue Snail.
It's been a wild ride since launch, and we are super grateful for all of you who loved Relic Hunters and supported us in this grand adventure! We are a small team from Brazil with very big dreams and you are helping make them come true. Thank you with all our hearts!
Posts like this will be opportunities for us to talk about the game's development, and also to talk to you—our community—to keep you in touch with what we’re working on, and what is coming next in Early Access!
Launch went well and overall server stability is pretty good! We haven’t had any long outages since launch, and apart from a few hiccups on day 1, our servers seem to be generally well-behaved.
Overall, we've seen very positive sentiment about the game itself, the core gameplay, the story, and the RPG systems—with the vast majority of negative reviews being about the current technical state of the Early Access build. The overall sentiment from negative reviews was "this game has a lot of potential, it just needs to be more stable before I can recommend it".
Although the early parts of the game and story content seem stable enough, we’ve made mistakes when it comes to the technical state of the endgame. We’ve fixed a LOT of things since launch, but there still are a lot of serious technical problems that we are working hard on addressing, including but not limited to:
We are also aware that the current endgame balance is not fulfilling your expectations. Compared to Raff, the rest of the Hunters feel underpowered and weak. Even so, there seems to be a decently healthy variety of builds being used in endgame, so it's a good sign that with a few more updates and tweaks we can bring the game to a great spot balance-wise!
Finally, the endgame didn't hold much interest after about 80-100 hours of play, and you are waiting for more content and/or major features. Honestly, this is actually not bad for our first Early Access release, and we are hopeful for the future, as we will explain below!
We heard you and are currently investigating adding an Offline Mode to the game before it's out of Early Access! Our goal is for you to be able to enjoy Relic Hunters Legend even when you're somewhere without an internet connection (or if servers are down for maintenance).
This is early in development, so we will share more information at a later date.
We are aware that, for some of you, being restricted from playing Story content in multiplayer is annoying. We are a very small team making a huge RPG, so we have to be very careful about where to dedicate our resources, and unfortunately, that’s a really hard change to make at this stage. We’ve made the difficult decision to keep Story missions single player and to invest our attention into making other parts of the game stronger.
We understand that some of you will disagree! At the end of the day, game development is full of hard choices like this where there isn't a clear "right" answer.
I played the game myself alongside you all for 40+ hours at release and the whole team have been watching livestreams, playthroughs, and feedback posted on our Discord.
We were shocked and felt really bad to see the game performing badly and making players frustrated, when we all put so much love and care into making it.
The team and I took a step back and looked at some of our technical infrastructure supporting the game's systems. We are serious about addressing everything that the community has spoken up about at launch, but that is a big undertaking.
We are balancing our time and prioritizing fixing known issues while also working towards a larger update that we’re looking forward to sharing with you all when we can.
Our goal is that, whenever the next big update hits, players will come back to a much more stable and enjoyable experience. We are super grateful for your patience, and we are doing our best to make sure it is rewarded!
We have been working on a first big Early Access update that is due next year!
Here's what to expect:
We have no release date yet, as we want to make sure we fix the majority of serious technical issues before making the game bigger. But hopefully you are as excited as I am to jump back into the game when the new update hits and farm some loot in Maps!
That’s it for our first State of the Game post! If you've read it all until this point, I commend you for your commitment—I know it was a lot of text! But hopefully it was a good read and made you feel like we are all on the same page about how to make this game better!
If not—that's okay too! Tell us about it (respectfully, please!), as the team over at Rogue Snail will be keeping a close eye on community discussions here on Steam, on our Discord, and on social media.
We are only just beginning, and we are grateful for having you all along for the adventure!
Cheers,
~Mark
Welcome to our very first "State of the Game" post! My name is Mark, and I'm the Game Director for Relic Hunters Legend here at Rogue Snail.
It's been a wild ride since launch, and we are super grateful for all of you who loved Relic Hunters and supported us in this grand adventure! We are a small team from Brazil with very big dreams and you are helping make them come true. Thank you with all our hearts!
Posts like this will be opportunities for us to talk about the game's development, and also to talk to you—our community—to keep you in touch with what we’re working on, and what is coming next in Early Access!
Launch went well and overall server stability is pretty good! We haven’t had any long outages since launch, and apart from a few hiccups on day 1, our servers seem to be generally well-behaved.
Overall, we've seen very positive sentiment about the game itself, the core gameplay, the story, and the RPG systems—with the vast majority of negative reviews being about the current technical state of the Early Access build. The overall sentiment from negative reviews was "this game has a lot of potential, it just needs to be more stable before I can recommend it".
Although the early parts of the game and story content seem stable enough, we’ve made mistakes when it comes to the technical state of the endgame. We’ve fixed a LOT of things since launch, but there still are a lot of serious technical problems that we are working hard on addressing, including but not limited to:
- Some Asteroid Dungeon Nemesis (ADN) missions are unstable when played in multiplayer, and can soft lock or crash sometimes;
- Some skill and item combinations in Raff and Jimmy are causing performance issues that can lead to sync issues, crashes or soft locks;
- Sometimes Delve bosses don't spawn their exit portal;
- Trading has some general instability and can be a bit buggy and unreliable at times;
- When playing Epic missions in a sequence, backend errors can be frequent and occasionally require players to restart the game;
- Players are sometimes getting temporarily stuck in the dropship when joining a game in progress
We are also aware that the current endgame balance is not fulfilling your expectations. Compared to Raff, the rest of the Hunters feel underpowered and weak. Even so, there seems to be a decently healthy variety of builds being used in endgame, so it's a good sign that with a few more updates and tweaks we can bring the game to a great spot balance-wise!
Finally, the endgame didn't hold much interest after about 80-100 hours of play, and you are waiting for more content and/or major features. Honestly, this is actually not bad for our first Early Access release, and we are hopeful for the future, as we will explain below!
We heard you and are currently investigating adding an Offline Mode to the game before it's out of Early Access! Our goal is for you to be able to enjoy Relic Hunters Legend even when you're somewhere without an internet connection (or if servers are down for maintenance).
This is early in development, so we will share more information at a later date.
We are aware that, for some of you, being restricted from playing Story content in multiplayer is annoying. We are a very small team making a huge RPG, so we have to be very careful about where to dedicate our resources, and unfortunately, that’s a really hard change to make at this stage. We’ve made the difficult decision to keep Story missions single player and to invest our attention into making other parts of the game stronger.
We understand that some of you will disagree! At the end of the day, game development is full of hard choices like this where there isn't a clear "right" answer.
I played the game myself alongside you all for 40+ hours at release and the whole team have been watching livestreams, playthroughs, and feedback posted on our Discord.
We were shocked and felt really bad to see the game performing badly and making players frustrated, when we all put so much love and care into making it.
The team and I took a step back and looked at some of our technical infrastructure supporting the game's systems. We are serious about addressing everything that the community has spoken up about at launch, but that is a big undertaking.
We are balancing our time and prioritizing fixing known issues while also working towards a larger update that we’re looking forward to sharing with you all when we can.
Our goal is that, whenever the next big update hits, players will come back to a much more stable and enjoyable experience. We are super grateful for your patience, and we are doing our best to make sure it is rewarded!
We have been working on a first big Early Access update that is due next year!
Here's what to expect:
- Bug fixes and technical stability;
- "Treasure Maps" endgame system, with over 100 new levels, new gear, new weapons, new Relics, a new Faction and new Rebel Rank Chapters;
- A new playable Hunter (who do you think it'll be?);
- New balance and items made to make all Hunters strong and fun to play;
We have no release date yet, as we want to make sure we fix the majority of serious technical issues before making the game bigger. But hopefully you are as excited as I am to jump back into the game when the new update hits and farm some loot in Maps!
That’s it for our first State of the Game post! If you've read it all until this point, I commend you for your commitment—I know it was a lot of text! But hopefully it was a good read and made you feel like we are all on the same page about how to make this game better!
If not—that's okay too! Tell us about it (respectfully, please!), as the team over at Rogue Snail will be keeping a close eye on community discussions here on Steam, on our Discord, and on social media.
We are only just beginning, and we are grateful for having you all along for the adventure!
Cheers,
~Mark