Relic Hunters Legend News

Hello hunters, how have you been?

We’ll be holding a Playtest Week for our new update that will be available to Kickstarter backers and Founders and will help us get feedback to improve Relic Hunters Legend. This test week will take place during the 1st to the 4th of November and our alpha players will be able to find many new features and changes in the game and we hope you enjoy this journey!

If you are a Founder and Backer and want to have access to this Alpha build, go to our Discord Server, show proof of purchase of Relic Hunters Legend to one of the moderators to gain access to the founders-only channel.

What are the new features players will find in the Friends & Family update:

• The first act of RHL history, with adjustments (and the brand-new ending!)
  
• Five playable Hunter
  
• Revamped Seven's Skill Tree and active Skills
  
• New Weapons and Gear
  
• New feature: Factions (“Secret Market Rebels” and “Abapotim”)
  
• New feature: Overshields and Overarmor
  
• New game modes: Delve, Defense and Distraction, totalizing seven game modes for you to enjoy considering the previously available ones - Exploration, Payload, Skirmish and Scavenge.
  

*You can find details about the features in our previous Dev Blog updates here on Steam!*



Hope you enjoy your time on this galaxy and see you around!

Cheers ~

Hello Hunters, how are you doing?

In the last quarter, we finished migrating our backend to Gearbox’s SHiFT, did a critical reading on the Abapotim story and implemented the necessary changes, did several changes in Seven’s skills and skill tree, and added new cool features and improvements to the game.

Today’s dev blog is full of great things (and info) for you to read. Let’s check them all!








Ok, we have LOTS of news about Seven. Here’s what happened in the last 2 months:

One of the most important things we did was revamp Seven's active Skills and Skill Trees. Our goal was to make Seven's kit more exciting with skills that feel more active and less reliant on late-game skill nodes and Legendary items to be fun to play with.

The biggest change is Re:Aligment, which was a supporting ability that regenerated your Shields and is now a CC ability that freezes all nearby enemies.

Another significant change (and much requested by our Founders!) was Seven's Ultimate skill. You'll now have the ability to shoot your own time rays at enemies, replacing your equipped weapon.

For the build nerds out there, you'll be happy to know that the Ultimate area not only freezes enemies as it did before but now also marks them with Paradox Mark which is very important to enable many different builds to keep working when the Ultimate is on.

We also added a new mechanic to Seven's Blink skill: Gain a Levitation buff for 1 second if your Blink ends in the air. This allows for some cool new maneuvers and will also save you from falling down pits.

The changes don't stop there: All of the starting nodes on Seven's Skill Trees (The Paradox, The Constant, and The Savior) have been redesigned, with interesting new effects so that you can feel like a damage dealer, a tank, or a healer, respectively, right from the start of the game!

Another major addition has been the introduction of the Overshields/Overarmor mechanic (we explain this right below), which replaces several nodes on Seven's trees related to Shields, Shield Recovery, and Damage Reduction.

We can't wait to see what you think of the new Seven on the Friends & Family build! Your feedback will shape not only future changes to Seven, but also similar revamps to other characters (especially Jimmy, who was the first character we ever coded skills for in Legend, and as such his kit is feeling a bit underwhelming at the moment).



The dynamic between damage, healing, and overall attrition in the last build was inconsistent, especially at the endgame. To create more challenging content in the future, we would have to either “one-hit-kill” our players or make healing too weak and feeling ineffective. To improve that, we developed this new “Overshields/Overarmor” system..

This is how it works:

• Some items and skills will give Overshields or Overarmor buffs, and they will become a secondary Life bar located above the current one.
  
• There is a new flashy VFX around characters who have Overshields or Overarmor.
  
• Overshields and Overarmor won’t be affected by healing effects and will decay over time, losing points until they’re gone. The decay is faster if you have more points, and will slow down as you reach lower numbers.
  

Here is a visual example of how the Overshield/Overarmor buffs will work:





Afraid of your connection dropping while on a Story Mission or any kind of Solo activity? Fear not, Hunter! From now on, if a player is disconnected while playing Story Missions, they can keep playing in offline mode and finish the mission.

Once the Mission is finished the player will be redirected to the Galaxy where two options will be available: 1) Wait for reconnection or 2) Quit the game. In either case, after their connection is restored, the progress is synced and no items or mission completion will be lost!





On our last dev blog, we introduced you to Teena’s Rank Rewards system, and now we invite you to take a look at some of the Legendary Gear we have already developed for this feature: Frost Star, Jet Boots, and Kinetic Belt!

Teena will reward you with a Legendary Gear piece and a Legendary Weapon, selected randomly from a limited pool if you reach Rebel Rank 1.





There are a few new regular enemies with different behaviors for you to encounter.

Each region has now enemies that match the environment they are in. The new Champions are all implemented in the game and you can already face them: Captain Go, Lt Speedy, Lt Frosturtle, The Obedience Unit, Kami Stakes, Kami Dune, and Fluffy Junior. They have unique Legendary drops so get ready to farm!





This feature was a suggestion from our Founders and Backers since our last playable build. It adds a special touch to our Champion enemies and perfectly matches the cartoonish style of Relic Hunters Legend, so we took the suggestion seriously and are finishing developing boss presentations for every Champion in the game.



We have new sounds for Side Adventures, Kami Cave, and new Guns SFX! All the VOs are finally implemented and now you can have a more immersive in-game experience.





We are implementing new Weapon types to help you create your perfect build to fight the Ducans: Grenade Launcher, Beam Rifle, and Machinegun. The SFX of the weapons are also under development.



We are working on the new Ace and Raff’s Friendship Adventures! Those stories will make you know our awesome Hunters a little more.

We are also developing new adventures called Relic Hunts. They will reward you with blueprints so you can find and craft your Relics in the future.





[h2]Red Mouth Mines
[/h2]

Previously, Red Mouth Mines had a Scavenge placeholder even though the level is a Defense mode. Now the placeholder has gone and the Mission is on its second pass and you’ll be able to access it soon at Galyno Desert!

[h2]Ubabela Dunes
[/h2]

Get ready for a good time at Ubabela, a beautiful region where the Ducans often spend their vacations. Ubabela is situated to the west of the Trash Sea.

The second pass of Ubabela Dunes is almost done, so get ready for an exploration mission with your friends.





The Abapotim story has elements of Brazilian Indigenous cultures, so we hired an indigenous person who is a specialist in this rich culture to read our story and make a critical reading on it.

We have made several changes based on the feedback, such as changing the Abapotim clothing and the narrative tone. They now look a lot better, less generic, and more creative, and we are more confident that we are honoring and respecting our native people!



Relic Hunters Legend now fully supports the X360, Xone, SeriesX, PS4, and PS5 controllers, with the inclusion of specific labels and mapping for each.



For almost 2 years now, as the project grew, we've experienced a very bad issue that plagued every Relic Hunters Legend player, regardless of their setup: Loading times becoming longer and longer as you play, leading to boring wait times and eventually requiring you to restart the game (or just crashing altogether).

This is too complicated to explain in just one dev blog but to sum it up: Over the years we have accumulated several small mistakes in our programming that caused objects to "leak" from mission to mission. Our engine was loading stuff that was no longer needed because it didn't know better. Eventually, the leak became so huge that it started to heavily affect the gameplay experience!

We've spent a LOT of time and effort going back through every system in the game and optimizing the code to get rid of most of these "leaks". The problem is now mostly fixed - we say "mostly" because there's always room for improvement, but at least the user experience is stable.

Although the loading will be smoother compared to the old builds, you will still experience longer-than-intended load times in the upcoming Friends & Family build, even more in a multiplayer match where you're not the party leader. We'll address these in the near future as our ultimate goal is for Legend to be a smooth experience with relatively short load times, especially on PC.



The QA team is on fire tracking down all the bugs and finding solutions. Here are some bugs and improvements we made this Quarter:

• The visual bug where Bounty was lost when buying items is fixed.
  
• The bugs where the gamepad couldn’t reach the World Map or the gamepad disappeared are now fixed.
  
• Fixed the bug leash that was happening after you shoot some enemies.
  
• Ambient profile problems fixed.
  
• Backend errors don’t block party transition anymore.
  
• ADN gameplay polish.
  
• Fixed the bug that made it impossible to open the screen through Tab after finishing a Mission and returning to the Galaxy.
  
• Fixed the bug where boss Cobran was vanishing from the arena.
  
• New login screen for Steam.
  
• Claim Faction Quest corrected.
  

That’s it for this quarter, Hunters. We’re still improving and implementing a lot of things, so stay tuned on our Social Media and Discord Channel to keep up with the latest news and hang out with us. We’d love to hear from you.

Cheers,

Hello Hunters!

Amazon's GameSparks will shut down its services on September 30th (this Friday). This means that every game client using GameSparks will no longer be able to connect to their service and existing client connections will be terminated. This also means that, for a short period of time, there will be no playable build of Relic Hunters Legend for the Backers and Founders to play.

As we told you before, we spent quite a few months migrating our backend from GameSparks to Gearbox’s SHiFT this year - and we are also working on an awesome build for the Friends & Family test event that will happen in a few weeks. Once we knew GameSparks would shut down soon, we had a decision to make: deliver a smaller build to fill this time gap between the shutdown and the Friends and Family event; or wait until the event because the build will be much more robust and have a lot of new features. We chose the second option. We are really close to finishing the FF build and believe me, this is the best build we have ever delivered to you folks!

Since we launched our Kickstarter, this is the first time that Backers and Founders won’t have any access to a playable build - so this is not a decision that we are making lightly.

(TL;DR) The existing build will not be playable from September 30th onwards, and a new build with SHiFT account integration will come for the "Friends & Family" test event this November.

We are super thankful for your understanding and we promise that the Friends & Family build will be worth your while! We can’t wait to share more news with you about this event. There will be more updates and opportunities coming soon. Stay tuned for more news and don’t forget to call all your loved ones to join us on this day! 🙂

If you have any questions, please write it on our Steam Forums or go to our Discord Channel to talk to us directly.

Thank you so much for all the support through this years and see you soon!

Cheers ~

Hey Hunters, how have you been?

During Q2 we’ve continued to do a lot of polish, improvements, and to develop new features for Relic Hunters Legend. You can check all of that below!

These months were a little bit harsh here at Rogue Snail. A significant part of our team got Covid and because of that, we had to manage efforts to continue developing and delivering everything we planned for this quarter. Fortunately, Gearbox has been an amazing partner and has helped us organize and plan the due efforts and everything is going smoothly now!

And our team continues to grow: we hired more people and everyone is working very efficiently and passionately. We hope you enjoy what we're showing you here today - we're excited for what's to come!





In this new feature, Teena is going to reward you with a Legendary Gear piece and a Legendary Weapon, selected randomly from a limited pool, if you reach Rebel Rank 1.

This is also the first time we’re using a whole new feature called “Events” in the game that we can explore to make new things in the future. Teena Rank 1 Rewards still need some polish but are pretty much done.





All of the regular Enemies and Champions that you’ll face at launch are implemented and playable in-game. The regular Champions are the ones that are not on Delve and Dungeons, and they’re going to have a dedicated drop (a Legendary Weapon or Gear).

We still have to develop all the special Story Enemies, but the most important part is done and we’re very excited to see what you’ll think about it.



We’re finishing developing and implementing all the levels on the mission areas of planet Cradle. There are a few visual things missing, such as the map nodes and some set dressing, but soon we’ll have everything ready and close to what we aimed for launch! We hope all of you enjoy your stay on the planet.

[h2]Coldstone Peaks Missions[/h2]



Now Coldstone Peaks have all the 6 levels coded and done with the Set Dressing complete: Kami Peaks (Distraction), Pilgrimage Trail (Payload), Peaks Hideout (Defense), Broken Lake (Scavenge), Peaks Blockade (Skirmish), and Coldstone Peaks (Exploration) that is the most vertical map that we have on the game!

[h2]The Crater[/h2]

This new area also has all 8 levels implemented with Skirmish, Scavenge, Rift, Distraction, Payload, Defense, and Exploration game modes.

[h2]The Trash Sea[/h2]



We implemented the 10 levels on the Trash Sea with all the Story Missions and faction quests running smoothly so you can enjoy a “vacation” there and learn a lot about these “paradisiacal” places.

[h2]Kami Cave[/h2]



This mission is the end of Act 01 of the Relic Hunters Legend story and is a new Delve that we implemented very differently from the previous one (The Shadow Valley Prison). The design of the space is much more in tune with what we need for a Delve mission in Legend, with a very different and cool Boss fight at the end.





We already explained how the Faction System will work in the previous Dev Blog update, but now the feature is done. It has all the tracking icons and you can track up to 5 Quests at the same time, regardless if they are Adventure Quests or Faction Quests.





Every hunter has their own unique Skill Tree icons set. No more placeholder here, yeey!





We still have a long way to have everything we wanted for launch and we’re excited about how many cool things we can do with our characters. We’re investing a lot of time into these cosmetics and now we have a few hairstyles, new color palettes, scarfs, accessories, jackets, sneakers, etc so you can create your own unique style.

We hope that selling Cosmetics will be our main source of revenue when the game is out, and allow us to keep supporting the game for years without any predatory monetization, so we want to make it really cool, fun, and cute so our community gets excited to customize their Hunters!





Now, when you drop a Memory for the first time, the game will notify and guide you to the inventory, explaining how the Memory system works. Also, when you unlock Pinkyy or Jimmy, you’ll gain a few Memories and the game will teach you how to use them to level up these Hunters.



The third and final act of the Relic Hunters Legend is playable but in a bare-bones state. There's a lot of polish to do, and we’re also working on the script for a new fully-animated cutscene!





We finished implementing all the Tier 4 Epic Weapons and Gear. Now you can drop a lot of unique weapons with different styles and elements and Epic gear to complement your builds with better stats. Hope you enjoy it!





We developed two new songs and reworked some sound effects, especially the gunshots. Hopefully you'll find that shooting our guns will sound a lot juicier and even cooler than before!





We have migrated from Amazon's GameSparks to Gearbox's SHiFT! The reason why we migrated from GameSparks (our previous backend system, powered by Amazon) to SHiFT was that after almost a year and a half of work to make our game stable on GameSparks, Amazon will be closing down the service for good soon. This forced us to switch to a different service, so it was helpful to have Gearbox offering us their SHiFT solution so we wouldn't start completely from scratch.

So we just pretty much had to rewire the entire game to work on a completely different backend system. This was the first time we had to do such a major rework in Legend, and hopefully will be the last.






We kept polishing the UI to make everything up to the same standards. The NPCs on the Secret Market have an icon above them and there’s a complete tooltip for the Reputation system with some lore and an explanation of what Reputation is. We also improved feedback for level up and quest completion.





We polished up the feature and now it has a nice, cohesive, and easy-to-understand Bug report tool, with all the elements we need to understand the problem you’re reporting.



QA team keeps doing their best to track down all the bugs and find a solution to fix them. We also kept improving some experiences on our game modes. Some bugs and improvements that we have already tracked and fixed these months are:

• Exploit fix: We remove the possibility to fake the faction quest events, this exploit made the quests"repeatable" and the player could win constant rank
  
• Remember that horrible bug where you'd sometimes fall through random spots in the game world and die? We refactored all the movement systems and now this bug is fixed.
  
• Blocked Map Nodes on Trash Sea fixed
  
• Fixed some random missions at ADN that changed if the player reset their progress.
  
• Fixed ADN rewards that were delivered at every level, even if the player already gained that reward.
  
• Reset progress appeared on ADN as a null red when you clicked on a node.
  
• Fixed the check system related to the number of hunters allowed to enter a mission in the ADN
  
• Hover description at ADN when the level is blocked
  
• Item Drops fixed
  
• Fixed Help/tutorial messages that appear on the HUD not being hidden during cutscenes
  
• Fixed the Secret Chest sound effect so that it only triggers if you haven't opened the chest yet
  

ADN still need some balancing, technical and visual polish, but all the of Tier 1 and 2 missions are playable now. We made a major change to how the Character Selection screen works: You no longer hover and change characters automatically - you need to click on the Hunter to change it. This change prevents the screen from freezing when you hovered over the Hunters quickly.

Also, the whole party gets a warning now if someone is using a Hunter that was already used on previous Floors. When that happens, the game automatically opens the selection screenso the player can easily select a valid Hunter instead.





Exploration Missions are getting better, with puzzles, mini-bosses, secret areas, and new Daily Goals for players to get some awesome rewards every day.

–

That's it for today, but there are many more things to come! Keep following us on social media, join our Discord Channel to hang out with us, and ask your questions about Relic Hunters! We’re always there to assist you, and our community loves to make new friends!

Cheers,
Rogue Snail Team ~

Loots out of the bag!

PAX East 2022 came out swinging with the Gearbox Main Theater Show with the exciting announcement for the collaboration between Rogue Snail and Gearbox Publishing.

We can't wait to jump in and share more info with you all.

THE HYPE IS REAL 🔥

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]