Power Patch - and a bigger discussion on the status of the game
Hi everyone. I’m Ben Marrinan, the lead designer of Phantom Abyss.
There’s been many thoughts and opinions thrown our way on the “power” update.
At the end of the day, we’re making this game for all of you, and it’s clear to us that many are upset about several changes in this update.
We’ve just released a patch with the following changes:
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Power draining blessings (Hover Slide and Wings) functionality has changed.
Before: Hold to hover. Bar segment(s) drain. On release it will continue to drain the last used segment.
Now: Hold to hover. Bar segment(s) drain. On release will REFILL the last segment used.
This means it’s now possible to hold wings in short bursts and it will never consume a power segment.
Additionally, Wings are now activated with the button, rather than .
This makes activating wings much more intentional, and no longer forces you to do an unintentional double jump or vice versa.
Power costs removed from the following blessings:
Chance to avoid damage
Crouch Jump
Fall Heal
Power costs reduced to 1 for the following blessings:
Double Jump
Whip again
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We understand some of you would rather we remove the power system entirely, as it has reduced how powerful you can become throughout the course of a temple.
The intention behind the power system is the opposite, shown by the 3 new blessings added this update (Banishing guardians, invulnerability, and whipping again)
We understand with double jump specifically, players are upset with only being able to use the ability a few times per floor. We get it. Double jumping is fun, and is also a skillful move when used well.
We ultimately made the decision to keep double jump as part of the power system because we feel players are able to entirely skip too much content presented to them with the ability. This speaks more to our failure on the trap layouts - and a more ideal solution would be including more hazards in the top half of a room to allow double jumping to still be a thoughtful decision rather than automatic decision.
We will be monitoring how the above changes go for now. We’re not afraid to admit when we’re wrong, and ultimately we want you to have fun.
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On top of these changes, we’d like to address point by point various issues players have been mentioning.
What’s going on with the road map?
We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what’s next. Being an Early Access title - (and especially one that relies on other players to play the game for the full experience) we’ve learned a lot over the past few months and am excited to share what we have in store next. We’ll be sharing these plans soon, and we hope they will both excite and reassure everyone on where we plan on taking the game.
We’re also excited to share these plans with the community and get your thoughts as well. What’s important to you is important to us.
Some players don’t like the phantom traps, nor do they like phantoms interacting with things like switches
The most common reason that we’re seeing for this is players won’t get to fully complete the temple themselves and that it’s been made easier by other people.
One idea we have for this is adding an option to turn phantom traps on or off. It’d be relatively simple to add, and no skin off our backs if that’s how you want to play. Please leave a comment if you want this.
To talk about the greater point however and why it was added in the first place - ultimately this is a game about phantoms, and that was one of the many areas where we wanted to push that aspect of the game. As a sneak peek for our greater plans being released shortly - we have new modes of play in the works. One of these modes will greatly increase the types of temples available - Ranging from easy to very hard and a system to give you a temple matching your skill level.
We hope that when matched with a temple that’s appropriate to your skill level - any traps that get phantom’d, or any phantoms hitting switches/opening doors are very welcome.
And for those of you who would still want to play a full temple start to finish when no phantoms impacting your run - we also plan on adding private temples for just you to play (as well as anyone else you explicitly invite)
Some players don’t like the power system
It’s completely fair to say we dropped the ball on this one - especially with how certain blessings were handled by the power system. To give more context, there are plans to give players more powerful abilities and upgrades. One example is we’d like players to be able to whip any trap to disable it. Using a global resource such as power felt like a nice solution to keep the power creep we have planned in check without trivializing the content.
Making the system felt like a good first step as we move towards the content planned on that front, and we hope the latest patch addresses your major issues with the system.
1 Heart start and essence in general
Some players don’t like starting with 1 health - especially if the temple they are given has few phantoms in it.
In general, the total number of phantoms per temple isn’t hitting the ideal number we would like to see. A weird problem this game has is it only takes 1 person to beat a temple, and then it’s closed forever along with all its phantoms. One thing we’re discussing is going as far as to keep temples open even if someone has finished it. The advantage of this it will allow us to get a lot more data on temples, and allow us to filter “easy” or “difficult” temples to match players skill levels, as well as have a more balanced experience with a healthy amount of phantoms each run. The downside is it heavily goes against what we have always seen the game as - which is a game where there can only be one winner. This is not a decision we take lightly and we’ve love the community to weigh in on what your thoughts on this topic are.
For now, given players need to find 3 essence to return to the old starting health (1 essence for the 2nd heart, 2 more essence for the third heart) at this stage we’re going to continue with the game starting on 1 health. This is something we are going to monitor closely, and this may change in the future.
Some of the new rooms - particularly ones that slow you down can be a bit annoying
Agreed. Some of the rooms in caverns/inferno in particular could do with some improvements to be more fun. We will improve them.
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Finally, I want to say thank you to everyone that's playing the game. I feel like I've let you down and I don't want it to happen again. Please respond with all thoughts, good and bad you may have on absolutely everything to do with the game.
Upcoming Phantom Abyss events to discuss further are:
Twitch Streams with a dev every other Thursday at 5:30pm PST https://www.twitch.tv/devolverdigital
Next one is in 11 hours at time of this post
Also keep and eye out for our updated roadmap. We will be posting this in a few days.
Thank you all.
