There are several major engineering & design tasks remaining to be completed before this game can safely be released to the world in open beta. We put a lot of work into three of those tasks this week: a proper new user tutorial, a friend list/system, and better signaling for when you pick up loot. None of that work is sufficiently wrapped up to show this week, but it’s all going well and I’d imagine we’ll have something on these fronts in another week or two! In the meantime, we have lots of new content goodness to share:
* Doctor Octo has always been one of our favorite units; so much so that we decided to upgrade him from a mere minion to a full, mid-level setpiece:
* The hardest bosses in the game now all have at least one elite “untiered” item that they drop with very low probability. For those of you not familiar with this terminology, an elite untiered item is an ultra-rare, T10-equivalent item that looks and/or functions quite differently than other top items in its class. It isn’t necessarily more powerful, but it is unique and can often be especially useful in particular circumstances. Since we’re currently only allowing folks to play for a few hours each week, we are setting the drop rates of these items significantly higher than we intend to set them when the game is available 24/7. They are still rare enough that most of you will never see them drop, but not so rare that nobody will. 🙂
* Frozen Horror has final, polished art. Feast your eyes:
And more!
- The loot caches in The Vaults will drop more upgrades than they used to, on average.
- Added names and descriptions to 31 weapons that were missing them.
- Lazer, the Victorious has a new spinning animation
- The Kaiju boss battle is a bit shorter, and has health-based phase changes to help with loot qualification.
- The Merlin class has been buffed substantially: +20% DPS, +33% armor.
- New minion: Sweeper. Merely a replacement for the newly-elevated Doctor Octo.
- Jester boss does more damage and has more health.
- Some of the setpiece bosses on the main island have different backgrounds. These are all works in progress, and will get further refinement.