Game Director Note: Changes in Game Design and Save File Progress Protection
I want to share a broad directional change that has been brewing for a long while. It is based on some steam posts I've been reading. I shared it with the team internally and now I want to share it with you.
What IS Archmage Rises?
Every person here buys into a vision of this game. Not necessarily my vision, but their version of the vision.
I don't think I've been actually making what people are expecting.
When I started making this game it had a fixed map, with fixed cities, and I was just randomizing the names and buildings within each.
The game was based on Pirates!, FTL, and Rogue games like Dungeonmans or ADOM.
Short plays of a life from 4-6 hrs.
Plays fast.
Then start a new world and try again.
Like Slay the Spire.
"Rinse & Repeat"
Yet the features we've been adding don't conform to this at all:
Spending 15 mins role playing making a char and getting attached to NPCs.
Spending time customizing NPC names, and portraits.
Building a tower and decorating and personalizing it
Having and naming different mounts in your stable.
Later:
-Working your way up a faction
-Building a trading empire
-Chasing a series of connected artifacts
-Building multiple towers
-Founding businesses and towns
-Romance and long lasting relationships
I first got hints of this a year ago when people said "
I like everything about this game, but the 4-8hr playtime on the steam page is so short. I'm out.". I changed the steam page but I didn't change my thinking.
Now I'm seeing what they were trying to tell me.
They don't want a rinse & repeat experience.
They want to dig in, settle in, get comfortable, and grow deep roots.
That's Witcher 3 or Dragon Age Origins 100+hr play, not FTL or Slay the Spire 1-3hr play.
What I think people really want, what I think they are buying into, is "Dragon Age, but in a custom personalized fresh world just for me" not the same world as everyone else playing.
In Civ 6 I play a nation for 20ish hours and when i'm done, i'm really done with it.
Until I roll up another world and another nation for a long involved passage through history.
Case in Point: Player Progression
We had a guy who was pre-playing the game in anticipation for the mage tower update. He was establishing himself in world, saving up gold, ready to get into his new tower.
And we invalidate his save and made him start again.
This person has every reason and right to leave a negative review. We failed him.
We disappointed him not just because of technical difficulty, but
because of a difference in thinking.
I have been thinking rinse & repeat for years, but not many players who have put their hard earned money behind this project.
I don't know how long we have been divergent, maybe it has been since Nextfest.
From now on we preserve player progress across updates
I've given the team this new directive:
We need to think each game is 40+hrs of play.
Something precious to be preserved.
My recent minecraft experience crystalizes how I see this working.
I played in my world for 3+ years, building all kinds of awesome (awesome to me and my kids anyway)
Then they release some "deep" update where you can go past Y 0. Some 128 + 64 new levels of fun.
So I fire up minecraft to see how deep I can go and it's still bedrock at 0, no further.
I don't get the new features on the old save file
But I abandon my old file on
my terms, when I want to, not because devs pushed an update.
I choose when I get the new features.
The game is under active construction. We're making drastic changes to the data structures almost daily.
Solution 1: Version Migrator
We designed a save files to allow for versioning and migration. Something that works for small localized changes. We do write these migrators (occasionally) and you wouldn't notice them running because they silently occur in the background when loading a game. We'll put more effort into these going forward.
But what if something really can't just be migrated, what if we did a big data overhaul?
Solution 2: Character Export/Import
We will be making a Character Progress exporter (in game) which can read your key variables (gold, renown, mage tower, equipment, xp, spells, skills) and stick that character into another world.
This may end up being a feature
Take a character from one world, drop em into another!
With the Legacy update we will be showing your previous dead characters and their legacy score. Why not show your active living ones above it?
Solution 2 isn't perfect. Character specific things like name, skills, inventory, and main tower can be preserved. But anything attached to the world, like NPCs, towns, dungeons half explored, all quest progress, will be gone.
I hope this makes sense and brings convergence between what I'm making and what you are expecting.
Answers to Questions:
Q: Are you promising I will never lose progress during Early Access?
A: No! I'm too experienced to make that naïve promise. I'm sure at some point, maybe more than once, it just won't be possible. What I am promising is much more effort and robust tech put into testing and preserving player progress. Dropping it from forced restarts 50x before 1.0 to maybe 5x.
Q: Wait, this is a rogue-like, isn't it? Are you dropping the permadeath or other rogue like features?
A: No, it is still a rogue-like, just not a mean one.
By player request we have added in ad-hoc saving, no longer deleting save files, and after much discussion I came around on the generational play. The big broad message I kept missing was: "I want to play a long time in one world and enjoy the simulator!" I'm finally waking up to what people actually want.
Q: Will you be dropping features to preserve this backwards compatibility?
A: No. The features coming are the features that are coming.
Q: I have more than 1 mage tower, will all of them come across with Character Export?
A: I don't see how more than 1 mage tower could be brought across because we could place that tower next to the starter town in the new world. But the others will be spread across the world and there is no algorithmic way to stick em into the new world. Instead, we could refund the cost of the ones that don't make it.
Q: What about <insert complex scenario here>?
A: I don't know. I just decided this with the team today. I don't have answers to every situation. I just have a new direction we are heading in: Preserve Player Progress.
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