State of the Game: Solo Snacks, Roadmap, and a Big Announcement!Intro: We are starting off 2024 with a few BIG steps for Embers Adrift. We’ve received a lot of feedback during our first year and some of it has been very consistent. We’ve reviewed it all again in order to help plan out our 2024 year as we prepped our roadmap and we are very excited to bring in some of the things our players and others in the genre are consistently requesting. We’ll start off the newsletter below with our Roadmap and that will lead us right into our big announcement. Then we will talk about our first update of the year and what we’ve already accomplished. Rest assured, we are committed to avoiding any kind of cash shop or pay to win in Embers Adrift. Ultimately, our focus will be on maintaining and growing the Embers Adrift community. If this is the first time you’re hearing about Embers Adrift it is a challenge-driven MMORPG where players can experience over 1000 hours of entertainment on a single character. With quests that have multiple outcomes, hundreds of rare mobs and thousands of rare/quest items, and a steady stream of new content coming out on a steady schedule. It’s never been easier to find long-term entertainment at a great price. You can support us by buying the game HERE for yourself or for a friend, and maintaining our optional subscription as time goes on. You can also purchase a month of subscription perks for your friends who may not have an active subscription. We also have a MERCH SHOP and a SOUNDTRACK if you'd like to support us in other ways. As a small company trying to go against the grain by not focusing on maximum monetization of our player-base we want to say a huge thank you to our subscribers, your support is very much appreciated! |
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| Roadmap & Big Announcement: Immediate: As you can see above our immediate priorities are focused around the community. We’ve taken a serious look at the feedback we’ve received and determined that we need to give players a better solo experience without compromising grouping and give new players a chance to try the game without paying up front. As an indie studio that listens to our players and works very hard on our game, we need to work just as hard to earn the trust of other players in the genre. Therefore, we are happy to announce that we will be introducing a free trial for Embers Adrift. This will include all of the content in the entire first zone as well as the first dungeon. This will give new players the chance to experience the questing, bulletin boards and solo experience, as well as the grouping experience as they delve into the Central Veins dungeon. We plan to launch the free trial around the end of February. Keep an eye on our socials and discord (linked below) for more updates. Our Bulletin Board System was just launched on January 30th so we are already able to check that one off the Roadmap list as well as several of the Ember Vein Solo Loops. The goal is to have every Ember Vein in the game include a solo-able section with its own special mobs and unique loot - players are already fawning over a pair of gloves that drop in one of the earlier Ember Vein solo loops. We plan to add more features to the Bulletin Boards to include gathering, crafting, exploration, and lore tasks as we go forward. These Bulletin Boards offer tasks that are completely solo-able and they offer experience as a reward as well as a health regen buff to help with further soloing or grouping. This is juxtaposed to our quests which usually have at least one objective that requires grouping and offers valuable items as rewards as opposed to experience. These tasks are not dailies, players can do as many as they like, and they give players even more valuable objectives to complete while their group forms or if they don’t have time for a longer group session, but still want to log in and play. We We have a secret plan we’ll be testing soon on the QA server and it has so many benefits that it’s almost too good not to implement. It will serve to really strengthen the community and as long as testing and feedback go well we will be very excited to port it over to live. The new encounter tech will take what some consider “end game” content and allow us to offer this type of content to all level ranges throughout the game. Short-Term: As for our short-term priorities we’ve got some very exciting items on the list that we have been dying to get out the door. Many of these things are being worked on in conjunction with our immediate priorities. Adding fishing to this list made a lot of sense since we are prioritizing fun and meaningful things that players can do solo at any level while they wait for their friends, or in smaller chunks of time. I mean, who doesn’t love fishing in MMOs, amiright? Epic Quests are in fact done as are their unique weapon art, but we are waiting for certain zones to come into the game that these quests will send you to. Kind of the same story for the Others’ encounters. We are waiting for a few technical details for them. New monsters and new skull tier bosses will of course be forthcoming too. Long-Term: Our long-term priorities are things that we have been working on as time allows. We are very excited about them. As soon as we get a chance to work on these things we will be. Our goal is to get everything on the list done this year. We may even be able to bump some things from long-term to short-term. Keep an eye on our patch notes as we go through the year. We may get them done sooner than expected. There are many other things on our wish list that we did not put on the Roadmap so if something you are hoping for isn’t on here it doesn’t mean it’s not on our minds or plans. |
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| What’s New: As mentioned above, we added our Bulletin Board System. We will be expanding this to multiple spheres of gameplay giving players more ways to accomplish their goals. These bulletin boards reward experience to players in the appropriate sphere throughout the whole game giving them a productive way to spend their solo time to progress their characters. Alongside this we’ve added more solo loops to more of our Ember Veins. With the boost to experience gains from solo and duo mobs this should all come together to make the solo experience for players while they form groups, wait for friends, or spend small chunks of time in game much more enjoyable and meaningful. We’ve truly tried to be attentive to player feedback on this and hope everyone enjoys the adjustments and additions. In other areas of the game we’ve made some beneficial changes as well. Marshal specialization has seen some significantly beneficial adjustments to their Alchemy abilities. Go check them out in our patch notes linked below. 3 Chevron mobs for group content now reward even more experience. We’ve also made some headway on our tech upgrades which included more work on memory. You can find the patch notes HERE. Go check out Elloa’s trailer for this patch, too, and give it a like and subscribe. As we iterate from patch to patch, adjusting current content and adding new content, we are asking our community to keep the feedback coming and to please be patient with us as we make adjustments. Thank you all! We are working very hard to keep crafting Embers Adrift into the best classically inspired MMORPG in the genre. Support our indie dev team as we grow the world together with our community of players from over 70 countries globally! |
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| Stay tuned into our YouTube channel, our TWITTER, and our DISCORD server for info about our new content and latest news. |
