State of the Game: Dec. 2022 AND Free Weekend!

[Drindin]

What happened in December, 2022​ Free Weekend Coming Soon! Jan. 27th - 29th! (See “Events” below) Welcome to Newhaven, drifter! December and the close of 2022 was a success for Embers Adrift. We held off on our monthly newsletter to better coincide with our upcoming free weekend that will include discounted pricing for those who wish to join the ranks of fellow Drifters and explore beyond the Old Wall. Thank you to all our players for supporting our indie studio. Your feedback in these first few months has been awesome. We have a number of community inspired adjustments either already implemented or coming down the pipeline. Your support means very much to us as a small company made up of a few people with a dream to fit a missing piece of the puzzle into the MMORPG market. Remember we have a simple purchase + subscription model; no other monetization in the whole game. No cash shops, no microtransactions. You can support us by buying the game HERE for yourself or for a friend and subscribing as time goes on. We are a small, but mighty team and we hope to continue to impress you all with what we’ve got on our Roadmap for 2023 in Embers Adrift.

Events: We will have a free weekend starting tonight at midnight. January 27th (12am CST/7am CET) and going through the 29th (11:59 pm/6:59am CET) if you have or make an account at our website you’ll be able to download the game, log in with your web account credentials, and play with other drifters. There will be a discount: Embers Adrift will be available for purchase at $29.99 throughout the weekend (tax not included). So invite your friends along to experience the old school goodness. There will be many streamers throughout the weekend as our CM, Elloa, will be running a streaming marathon event. Each of our streamers will have one key to give away per hour. So if you or your friends are trying us out for the weekend and want a chance at a free key, then head over to one of our live streamer’s shows for a giveaway opportunity. You can see a list of these streamers below. There will be a few other events that you can see over on our DISCORD channel in the event channel as the weekend goes on. Join us for the free weekend and check them out.

Game content: We’ve had quite a few additions to the game recently including some new dungeons, quests and balance passes. We’ll get to some of those things in the January recap next month. As for December, we secluded ourselves within the dark halls of Stormhaven Keep to ponder the mysteries of Ember, unlocking its secrets for ourselves… muahaha! Just kidding, we actually worked really hard in the background for a few weeks to gather feedback, sift through it, set priorities, and dev some of the things that we’ve been meaning to get to for a while. The patches in December were not very exciting, but provided some very important improvements that were needed. A few of the team members were able to take a few days off for some much needed R&R and some of us even got quite ill : ( …yet we soldier on for the good of our people! One of the most visual changes in December came in the form of our Hallows; these are respawn points in Embers Adrift and people were getting confused thinking that all Ember Rings were respawn points. The real respawn point are the Hallows, made by the ‘Others,’ and we implemented custom art pieces with eerie lanterns to help denote these for players, even underground you can find roots with lanterns swinging from them calling to the near dead. There were some balance passes to damage on mobs back and forth to find the sweet spot. The group window now has a ‘highlight target’ feature that I am loving. AoE targeting was fixed to be more reliable across the board. Defenders had some abilities’ range increased to help with threat nabbing. The Defender threat nob is still getting tuned and as a tank I am really liking what I’m seeing coming down the pipe. We did more work on DoTs/HoTs which now receive a bonus after a heavy hit or crit. The way resists operate was reworked - you now have a chance to fully resist an effect and if you fail you’ll still get the benefits of reducing the effect in accordance with your resist stats. Your chance to fully resist something increases as you build resist stats up. We also added a whole slew of information and adjustments to the combat log which gives players a bunch of new data about how their stats are affecting combat. Finally, Emberdrift spawning and Embervein availability was tweaked and redesigned to meet our intended goals and player expectations. Oh, and we also built up the Exile Freehold which was tested in December and launched just a few days into the new year. The feedback on this outdoor dungeon (the last bastion of the Exiles - to some players’ relief) has been overwhelmingly positive. If you’ve got a level 42+ character and haven’t been in to try it out, we highly recommend it. We’ll be using this zone as a nod toward what we should be designing for in future areas. We continue to add more high and mid level content and are working on diversifying this range of content even more with quests and more game content; stay tuned. 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 from week to week.

If you want to know more about our game check out our YouTube content which will showcase lore and story elements, and even more in the future. Stay tuned into our YouTube channel and our DISCORD server for the notifications about our weekly community show hosted by Elloa to stay up to date with all the latest news. You can also take a look at our patch notes on the Embers Adrift forums.