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State of the Game: June

Drindin

Executive Producer
Stormhaven Studios

State of the Game: June

Welcome to the Embers Adrift newsletter. We’ve extended our testing window to include testing time on every day except Thursdays! Our servers are now open starting Fridays at noon CT/6pm UTC through Tuesday at noon CT/6pm UTC for our pre-order players. You can also join the devs in our Wednesday night session at 8pm CT/1am UTC. If you like classically inspired MMORPGs with deliberate gameplay and rewarding progression, please visit our website to pre-order, join the fun, and support our indie dev team! Embers Adrift can also be purchased as a gift; nab it for friends and/or family so they can join you in game. June included quite a few awesome improvements so let’s take a look back over the last month and see what progress was made.

Before we get too far in I’d like to mention that a second free weekend event: “Worldbreaker II” will be upon us soon. We are currently building and testing our new servers with the help of the player data we gathered from the first Worldbreaker event and will host another server stress test soon. All those who participated in Worldbreaker I will be invited back and we’ll be inviting new players to sign up on our website for Worldbreaker II. Please keep an eye on our social media pages to hear more about specific dates and times and the announcement of the sign-up page opening. Now, on to the update…

June was awesome, there was a lot of progress made. I mentioned in the last newsletter that Guild Tech was almost in; it is in now and seems to have gone off without a hitch. So far, no major bugs have been reported with the guild system. If you encounter anything funny, please do let us know. I also mentioned that we were going to test a broader window of time for testers to access our test servers and would let you all know if we’d be sticking with it. I have good news. We will continue on with this extended schedule until launch with the exception of the new server build coming online and the Worldbreaker II event that will operate similarly to the last event when the servers opened on Saturday rather that Friday. We may also have other times that require servers to be down that we can’t predict. If that occurs we’ll give testers a heads up in advance.
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In other news there have been some fun features added that we have been discussing with our community lately, things that, quite frankly, we just needed to have. We now have comparable tooltips that pop up when you hover over an equip-able item to see how it compares to what you’re already wearing. We’ve also added a limited way for you get your bearings using the map. Now, if you’re standing near a POI it will be highlighted blue in your map to help you get your bearings. That should make navigating a bit easier moving forward. We’ve also added in swimming for mobs - they will now chase you down and kill you in the water; fun! This led to us finding a bug where player’s couldn’t use direct heals or smelling salts in the water to rouse their allies back into consciousness - this has been remedied. We’ve updated the flanking system, too, their UI features are much more noticeable (look at the little arrow below NPC portraits) and we’ve added in flanking bonuses onto equipment as a stat bonus as well. Positioning can greatly improve your effectiveness in combat.
A few more notable things are that we’ve added a slew of learnable recipes into the game for crafting. Now, you not only start with recipes, but can also obtain more as you adventure - right now from a vendor; later from mobs, quests, treasure boxes, etc. We’ve added the “Strike” ability to all players. The purpose of this was to speed up the first few levels a bit and give the early combat a little more activity; I must say the pace feels really good and our community is echoing that as well. Dynamic music has made its way into the game. Each zone now has at least 1 dynamic piece. What is a dynamic piece, you ask? Well, these dynamic songs come from one of our original pieces and are decomposed and given separate tracks including foundation, daytime, nighttime, peace, combat, and POI. These tracks fade in and out appropriately depending on where you are, what time it is, and what you are doing in the world. If you are typically have game music off, you might want to turn it on for a bit to experience these dynamic tracks for yourself - I find them truly awesome. Let us know what you think.
We, of course, continue to make new armor and other equipment as well as new monsters. We have a slew of new creatures awaiting implementation. We have also finished reconfiguring our dungeon system and the designers are now taking the waiting dungeons into their skillful hands and giving them the attention they need to offer players an epic dungeon crawling experience. I’m really looking forward to finally giving our testers some more content to explore in the Veins.
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That’s not all we’ve been working on. Now that we’ve got guild tech in we’ve moved on to the refactor of our dialogue and quest system. Work started on this system at the end of the month and is ongoing. We hope to have NPC dialogue and quests for testers by the end of July - stay tuned. Not only do we have the tech team working on this system, but the writers have also been hard at work adding to what we already have done for quests and dialogue. We’re excited to start unfolding the narrative design of Embers Adrift. Adventure is just around the corner. Whether you’re exploring ancient ruins and the wild north, chasing down mysterious hooded figures who wander the night, helping Newhaveners, fighting Exiles, uncovering lost history, or exploring the secrets of Ember, we will be offering you epic quests to accompany you during your journeys in Embers Adrift. All these different storylines are important and give flavor to the world. Several months back we brought on a few additional Writers including a Narrative Designer. We’ll have an exciting announcement on who that is soon; stay tuned for more detailed information on our intentions with questing and storytelling in Embers Adrift.
That about wraps it up for this newsletter - there are many more things to learn about our development, in fact, you can listen to Elloa talk about all the new beta things in a video coming Thursday, the 14th, over on our YouTube channel. You can also take a look at our patch notes on the Embers Adrift forums or head over to Alicebluu’s YouTube channel and listen to her read the patch notes and comment on them.

We want to thank our testers for their involvement and feedback. Your patience is appreciated as our small indie team works to bring more content and polish into Embers Adrift. If you would like to support us and our launch we would greatly appreciate it; visit our store to pre-order or purchase for a friend today! Pre-order customers will be getting early access to the live servers when launch rolls around later this year. Thanks for following our development; we really appreciate your support and interest!

Join our discord server to share your feedback & ideas, and to interact with the dev team & community, and then head over to our forums to dive deep into the news, lore, and discussions about Embers Adrift. If you don’t have a previous account, please sign up!

If you’ve pre-ordered a Stormhaven Studios product before that means you already have beta testing access to Embers Adrift and we’d love to see you in game and in our discord on Wednesday nights at 8pm Central and on Fri, noon - Tues, noon. Your account has been carried over to our new website where you can download the client from the account page after logging in.
 
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