State of the Game: MayWelcome 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! You can also find our living soundtrack on Bandcamp which grows as more music is put into the game, buy once, get 70+ tracks over time. Embers Adrift can also be purchased as a gift; nab it for friends and/or family so they can join you in game. May comes with some pretty big developments for Embers Adrift; let’s dive into the details.We’ve implemented a new zone, Redshore Forest, and it is one of the most beautiful zones yet. Along with a towering forest it features a sprawling beach stretching across the south of the zone and looks over a massive clear mountain lake to snow capped peaks in the distance. What more could you ask for? How about 4 new tracks of original music that have been added to our ‘Living Soundtrack’ over at Bandcamp? This is another huge zone for players to explore. Check out these screenshots. |
Speaking of huge zones, most of our zones are quite large in size causing travel times to potential group opportunities to be rather long. We’ve added the foundational tech for fast travel. Our fast travel is intended to work in conjunction with our Ember Essence system. For now fast travel is free, however, it will eventually have a cost. You’ve been warned. You can now utilize the Ember Monoliths (pictured below) found in each zone… if you can find them. |
As you can see we’ve also made some visual improvements. With our new skybox implemented our lighting gives a whole new look to the world. Not only that, but we can finally showcase the planet we orbit - a massive blue gas giant. This planet isn’t only a lore point, it also serves as a navigational beacon for our players during both night and day. The addition of this celestial body helps the transition from day to night to be less swingy, but we’ve also added an exposure slider in our video settings for players to have some control over night time visual levels. In other news, guild’s are almost ready to be tested as the tech has been seeing some love throughout May. I’ll keep you posted on how that shakes out. We also wrapped up a big new creature in May, but you’ll have to wait to see it until our game designer get’s it set up to spawn in Redshore Forest. The Chameleons and this new creature will make appearances soon. We have more abilities, levels, equipment, and content available that we need tested. More time is required to get to this new content and that is one of the reasons why we have decided to extend the test windows from Wednesdays and the weekend to also include time on Monday and Tuesday as well; that, and our community clamoring for more time to play, of course. We love you guys, thanks for your commitment and passion for Embers Adrift. |
That about wraps it up for this newsletter - there are many more things to learn about our development and you can find those in our patch notes on the Embers Adrift forums or head over to Alicebluu’s YouTube channel and listen to her read and comment on them. We want to thank our tester 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. |