State of the Game: November
Welcome to the Embers Adrift newsletter. If you or your friends and family have been waiting to join Embers Adrift, now is the time. Visit our website to pre-order and join the fun! You will gain access to our test sessions with the devs every Wednesday night at 8pm CT, our test weekends, alpha forums, and alpha discord where you can give feedback directly to the developers.November was a productive month that ended with an awesome extended weekend test. A lot of new things were implemented and improved, but before we get to that I would like to start with a few quotes from our testers that were shared in our alpha Discord chat during the test:
‘‘This is my first weekend on Embers Adrift, and right now I'm level 8, did a lot of battling, and even with the skillset that I currently have, I'm discovering clever ways to utilize the few abilities I have, and how to maximize their potential.”
- Saints | New Tester
‘‘I like that all the roles and classes encountered so far in groups feel unique too, like each person is bringing something unique to the group… love that it all came together quite well in a 6-player group”
- Saints | New Tester
One tester shared this along with a screenshot posted in our ‘alpha screenshots’ Discord section: “adventurers retuned from delving deep into the depths of the Central Veins, unloading bags bursting with loot!”
- Alicebluu | New Tester
“I had a blast over the weekend…. I will send some feedback later but just wanted to say how good the game is looking and feeling! For me this game has always felt so close to EQ… obviously with a 2021 look!… And what I have been missing since… Slower pace of fighting… more tactical…. And the feeling of exploration, massive open spaces and a sense of danger…”
- Shalana | Experienced Tester
“Call this a weird analogy but I feel like I’m playing in a campaign of Dungeons & Dragons whenever I get on. The world is mine to explore and the adventures are limitless”
- RhadigarTV | Experienced Tester
We are humbled that those playing our game are having such a positive experience - that’s why we make games, so we can all have fun! As we continue to iterate gameplay features the core gameplay loop grows more enjoyable. Each improvement moves us closer to being able to open our servers more consistently. We are working hard at implementation and adjustment of gameplay features so that we can do just that.
In November we saw the return of harvesting and crafting. As part of the revamps you will find that the harvesting professions have changed to Hunter, Forester, and Prospector, while the crafting professions are now Provisioner, Weaponsmith, and Outfitter. This aligns well with our unique equipment system. These adjustments give harvesting a broader array of materials to gather and refine, a greater array of recipes for crafters, and greater synergy between players with different professions. We are very excited for people to see where we’re headed with our crafting sphere.
Questing is well on its way with NPC dialogue working well. We have added in our brief tutorial quest and are receiving feedback on that from testers now. We have some tweaking to do with how dialogue is presented, but it’s working well otherwise.
Certain reagents can now effect your abilities. Players will be able to change the flavor of their abilities depending on which reagents they equip furthering their ability to make unique strategic choices for their character and giving them more tools to overcome the different challenges they encounter.
Speaking of combat - our roles and specializations have been further tweaked to give each role uniqueness and importance in a group setting. Players select a role at character creation (which they can forget if they decide they want to try a different role later) and then choose a specialization for that role at level 10. More details on this can be found in our alpha forums.
We continue to fill out our zones with points of interest, unique enemies, and new items. Our team is hard at work giving the game more content and depth.
All the feedback from the testers has been extremely helpful and our community has been very excited about what Embers Adrift is bringing to the genre. We will be opening the servers again for the coming holidays - likely for a whole week near the end of December. We will announce those dates as well as some other exciting information soon, so stay tuned.
We’d love to have you join us to check out the experience for yourself. If you would like to support us and our coming launch in 2022 we would greatly appreciate it; visit our store to pre-order today! Thanks for following our development; our small indie team really appreciates 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!
