In the first Ravenbound Q&A on the 27th of April 2023, we welcomed CM Althalus, Tomas (Game Director), Johan (Gameplay Coder) and Andreas (Executive Producer). During the Q&A we answered a bunch of questions sent in from the community - make sure to join us on Discord if you have any questions you want to see answered!
What are the main inspirations for Ravenbound?
It's super inspirational to work on a roguelite set in an open world. It's a very interesting challenge in many ways and I think a lot of us get going creatively from that sort of challenge.
In terms of games that inspired us, Slay the Spire, Risk of Rain 2 and Cult of the Lamb are some of the biggest inspirations for the roguelite part. The combat team looked at Nier Automata and Devil May Cry for the style - the look and feel, and many many other games for other elements of the combat.
Do we have any plans for more ways to incentivize exploration outside of combat?
Looking at the open world, it's one of the key focuses going forward. As a team, we're super excited about the future of this project, and the open world aspect is something that we're really eager to expand upon. We're a division of Avalanche Studios, so we have a lot of open world games under our belt. But, we can't necessarily rely on how we did it before. So that’s the challenge and what's cool about it, how do you make an open world for a roguelite? We have some exciting ideas around how to create an open world that essentially keeps tying back into that core loop and also adds elements of exploration and different activities.
We're trying things on paper and prototyping to find that key element that still keeps the core of a roguelite, that’s something we're hard at work trying to figure out and hopefully you get to try it soon.
Releasing a game is always a scary thing, a lot of people are gonna play it and have opinions, they’ll test it and discover there's bugs and whatnot. But it's also very valuable because we get a lot of insights, as well as a chance to test our own assumptions about what makes the game fun and what makes you tick.
Is performance a top priority? How are we using crash and performance statistics to create a better experience? And how are we prioritising performance in that way?
All of the crash reports that are sent in provide super valuable information, as we get to see where the code went wrong. And it's been the number one thing the code team is working on because we, as gamers, know the frustration of a game crashing a lot.
According to our statistics about our metrics and crashes, we have fixed about 70% of the crashes – we have 70% fewer crashes now than at launch, roughly. It still doesn't look good enough, but we have made at least significant improvements.
What is your intended player to boss scaling? If you’re happy with the current power scale between the player and the boss, then, are there more ideas that you’re working on to make boss combat more engaging, or more rewarding?
We’ve personally experienced this - when we’re playing the game seriously and thinking we’re doing well, only to get to the boss and the scaling is way different and we fail the run. It’s frustrating, and we know that it's an issue. The balancing has to work together with the open world and with the bosses, and we’re always asking questions - can we extend the amount of moves they do? Can we change the timing, or windows? These are all different things we're looking at. If we can change, maybe more how you interact with it, instead of scaling it with numbers – can we scale other elements instead? So getting us more levers that we can pull to get that balance to a good place is something the combat team is pretty invested in right now.
We want to add that we're not a big team. It's not an excuse, it's more that it affects the way we have to work or the way we want to work. When we look at combat aspects, for example, we might have areas that we want to change or make better based on community feedback, and we're trying to look, in parallel, to other areas to see if we can hit more birds with one stone. So, we're trying to look at opportunities where we'll fix it like this, and also introduce a bit of variation to other areas that need it. There’s a lot of crossover when we talk about how to fix a design element.
…Just based on what you said there, how many times a day do people make puns with the saying “two birds with one stone”?
Andreas: There's a lot of bird jokes flying around.
Are there any easter eggs lurking around that no one has uncovered yet?
Tomas: Would we say if there were? I feel like that would spoil it.
Johan: I know there's certain ones I haven't seen yet.
Are there any improvements that we're looking to do for the traversal systems? Specifically, Raven form.
We've added over 100 more Raven Towers in the upcoming patch. However, this does mean we're not addressing that demand to immediately go into Raven mode. There are a lot of reasons why we haven't just flipped that switch yet and it ties into future plans and designs too.
With a lot of these things, there's a balancing act going on, where making some changes now would actually impede some of the things we want to do down the line. So, we added more towers, because we understand it's not fun to have to travel a lot of terrain to get to that tower.
One thing that we can admit to having missed is that there are places where there's a height variation. So if you look at it top down, it looks like there's a raven tower quite close to you. But when you factor in that it's at the top of a mountain and that you're standing at the bottom of them…That’s quite problematic. So that’s what we’re addressing currently.
We have tried having the game in pure bird mode, where you can change at any time. That's something we did earlier in development where you can just click a button and off you go. And that sounds great! But then we found that you lost the sense of the scale of the world, you lost the sense of walking somewhere and finding something along the way. And you lose some connection to the world when you're a bird all the time, because then you go to a camp, fly, kill, the camp, over and over again. And there are no opportunities for us to add something exciting that's gonna lead you somewhere - and for the future, we want to do that sort of stuff. So, I think it is fun in the short term, because bird mode is great. But I mean, just having that all the time can lose the specialness in it, it's like eating cotton candy all the time.
Anything else we want to talk about on the topic of traversal?
We're doing a lot of stuff for on ground traversal. I think when we're talking about looking at the open world, of course, that's where a lot of that additional content is gonna go. So again, it's also what we kind of want, we want you on the ground, not in the air constantly. And it's our responsibility to make that more fun than it currently is.
What was the hardest or the most difficult part of developing Ravenbound?
Tomas: The hardest thing is also in a way, the most exciting thing. And that's getting a roguelite in an open world. That's been incredibly hard, and we haven't hit every beat on it, which is why we're still doing things and fixing things.
There aren't a lot of open world roguelites out there. And so, it's difficult to find that immediate reference.You can, of course, find a lot of roguelites and a lot of open world games, and then you realise you can't just sort of willy-nilly start picking from both and slapping them together. It’s a really interesting design challenge. Like we mentioned before, we're not a huge team, so it's quite an ambitious game in many ways and there may be areas that could have been solved by throwing more bodies at it, but we don't have that. So we need to find other ways to address issues. So that's been challenging for sure.
Andreas: When making a game, there's a lot of things you can do. People have good ideas, for sure, you can have this or that feature, but you need to prioritise and you need to test them out, and you need to actually make them and then you realise, wait a minute, this doesn't work because of reasons X, Y, Z. That process of always wanting to do more than you can do, that's a constant and hard thing to deal with.
Are there any particular builds that you find super fun or interesting that people may not be aware of yet?
Johan: Usually when I play, I like to try something weird. Like, can I do something where I transform my weakness into bleeding into another thing, for example, a bunch of status effects stacking on top of each other. But I think one thing that is really undervalued is Multistrike. We have a trait that lessens your damage but gives you a bunch of Multistrikes, which means you crit more. If I just want to win, I go for max Multistrikes.
Andreas: I would rather experiment and die than going for the optimal build.
Tomas:I didn’t play many roguelites before I came into the project, I had to get over that initial strangeness of, I'm just gonna die and die. So I'm still approaching it like that, I’ve had runs that are like, this is going nowhere and fast. And then suddenly, you get that moment where you pick up a different piece of kit that just gels with the other, like your relics you go, oh wait, this is actually shaping up nicely. That's a really cool feeling, I love those moments.
Johan: By the way, a small tip, always have a bit of luck. It always pays off.
Was there a reason for there not being any voice acting in the game? Or is it something that we're still looking at? Is that something we're even able to talk about yet?
Tomas: For voice acting, it's a thing that's come up multiple times. Our hesitation has been, again, we're a small team. If you have voice acting in one part of the game you need to consistently keep at it. When you add more to that part of the game, you need to then also add all the new voice acting and make sure you have all of that running. So it compounds the amount of work. And we want to be quick with being able to add content, new features, things like that first and foremost.
As fans of games, yes, we can all see the benefit of having full fantasy voices. We all love it as an idea. It's more of a question of how do we distribute our resources?
Johan: Speaking as a coder, if you only have text, then you can be very flexible with it and we can make changes as we wish. But then, with voice acting, it's going to be very hard to generate changes around that. So it'd be like we're closing a door on some things, and we're not really prepared to close that door yet.
Tomas: To kind of jump back, we talked about how this might be the first full on 3D roguelite in an open world attempt. As a team we're super protective of that, I think we want to own this concept, because we're the first ones to sort of attempt it in this way, at least. So we're very committed to making it make sense, especially in areas where maybe we haven't gotten there all the way yet. And we've sort of made a promise here with regards to the open world that we’re incredibly passionate about actually delivering it in a fuller way than we have so far. So there's a lot of focus on that area.
Do we have plans for speedrun focused features? Is speed running something that you consider that should be part of this game?
Johan: I just want to say that one of the most fun experiences I've had was speed running against Simon (Lead Designer). We were like, okay, how quickly can we get to the Betrayer? It’s something I still remember as a great experience. So I can say personally I love speed running in general.
Tomas: It's not one of our main focuses right now, but if we can package it into challenges? That's something we have plans for. Are they concrete plans yet? A little bit here, not so much there. Sorry, to be vague.
Andreas: Speed running is clearly a roguelite feature, with the open world you will not speed run really, you want to take your time and explore and perhaps roleplay, right? So yes, it should be possible to speedrun. That said, it was never going to be the main focus.
If you had to pick one individual thing about the world, like an animation, or a feature or something else you’d like to call out, what would it be?
Andreas: I think the most fun is finding the synergies, the cards and how they play into each other and strategize around those. I really enjoyed that.
Johan: For me, it's something that's not gonna be noticed. I'm very proud of the work I've done on the loot system. A bunch of cool magic happens behind the scenes, and there’s also the luck element, and we try to not make it too repeatable, we try to have a rarity system, but then a bit of luck still affects it. All of that mixed together, I think is really cool. But maybe to others it just seems like “it's a video game, it should do that.”
Tomas: I'm gonna go with a cop out answer again, prepare to go boo. I'm super excited about something that's coming up that's not in the game yet. And I'm not not just trying to be a teaser trailer for it. It's actually part of what Johan is talking about. It's kind of a device that synergizes with a bunch of other things. I'm very excited about it not just because of my personal involvement in it, but seeing our designers grab an idea like that and then improve on it. That's more my general perspective as director, seeing the team achieve this stuff is the absolute coolest.
Johan: Sorry, I'm just gonna say that the best attack is the heavy axe, heavy attack where you spin like a beyblade, I think that's the best animation we have.
Speaking of Spin to Win actually, a while ago, there was a bit of a discussion going on Discord, because people had found some very specific ways to optimise a dual sword build, where you would basically just spend your entire game doing whirlwind attacks. How do you feel about when the community finds those ways of doing things? Is that entertaining or frustrating to see?
Tomas: It's great. When you create something, you have an idea what it is, but then somebody else takes it and you realise, whoa okay, there's more than I knew when I was making it. We’re not going to catch every single permutation of the card synergies. So it's really cool when you see something that maybe we hadn't seen internally.
Johan: But to complicate that perspective, there might be a case of a totally broken build that's only going to be better than everything else always. That makes the game worse, not fun. So in that case, like, no. But most of the times when people come up with weird things that we haven't thought about, yeah, it’s great!
One thing we've seen, and we left in, is if you do an attack while you're in the air, you keep your momentum. So then you can do a trick to keep the speed higher than running while you're on the ground. So you can get to a Raven Tower quicker. And that's something that we asked ourselves, is that a bug? But no, you just get there quicker if you do this tricky thing. And we kept it in.
There are some interesting changes to hatred coming in the next patch. It's a really important part of how Ravenbound functions but I do think that some of the changes that are coming up are going to be quite fun to see how everyone reacts to them, at least.
Tomas: We’re looking at the hatred system quite a bit. But we don't hate the system.
Johan: Hatred is a key thing that came out of mixing open world and roguelite. That is us trying to figure that out, because if we didn't have it, that would mean it's only open world and if the hatred is too punishing, then it's only a roguelite. It’s the thing that tries to solve that combination, but we didn't make it nice enough. Maybe it's a bit too harsh and that's why we're trying to figure it out. We're not done tweaking it.
Was there any piece of player feedback that you found surprising, or that you really thought was super interesting?
Johan: In a way, the hatred system for me is that. Hopefully, I don't put myself into a bad spot but I've done a lot of the code on the hatred system. We knew it was punishing. But then seeing how people reacted to it, and what they tried to avoid and then actually seeing how people play with it, it was quite a big change and for me, and I was able to take a step back and think, okay, maybe I need to work on how to explain things, how things are being done. So that was a big eye opener to see how the community approached it, and how they reacted to it, compared to what we thought while playing it ourselves.
Tomas: Generally, when we look at all the feedback, we do a lot of squinting to identify the problem areas. Then we'll take that problem area and try to work it into all the things that we know about the systems and where we can make effective changes that don't break other things, and so on. So generally that's how we treat it, I would say, as opposed to maybe a one to one, this person would like this to be changed in this particular way. And you can't always react to that specifically, because people don't know how it all connects under the hood. Also, it's not the community's job to solve this game. It's our job and responsibility to fix it in a way that makes everybody feel like their feedback has been addressed.
Johan: For example, the bird mode - we talked about people wanting infinite bird mode. Seeing that feedback, we didn’t just give players bird mode. Instead, looking at the feedback we realised it’s not fun being on ground. Okay, so that’s the issue, and we should make that fun, because we know the other issues we're gonna cause if we give infinite bird mode, that's not fixing the real problem. We take those insights and find actionable stuff to do based on them.
Tomas: Through a player’s frustrations, we can see that we actually haven't onboarded them correctly, or we haven't explained the system correctly, They're inadvertently "playing the game wrong", like they're trying to play in a way where it's not set up to be that way and it's our fault that they ended up there. So then we start looking at how we can make sure that we funnel them into the game in a way where it's fun.
Andreas: That's exactly what I would say. What I underestimated the most, was that we didn't explain certain parts of the game in a good enough way. We have our work cut out for us to do that.
Tomas: It's making a roguelite and open world. We're gonna get people that come from open world games, with all the assumptions they have about open world games. Have we been clear enough about what the open world means in this game? Maybe not. So we're working on it.
Any final words as we finish the Q&A?
Andreas: Apart from a big thank you, I think I've said earlier in this Q&A that it's scary to release a game, but also very beneficial to get people playing and learning ourselves what you're doing with our game, and how we can take it forward. So a big shout out to all of you for that.
Johan: It's really fun to see you guys finding the game, what is fun or not, getting all the feedback, and us being able to develop more on that and focus in the areas where we get the most impact.
Tomas: I agree. The community is now everything since we're live. It's super important to us, and it’s been fun.
Please add any questions you’d like answered in the next Q&A in the replies or in #questions on our Discord server. We’re aiming to do these Q&A's regularly and the next one will be tomorrow, May 4th, at 15:00 CET!