After about two and a half years in Early Access, with many updates and changes, we are confident that with the next big update, the game will finally be ready to earn its 1.0 Full Release title. The date for Full Release is June 22, 2024.
We had already wanted to push the game into Full Release last year but felt that more features and changes needed to be done before we did that. We wanted to give ourselves 4-5 more months. However, as game development goes, ideas for new features popped up, and we ended up extending development by another 10 months. However, we are happy that we did because the game is going to be incomparably better than it would have been 10 months ago. The biggest update with the most changes so far is still in development and will be coming to beta soon.
We are soon going to set the price of the game to $15, which we feel is going to reflect the final quality of the game. But we’ll be offering a very heavy launch discount of 50%. So, if you haven’t gotten the game yet, you might want to wait until launch as the price will be only $7.50 with the discount.
Progress on the New Update
The update we’re currently working on is going to be the biggest change in the game so far. Here is the summary of the new features and changes:
- Complete rework of the Quirks system where you can now teach and upgrade gladiators' quirks (finding good ones in the shop is still important).
- Guild building that will let you unlock more quirks.
- A new batch of 30+ more Quirks.
- Reward system moved from battle to map menu and is clearer on chances to gain items.
- A guild building that will let you upgrade Universal items from green to blue and purple.
- A guild building where you can reset gladiator stats.
- Options to set resolution, frame rate, and more from the game.
- Rework of all UI elements. They are bigger, cleaner, and overall more polished.
- Gladiator and Item shop refresh buttons now refresh the whole shop, not just the first row.
- Item system rework so now items can send buffs with any type of attack.
- We had items for each attack type that increased damage against burning or frozen targets. Now, one item fits all attack types.
- We added items that can set enemies frozen or on fire with all attack types, allowing for many different strategies. For example, units with taunt with this kind of item can also set enemies on fire or freeze them.
- The timeline now has a Play and Stop feature that will fast forward until any specific event triggers it to stop. Triggers are: Quests, Ring of Death, Shop Discounts, Championship. They will pause the game and open the panel. But you can choose your own triggers in settings as well as other options related to the timeline.
- Reputation now goes from -600 to 1200. It’s balanced so it takes longer to reach maximum reputation.
- Factions now react to you reaching a higher or lower reputation, giving you rewards or trying to sabotage you. Now, there will be a reason to think about quests that you’ll want to accept or decline.
- XP is now shared with gladiators that die in battle so they don’t lag behind the team in case they are vulnerable and die often.
- Various bug fixes and improvements like pushing units through colliders, random starting gladiator setting, necromancer issues, and many more.
Most of the features we’re planning in this update will be available first in beta mode that will be ready in about 2 weeks. It’s going to be easily accessible with a toggle in the main menu. But only in English as we’re waiting for translators to get all the text ready in all the languages.
Once the beta is ready, we’ll notify you guys here with an announcement as well as on our Discord server, where we’d love to have you as we talk about and tweak the game into the full release version.
We’ll share more details on all those changes once the beta is ready.
We’d love to hear your thoughts on all this here in the comments or on our Discord. After the 1.0 is out, that does not mean updates will stop. We still have plans to add more things to the game but we believe that after this update it will deserve to be called completed.
Thank you all so much for staying with us and supporting us all this time!
UPDATE: I just made a video showing how the new Trait System will work, and showing some of the new Traits and interesting ways of using them:
Watch on YouTube