Hello my Fellows! Time for another Campfire Checkpoint to kick off what will be our “Road to 1.0” that we’ll be treading for the next while.
So, for those of you that missed it, let’s start with a bit of an overview of what was discussed during our most recent Roundtable. Disclaimer, this stream was not a news stream but rather a way for us to start very important, transparent discussions with all of you around the development focus that needs to happen as we look to exit Early Access.
We recently sat down for a candid livestreamed Roundtable with Will, head of our core team (UI, progression, loot, multiplayer, localization), to talk openly about where Fellowship stands and where we're headed next.
The team consider Season 3 one of our strongest efforts yet. New Dungeons, reworked routes, non-loot rewards for profile customization and challenges helped us keep players engaged longer than in Season 2 (as well as a much better difficulty curve through the Leagues), which suffered from a lack of new content on the Dungeon side and some unfortunate timing; fighting for the attention of our players against other major competitors. Not a whole lot we could have done about that timing, but that was the reality for us and the Community as we’re sure you remember.
Rather than pushing forward into Season 4, we're now focused squarely on 1.0 which will be important to get absolutely right (especially for new players jumping into Fellowship for the first time). That means stepping back from the rapid, weekly patches we relied on during Season 1. We've found that pace isn’t conducive to the work that we need to do at this stage in development. We'll keep addressing bugs, some balancing too, but our focus needs to be on the bigger structural work ahead.
Our biggest priority for 1.0 is a full rework of our matchmaking and queue system. Instead of layering on more incremental fixes like leaver penalties or additional sub-systems, we want to rebuild this from the ground up; addressing why players disengage in the first place rather than continuing to put band-aid solutions on the symptoms.
Since one of our main goals with 1.0 is to attract and keep a much wider audience beyond our dedicated early adopters, we're prioritizing onboarding. We want to make the game approachable for newcomers who aren't familiar with genre conventions like rotations and global cooldowns; things our veteran community can sometimes take for granted since it’s all become second nature to most of you!
We'll keep working through bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements, and we're open to testing some experimental changes live. Things like account-wide Bloodstones and Gems to see how they affect player retention and willingness to jump on an Alt and go through the journey again. We're also considering a public test build ahead of 1.0 so we can gather feedback on our reworked systems before the full launch and we plan to keep having more conversations like this one with our community as we get closer to release.
I got a message from Will after the stream, reflecting on things he wished he’d said so he went ahead and dropped those thoughts in an announcement on Discord to clarify a few things. “Hey Gang!
To reiterate what was stated in the Roundtable and clarify after seeing a few questions across the community; we will continue to support Early Access Season 3 while we work towards 1.0 but it will be at a reduced rate than would normally have been the case.
The aim for the next week is first to look at fixing the high priority bugs (eg. Meiko finisher bug, Anomalous Orbs issue, Blessing bugs etc.).
These fixes will themselves affect the overall balancing, so once they go live we will have a look at the balance of the roster of heroes to see how those changes shake out before we look at what specifically we want to target.
To avoid introducing more issues and having continued ‘big shifts’ in power, we will be focussing on stat-changes to existing abilities rather than adding or removing gameplay from the abilities themselves.
During this time we will also look at some Quality-of-Life fixes for EAS3 as well. We will be collating the community feedback to find the major pain points and deciding whether these are issues we want to fix in EAS3, or resolve with the bigger changes within 1.0. We will speak more about those as they come together.
So: Bugfixing is top priority, then going into balancing tweaks, then onto QoL changes.
We hope to settle on a sustainable mix where we can both develop the much-needed changes for 1.0 whilst still supporting and responding to the live experience of EAS3 without spreading our team too thinly. From a production point of view, though, the work on 1.0 has to take priority.”
We wanted a way to share information with you so it wouldn’t get buried in general chatter so we created the dev-insights channel.
If this kind of information is something you don’t want to miss, make sure you set your notifications appropriately!
Next week, I’m going to be running the Normal Pinnacle for the very first time and I’m looking for other players that want to “run it blind”. It’s been a request from our community and I think it’ll be a whole lot of fun to figure it out as we go. If you are interested and haven’t yet completed your first Pinnacle run, I’d love to hear from you (as long as you aren’t a Healer since I’m playing Sylvie). Just DM me on Discord (hamishbode) and we’ll get a 4-stack together!
That’s all for today’s Campfire Checkpoint but we’ll be bringing you more of these as we continue our push towards Fellowship 1.0. All of the feedback the team are poring over now has been super valuable and will definitely bear fruit over the coming months. We appreciate all of it so please keep it coming! See you in the Stronghold <3
- Chief Rebel Devs