Hey folks
We'd just like to say a huge thank you to everyone who checked out Renown over this Free to Play wipe. We'd also like to extend our humble apologies to any players who had their time wasted due to crashes or bugs. Going into the wipe, we'd hoped all of that had been sorted.
However, due to the crashes not occurring on the dev team's machines and our low population levels prior, it was very hard to verify across the wide variety of PC configurations out there. Based on player data since then, we've been able to fix the majority of those bugs.
That said, we're not happy with how Survival is playing and the general loop we're getting players into. We've got some thoughts on what we'd like to change, but we're always keen to hear what players have to say, we've had a good discourse going on our Discord, and we're always keen to have more.
Two things are front of mind for the future of Survival:
Extending wipe times: making each wipe last as long as players could want it to
Returning to our roots: improving the medieval experience at the core of the game
There's still a bunch of work to be done on the technical side, but we also want to shake things up a bit.
Raid Mode is Coming Back
In the meantime, we're bringing back Raid Mode. This was originally a testing map and game mode we used prior to the Survival map being a thing. It was also really fun, and a lot less overhead for players to get into.
This mode puts players on teams with a small premade base and resources. There's a short safe window to build, upgrade your base, and gather supplies, then the safe window drops, and it's an all-out brawl over the bases until one team is left standing. This experience generally went on for an afternoon, as opposed to the full duration of a Survival wipe.
Raid Mode can be played in two configurations:
Team vs Team — 1v1 teams
4-Team Free-for-All — 1v1v1v1 teams
We'll of course still have Survival servers running for each region. Raid Mode is there to offer a quicker, less intensive gameplay option alongside it.
What's Next
We're going to bring the Free to Play Demo to an end in the next couple of hours. This is while we work through the data gathered. That said, we'll be looking to run another one in the coming weeks. Some folks might have noticed we went very light on the marketing and promo. We think that was the right call, but we'll be doing our best to properly hype up the next Free to Play wipe. The next Free to Play experience will also start at a proper time for our European friends.
Again, a huge thank you to everyone who played the wipe. Doubly so for anyone who had a less-than-satisfying experience but still took the time to troubleshoot or provide detailed bug reports. That feedback genuinely makes the game better.
— The Renown Team