The day is finally here! Ravenbound has taken flight worldwide and we have already seen thousands of you playing, streaming, tweeting, chatting as you discover all the perils Ávalt has in store for you.
After years of hard work, months of community collaboration, and untold hours of bug fixing, tweaking, and updating, we are so happy to put Ravenbound in your hands and let you loose. And while we may have taken a pause yesterday for a much deserved celebration (full of mead and cheering and prop weapons we liberated from the MoCap room), we hit the ground running today to continue working on polish and improvements to make your experience the best one possible.
To say we couldn’t have done this without you, the community, is only scratching the surface. The closed betas and the Steam Next Fest Demo gave us the opportunity to hear from you directly about what matters, and what makes your lifetimes in Ravenbound as exhilarating and engaging as possible. We’ve been busy (very busy) since the Demo ended in February, making changes and cleaning up the game to prepare for its release into the wild. Many of these changes probably aren’t obvious, but they’re all important improvements that give you a more seamless experience overall.
Additionally, while we likely would have worked on getting in changes up until the night before launch if we were allowed, sleep is important. And also, there is a very important backend process for quality tests and final checks that means we needed to lock the game build before the game released and save some things for another update. All that said, we want to highlight some of the things we’ve done since Next Fest and what more about what we’ve got in the pipeline.
In total we made over 150 bugfixes and improvements since the Demo build during Steam Next Fest. These ranged across almost every department on the team, from UI & Progression, to Combat, to Audio, and more.
Tears of Hatred
We made some overall improvements to Tears of Hatred to make sure they were easier to spot and keep track of on your screen as you’re exploring the world in Raven flight or on foot. We also fixed several instances where the mana could disappear if you left the Tear. In addition, there were some less noticeable adjustments made to visuals and audio, enemy behavior and spawning, and general gameplay which should make your spelunking a bit less treacherous and more consistent.
Enemy and Combat
There were some occasions where enemy AI could lose targeting or overtly dodge - sometimes dodging out of locations and ending up healing up as if you left. A lot of updates were made to boss fights - from damage balancing to frustrating behavior (for example, Wardens will no longer escape their Arena in rare cases). We also added improvements to stagger, such as being able to see stagger bars on bosses. Overall, we cleaned up 38 bugs and quality of life issues.
Audio bugs
We had some nasty audio bugs to tackle. For example, during the Häxa Apprentice fight, the lightning ball SFX continued to play after the effect had stopped. Similarly, the sound of one of the bridges leading to a Warden would play on a constant loop.You were quick to let us know how those bugs were, understandably, driving you mad. Although they were hard to reproduce, we ironed out as many as we could for launch and have more fixes lined up for the next patch.
Gameplay
We fixed a bunch of bugs and improvements to keyboard and mouse controls and remapping, including some added settings options for camera handling. You may also notice the Raven’s Talon behaves a bit more intuitively (or perhaps not, in which case just trust us on this one) and consistently.
Other high priority fixes were any known issues where cards, traits, and challenges didn’t work or unlock things as described. In total, we cleaned up over 50 issues and bugs relating to gameplay not otherwise mentioned above.
And we’re just getting started.
Today’s Hotfix and Upcoming Patch
Although we had a hard stop on what we were able to add to the game in time for launch, we never stopped working on improvements. Today, we released a hotfix that addresses one of the most occurring crashes. And we are finalizing a robust patch that has even more bug fixes as well as balance changes we’ve made based on both feedback from you and player behavior we’ve seen in game since Ravenbound went live. Once this patch is tested and good to go, we’ll let you know when you can expect to see that update ready for download and exactly what’s included.
In the meantime, keep sharing your thoughts, streams, content, and memes with us in Discord and on social channels (tag #Ravenbound to make sure we see it). We’ll see you in Ávalt!