Yesterday, we announced our upcoming Closed Beta and hosted a livestream where our team discussed our upcoming Closed Beta and answered some community questions. In case you missed it, here’s a recap / modified transcription of the questions and answers from the stream! You can watch the full version here.
The developers on this live stream are: Min (St0ve) - Cofounder, Jeremy (SunsetLion) - Game Director, Rache (Reilena)l - Gameplay Production, Zaven (Farpanther) - Gameplay Engineering.
What were some of the learnings that we had during Steam Next Fest?
Zaven: There were quite a few things but the two big ones were performance and the new player experience. Specifically, tracking the experience on a wider range of computers gave us way more data. One of the things that came out was the wider gamut of different people’s computers and where they’re at. We knew we had more work to do, especially with our plans to launch on console, but seeing the player data we realised we had to take a much bigger swing at it and sooner than we had planned. It took a lot of effort. The engineers went dark for a bit and went off to tackle performance in a big way. It was a big undertaking. It feels like it’s getting to the spot now that people who are at our recommended spec are experiencing the game the right way.
For people that want to get a little bit nerdy, can you go one level deeper on the performance improvements?
Zaven: A really common thing in a game engine is you have your simulation update and then your presentation update and then you submit to render. One of the big things we did is that we parallelized some of that so that we run some of our render submission to the GPU in parallel with our simulation. So it’s leveraging multicore and just moving around how we actually update the frame. It’s a big undertaking to do because you have to make sure that your game can run multithreaded in a good way. That’s saved us on average about 7-8ms
We also re-wrote the VFX system. It was a rewrite that was underway for some time but we really accelerated this effort since Next Fest. It’s running a lot faster now. We’re really pleased with it. It has equal or better visual quality but it’s much better on your GPUs. There’s still a lot of other stuff going on and we’ll keep working on it, but those were two big swings that have made a big impact,
Are all those improvements in the game now or are they coming in the update next week?
Zaven: We did a big change a little while ago that’s in the game now. We also introduced a memory leak in our UI… so that took a little bit to find and fix as well. But these last two patches have been super solid now and a lot of our performance tracking numbers are looking much better. The Closed Beta build should be even better as we continue to add small improvements in each patch.
What did you learn about the new player experience since Next Fest?
Jeremy - There’s two parts - new player experience and where the Spires mode came from, and they’re related. We identified a gap where our long-time players are really good at the game and when you have 45 players in a game they tend to be better than players who have not played the game yet. It turns into this thing where new players don’t get to have that moment where they can kind of connect with the combat. Like “I didn’t even finish my loadout but I got stomped” by a Bolbi or a Nethy or whoever it is that stomped them. And they’re just playing the game and doing awesome, so they did nothing wrong. So we were thinking, how do we bridge the gap between the tutorial and getting ready for Ascension. We’ve also wanted an arena type game, which is Spires. That's why it exists. We’ve gotten so many messages from people on our team and players saying we should do an arena mode. So it’s always been on our radar, even before Next Fest.
So we took that and started thinking about how to make it a real mode, and then started thinking about whether it might be a way to build the bridge to Ascension.
In learning the ropes, we bias towards thinking that repetition in combat and understanding items are the two most important pieces. Spires facilitates that really well so the next logical step was to start working on it after Next Fest. That’s how Spires went from just an Arena mode that we all wanted to a way to help players get more comfortable before jumping into Ascension.
The other thing it does well is that in Ascension your item set up is based on what you find, you don’t get to get familiar with your most comfortable item and play with it over and over again. In Spires you can do that and build on that familiarity and expand your comfort levels over time.
So there is a gap that we identified and we’re hoping that Spires is a good way to fill it. We’ll be testing that out during Closed Beta.
One of the options we thought about was whether we should simplify Ascension to make it easier for new players, but not only would that disappoint the players who love it as it is, but it would mean that we are limited in adding more advanced mechanics in the future.
We want to grow the community over time and be able to do both modes, that’s the goal. So we were trying to create a balance so that there’s an option for new players without taking away the depth of Ascension from experienced players.
What other feedback did you get about Ascension?
Rachel: One of the things we did was change the abyss mechanic so that instead of showing up at the end of the timer and you were either in or not. Now it crawls up to the beacon to guide players towards the beacon instead of just catching them in it.
Zaven: During Next Fest, we were all watching streams and watching people play. We saw so many new players fighting and they were getting it and having a good time but then the abyss would just appear on them 200m from the Beacons and then they’d die. It’s a learned skill to watch the timer and know to get to the Beacon before the Abyss, and so this helps newer players as well.
What’s happening with progression in Closed Beta?
Rachel: Generally speaking, high level, we know that progression is a compelling thing for players. You hop on and maybe you get the personal satisfaction of a certain number of kills but it’s also nice to have that additional motivation to keep playing, and collecting things is a great way to do it. It’s something we’ve always had planned but finding the right time to do it was the thing and now feels like the right time. It’s going to take some more tuning and testing but we’re excited to see it.
Jeremy: With everything that we’re trying to do - we want to bias towards agency and transparency. It applies to Ranked Progression that’s coming later and our Cosmetic Progression system that we’re introducing in Closed Beta. You should know everything that you're earning and how the progression works so that you can play it the way you want to.
We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel here so I don’t want to overstate it - but the idea is that you can go to unlock stuff that you want. You can earn progress by opening chests, killing monsters, taking challenge rifts or by Ascending. These actions give you Pages and multipliers and create a calculation at the end of your match that helps towards your progress for unlocking cosmetics. You can spend it on whatever you want from the collection, there’s no pre-determined order.
When you go to the collection you’ll see a grid of 25 things you can unlock like titles, executions, emotes, anchors and skins. We sort of cobbled together a starter collection set together for this Closed Beta, but once we launch Arkheron, the official system for these collections will be tied to exploring the narrative of Arkheron.
You’ll get to learn more about the characters and their motivations, why they ended up in the Tower. It all gets manifested via the cosmetics. We’re mega passionate about the world and I don’t know that we’ve fully demonstrated the depth of it yet. The cosmetics will be tied to it in the future but in this first Closed Beta prototype, they won’t be.
Zaven: It’s going to be really helpful to have players run through the progression system so that we can learn how it’s feeling, how well Spires are helping for the new player experience. Help us find the edges. It’s been immensely valuable already in our past playtests.
Jeremy: It’s going to be mega to have players doing this - it’s also the first time Spires is going to be up 24/7 with progression so we want to see what the grind is, is it motivating to unlock it.
Another thing that’s involved with the progression system, there’s a prestige track. For every item you unlock, you move your Book rewards forward. For every 2, 5 and 10 items you collect you’ll unlock a permanent reward that you’ll get to keep forever. (The other cosmetics will be wiped after Closed Beta).
In future testing there will be other rewards.
How do you feel about moving into closed beta?
Min: Once we move into Closed Beta, one of the big benefits for all of us is just going to be more players. We’ve all been playing together. It’s almost like Cheers - everybody knows your name. We’re all here. I do think we have an amazing community just like how everybody treats each other in Arkheron has just been so great. We just need more players, and I think that’s going to make a huge difference with things like matchmaking and finding out who truly is the best. It’s a competitive game and having more players makes it more competitive. I’m super excited about that.
Rachel: It’s kind of a bittersweet moment actually. This is kind of the last time this community is going to look like this right now. I’ve really appreciated playing with all of you and the hours and hours you’ve spent playing with us, and all the feedback you’ve given.
Min: And the many hours of ass-kicking we’ve taken.
Zaven: Yeah it’s been super fun jumping in with a group of people like this and seeing that they’re better than me and they’re on my team and we’re facing another team of people better than me. It’s been so fun and really cool to see the game show us what it is.
[For your context, historically Zaven used to win a lot in our studio playtests so it’s been a delight to see him taken down a peg by our community]
Why isn’t Ascension open 24/7? What is the primary main mode?
Jeremy: I don’t know if we look at Ascension as the main mode. Spires is a bridge but we could also take that mode into something uniquely awesome individually. Ascension just requires more people. We don’t want to get into a situation where it's so small that matchmaking becomes a problem where people churn out for different reasons.
So we looked at how do we make something that’s low-population friendly and teaches you to get into Ascension. We want to grow it so that it can have more uptime but we don’t want people waiting 20 minutes in queues waiting for a game just to have the sharks in with the minnows. We love that mode, we’ve built so much around it. We also look at Spires as this awesome new avenue which is also a stepping stone to the thing that we love.
Zaven: We were really intentional in this last phase to keep the community small and it hasn’t been for everyone. It’s really been just for our most invested players to come and try things with us and try out the early Spires prototypes. What we learned from Next Fest is that we have some things to do before we want to go wide again and invite some players in to experience our next phase, or Closed Beta. We wanted to fix some things in the game like performance, hit feedback, UI, learn tab and all these things as well as game modes to new players. So we’ve been holding back on Ascension a little bit for this period.
Jeremy: Speaking of players who have been sticking it out with us through this period while we work on some stuff. I want to touch on something which is sort of an apology, we’ve been so focused on making sure new players can get over the initial learning curve so that we can build enough of a community to make sure Ascension is working. We only have so many resources. So not doing new eternals or not changing an item that’s OP, or underpowered or adding new quests -- these are the same resources fighting with how we make it easier for new players to get in. So we have a balance that’s been chosen but we agree with so much shit the community says where we’re like ‘yeah we wanna do that!’ We can change numbers but we can’t go redesign an ability while we’re doing other stuff. That takes weeks sometimes.
So I would like to get that out there. We’ve chosen to spend our time on making sure the tutorial is good, the learning tab is good, Learning Spires is good, before we can move into more of make sure tutorial and learning is in a good spot so the community can grow naturally and then we will spend all of our effort on those other things.
It may feel like we’ve neglected that aspect of it and it pains me personally, and I think all of us, but we totally want to do that and we do agree with you, we just can’t do it this week. It’s been a problem, it’s frustrating for sure. We super appreciate everyone sticking with it. Hopefully this starts a new phase where new players don’t hit the wall they used to and we’ll also free up time and resources to do this other fun stuff that players have been asking for.
Will stats or titles from beta carry over through future phases?
Zaven: We store a lot of stats and we will have those in data at least but I think a couple of progression items that we were talking about that you’ll have forever. We’ll do all the work it takes to maintain that. But all of the other progression knowledge we get from that, we may not be able to maintain. We’ll have to look. We’re still testing it - and will be during Closed Beta. We’ll be wiping all of that except for the Closed Beta exclusives. We also want fairness for people who come later so they can come try it too. There’s some things that have come up about matchmaking and skill rating, we’re doing a migration internally at the moment so we’re starting those new for Closed Beta.
TLDR: There are some Closed Beta ‘prestige’ items in the collection that you’ll get to keep but most other collection items will be wiped to make way for future tests.
Ranked is on the horizon but won’t be in the Closed Beta?
Rachel: It won’t be in the Closed Beta but it’s definitely on the horizon.
Jeremy: We’ve made it and it’s there that we technically could flip it on any time. We’re going to monitor how the Ascension weekends go - it’s all about making sure the experience is right. We want to make sure the appetite is there before we serve the “main course”. So we’re holding it for this playtest, but it will be in a future playtest.
Can you speak to the forecasted player numbers for closed beta? How many invites go out?
Min: We’ll start releasing people from the waitlist next week. I don’t know the exact numbers yet but it will be in the ‘many thousands’. We had a lot of people on our waitlist after Steam Next Fest but we wanted to get stuff done before we open up the waitlist.
Which ways is the team exploring to grow the player base?
Rachel: Pointing back to the learning experience. We’ve been focusing on how to make the game sticky for people and how to make the game fun which is in the interest of growing the player base. That’s just one piece of it within the game, there’s more outside of that like marketing strategy etc which we can’t speak to here. We just want to make it easy to have fun and we think that’ll make a bigger difference.
Jeremy: At some point, after the gameplay experience clicks for you in Arkheron, which can be 20 mins to an hour, the fun level goes up. So we’ve been really looking at how the initial new player experience allows players to more easily get to that place and then stick around. So that’s where a lot of the effort has been, so hopefully updated tutorial, new player spires, and spires will help flip that switch.
Min: Learning Spires will also help players show the game to their friends.
Why do we think our game will succeed compared to similar games that have failed recently?
Rachel: I want to start the answer off by just acknowledging that a lot of the people who make those games are people who are our friends, and people we respect deeply, and making games is really, really hard. In the environment, in the world today - this is a hard thing to do. I really respect people putting their creativity out there and trying something whether it succeeds or not.
We’ve been afforded an opportunity to work on this game for a long time and I feel very, very lucky that we’d had you all to help us iterate. We’ve been afforded the opportunity to try things, to fail, before we’ve had the pressure to push things out to the public.
For me, that is why I feel like we have this chance of success here because we’ve had the chance to iterate and to be wrong and to change things and to be better.
Jeremy: I think it’s really hard to predict if any game is going to be successful whether it's pvp or something else. It’s such an interesting climate that we’re in, there’s so much awesome stuff out there and how do players pick where they spend their time?
I don’t necessarily look at it like, oh we have to do what this game did or didn’t do. I just feel like this team loves this game and we just kind of make it for us first and we hope that everyone loves it the way we do. It’s easy to get lost in the sauce of what other companies are doing and what’s trending or not. Games have come and gone since we’ve been working on this and it doesn’t mean those games weren’t awesome and it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re going to do this rapid pivot to adapt it to something else.
We’re still scratching the surface of what this game could be, it’s less about what it is today and I’m so hopeful for what this game could be two years from now. When we get into the world and narrative stuff, when we start doing Spires this way or improving Ascension This is the starting line for us, this isn’t the checkered flag by any stretch.
Zaven: It’s a question I ask myself all the time - is this going to work? It’s a really honest take, we’re making a game in a hard world with a lot of challenges out there. What I come back to is that I look around at my teammates and I go well ‘they get games and they like this game’ and ‘What do I want to do on a Friday night’ I want to play Arkheron. It’s motivating that the game I’m making is the game I most want to play. So that makes me feel a bit of hope.
Min: We play the game every morning and that’s like a highlight of our day every day. I was showing some people how to play on controller today and I was just super giddy, laughing the whole time. I’ll even play on hotel wifi and it’s a bad experience but I’m still playing. If I’m running late I’m opening the laptop in the elevator so that I don’t miss playing in the morning playtests. So we have a good time and then we play with all of you and you’re having a good time. It gives us a signal but there’s just no guarantees. Hopefully we have a chance to keep making this game and make all the cool stuff that Jeremy was talking about.
Jeremy: Yeah, those mornings are just amazing. Watching everybody having a blast - and having a blast on the game we’re making.
What’s the studio's goal for a healthy playerbase?
Min: Anything that gets the matchmaker to be in a good spot. We’d love to run Ascension all the time. At each skill band you sort of need 100s of players to make the matches feel good. After that, it’s just players bringing their friends and just growing there. Usually somebody finds a game and just tells their friends. We aren’t going to grow much through advertising, it’s usually friends connecting with friends and it depends on if people love the game, love it enough to play and love it enough to invite their friends.
Is there any way to invite your friends to the playtest?
Yes, we’ll make friend invites available!