Kickstarter
#40
Update 12/29/14
Posted by Orphic Software
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Hey everyone, we're thrilled to report that the end is near. While we're running just a little bit behind from our previous December release target, we're not too far off. Currently we're scheduled to release the alpha by around the end of January, followed by the beta a month later, followed shortly thereafter by the official release.
As for the state of development we're pretty close to done. We're finishing the last few teaks and technical fixes before going into the Alpha phase. While we've made tons of changes, upgrades and improvements to just about every aspect of the game over the course of the last six months, I'll mention just a couple tangible ones here. Food - we've decided to make food an important (but not the the point of frustration) gameplay element. Sleeping (which restores your party's health and mana), now has a discrete food cost, 1 food item per hour, where each hour will restore something like 25 health and mana points. Each additional hour of sleep beyond the point at which your party's stats are fully restored is free, costing no food. Antharion has a world map with discoverable cities that allow for fast travel. We've added a food cost for fast traveling, where the cost is determined by your party's in-game distance from the city you're trying to travel to. Then there are inns in which you can rent and sleep in beds, fully restoring your party's stats for a fee considerably cheaper than the cost of food needed to do so when sleeping anywhere other than an inn. We also added a foraging skill, that'll allow you to find more and better kinds of loot in many situations. Foraging does not affect all loot, it's kind of supplemental to our looting system and has just enough of an effect to justify it as a skill pick.
Another focus of our efforts has been in balancing our huge open world which is divided into areas of overlapping difficulties. What this means is that from the moment you enter the game you can basically go anywhere and you won't find any level 20 goblin roadblocks. This design facet is crucial because of Antharion's open character development and skill system coupled with the total lack of monster scaling. Whether your party is super-powerful or not should make no difference because you as the player will have the option to selected the area(s) of difficulty that you find appropriate and fun.
I'd venture to say that, for those of you who've partaken in other alphas, you'll likely find Antharion to be relatively finished, balanced, polished and un-buggy. I say this simply to reiterate the point that much of what we've been doing has been attending to the seemingly countless minute details that require attention when preparing something of Antharion's scale and scope for public release. A big part of our design philosophy is that details count. Sure any given little detail on it's own may not look like much, but when you throw it together with 1000 other little touches something magic happens, hopefully anyways! The point being that we're confident that all of our attention to detail will pay off in the form of a much more solid full-fledged well-balanced rpg.
Check out this very old-school looking rpg recently up on Steam Geenlight.
Anyone with outstanding backer rewards will be contacted in these coming weeks prior to the Alpha.
Thanks a lot to all of you for your continued patience and support and we look forward to working with those of you from our alpha/beta tiers very soon. And everyone have a Happy New Year!
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