AMA: We’re the devs of Enshrouded! Come ask us your questions about the game and its first major update, Hollow Halls!

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

https://preview.redd.it/z4hl7rbq2ouc1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=370c288a412ee360b894f0da80a83751c7908dba

Greetings, Flameborn! 🔥

To celebrate Enshrouded’s most recent update, Hollow Halls, the Keen Games team will be hosting an Ask Me Anything in this thread on Thursday at 5:00PM CEST! (11:00AM EST)

You’ll be able to post questions in the comments from now until Thursday. Once the event starts, our Creative Director, as well as several other team members, will sit down for a couple of hours to answer as many questions as we can!

Questions can be anything you want: Ranging from the development of Enshrouded, to what we had for breakfast that morning if that’s what you’re into. We likely won’t have time to get to every single question, but we’ll do our best to answer as many as we can.

If you’d like to learn more about Enshrouded, the Keen Games team, or just what goes into making games in general, don’t hesitate to ask and upvote some questions. And don’t forget to check out the thread again on Thursday to watch us answer your questions live!

The Keen Team

~~Edit: It begins! Here's a message from our Creative Director Antony:~~

Hey everyone, we're gonna get started! Just a quick message to introduce myself and the team members who are helping me out today: I am Antony, I've been at Keen Games for 19 years, and I'm the Creative Director. With me is Simon, our Producer, who's been at Keen for 11 years, as well as our Community team members CoolUsernameBro and Toast (their real names redacted to protect them from adoring masses), who have been with us for far too long. We also have our Lead Designer Ben, and Kall, our Senior QA Specialist, who you may have chatted with on our Discord!

Edit 2: All done!

We've gone slightly over our time budget and answered as many questions as we could in the time we had! We hope you've had a good time following along, and sorry if we didn't get to your question! It was fun, and we will probably do this again later. Meanwhile, feel free to drop by our Discord and say hi! Thanks so much for hanging out.

We will also have recaps in the coming week to go over all the questions we answered here.

The Keen Team

External link →

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

https://preview.redd.it/z4hl7rbq2ouc1.jpg?width=3840&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=370c288a412ee360b894f0da80a83751c7908dba

Greetings, Flameborn! 🔥

To celebrate Enshrouded’s most recent update, Hollow Halls, the Keen Games team will be hosting an Ask Me Anything in this thread on Thursday at 5:00PM CEST! (11:00AM EST)

You’ll be able to post questions in the comments from now until Thursday. Once the event starts, our Creative Director, as well as several other team members, will sit down for a couple of hours to answer as many questions as we can!

Questions can be anything you want: Ranging from the development of Enshrouded, to what we had for breakfast that morning if that’s what you’re into. We likely won’t have time to get to every single question, but we’ll do our best to answer as many as we can.

If you’d like to learn more about Enshrouded, the Keen Games team, or just what goes into making games in general, don’t hesitate to ask and upvote some questions. And don’t forget to check out the thread again on Thursday to watch us answer your questions live!

The Keen Team

~~Edit: It begins! Here's a message from our Creative Director Antony:~~

Hey everyone, we're gonna get started! Just a quick message to introduce myself and the team members who are helping me out today: I am Antony, I've been at Keen Games for 19 years, and I'm the Creative Director. With me is Simon, our Producer, who's been at Keen for 11 years, as well as our Community team members CoolUsernameBro and Toast (their real names redacted to protect them from adoring masses), who have been with us for far too long. We also have our Lead Designer Ben, and Kall, our Senior QA Specialist, who you may have chatted with on our Discord!

Edit 2: All done!

We've gone slightly over our time budget and answered as many questions as we could in the time we had! We hope you've had a good time following along, and sorry if we didn't get to your question! It was fun, and we will probably do this again later. Meanwhile, feel free to drop by our Discord and say hi! Thanks so much for hanging out.

We will also have recaps in the coming week to go over all the questions we answered here.

The Keen Team

External link →

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

Originally posted by aksdb

18th of May? You mean April, right? Otherwise it would be a Saturday in over a month.

Yep haha, had a bit of a miscommunication with our image asset guy, but we fixed it :)

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

Originally posted by lufreine

My question is: Can someone on the team please go and hug all the Dev's responsible for accepting the proposal and implementing the arachnophobic mode? Pretty please?
I can't hug them myself!

Will do o7

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

I've set the comments to contest mode for now to avoid the most upvoted comments being influenced by whoever got here first, but I will set the comment section back to normal once the AMA time comes <3

Edit: It's been 24 hours and things have solidified a fair bit, so disabling it now.

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

Originally posted by Istickpensinmypenis

so are you guys gonna answer any questions orrrr.....???

Like we said in the post, the AMA will start on Thursday, and we'll answer the questions then. :) This is to allow players time to ask their questions in advance

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

Originally posted by paleh0rse

does doing so reset the upvote count? if so, I didn't know that. Very cool trick.

The upvotes are still counted, just not visible to normal users. If I set it back to normal, they'll go back to being visible and the comments will be sorted normally again :)

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Just a reminder: it's easier for us to answer questions if you are actually asking only one per post. If your post is "here are four ideas for improvements and new features", then you should probably split it into four posts.
Sincerely,
Cool Person Who Has To Actually Type Answers Out

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by FelloBello

Such a great game. I have enjoyed countless hours adventuring and discovering new places. Great job. May I ask, what inspired you guys to make the game? Did you have any inspirations from other games in the genre?

Keep up the great work! Easily one of my favorites and I look forward to what you do in the future! All the best!

It would be impossible to list all the games that inspired us in making Enshrouded. Game developers stand on the shoulders of giants. Some of the references are more obvious or immediate, so here are a few of these: our very own Portal Knights, Zelda Breath of the Wild, Valheim, but also to a certain extent the Souls game inspired us for the abandoned world, some aspects of combat (sorry no i-frames during combat rolls). Every one of us brings their own inspirations to the game, so if you think you recognize an influence somewhere... the answer is maybe! You should definitely make a 4-hour video essay on Youtube and let us know about it...

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

I'm not sure why Reddit isn't letting me sticky the comment directly, this platform hates me. But if you'd like to keep track of all our answers, we have a bot here that is keeping track of all of them <3
https://www.reddit.com/r/Enshrouded/comments/1c4omlh/comment/kzp9mka/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by Skeith4000

What was each team members favorite game that holds a special place in their heart to this day?

For me: Dune, the 1992 Cryo game

From Kall: Way too many to count. It's a bit cliche but can't go wrong with Chrono Trigger

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by fwambo42

Hi Dev Team! Thanks for doing this. What feature are you guys most excited about working on?

The "shared gameplay experiences", because I'm a huge fan of user-created adventure maps. Gimme your parkour challenges and your obstacle courses. Gimme your Vukah mazes. Gimme your Tuscany bathrooms.

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by Owyanos

The devs are awesome. I really hope that you guys have a continious sustainable business model to keep your awesome team (and the game) alive for decades. I would definitively pay for future dlc's (after the game is complete) if the content and quality resembles this output for the price i've arealdy paid. I never had so much fun in a long time. Vielen Dank.

We're very happy to hear that we have built a community that is so supportive of Enshrouded and our team. We currently don't have plans for any paid content, but we are clear that we won't offer any kind of paid content during early access. After full release we might consider paid DLC in addition to free updates (similar to what we did with Portal Knights), but we are not sure yet. Our focus is on offering a premium game in the first place.

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

Originally posted by fwambo42

Hi Dev Team! Thanks for doing this. What feature are you guys most excited about working on?

Does our Discord server count? 🤔

And from Ben: Improving and advancing the combat. Adding new monsters, small and big.

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

Originally posted by Skeith4000

What was each team members favorite game that holds a special place in their heart to this day?

The original SSX series, especially SSX 3. I get a blast of nostalgia just from hearing that game's soundtrack <3

From Ben - Zelda: Ocarina of Time

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

Originally posted by ZGoot

hey guys, just want to say that hallow halls are super fun! I love the dungeon delving and they just look so good! So after everything in the roadmap- fishing has to be coming down the pipe right? Every great game as a fishing mechanic ;)

We don't even have water yet, and you're asking us to commit to a fishing mini-game? Where would you fish, in the lava pools?!

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by Kh3ll3ndr0s

First of all, congrats and thankyou for this game.

Second, is there an approximate date for next map portion release?

We aim to release a smaller sub-biome with our second major update. It adds more variety and new content to an already existing biome. For the next full-size biome, we're looking further out than that, several months at least, as it needs a lot more content to come with that.

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by strixus

If you can, could you share any details about the upcoming Mountain biome?

I'm really looking forward to it, and I am curious about what sort of new monsters, new critters, or new plants we might encounter. If you can't share any of that, is there some out of context detail you could share that is a favourite about the area?

The mountains will still take a bit more time as it's a first new (full) biome and we'll start development on that in parallel to other additons to the game. Also, mountains need mountain weather.

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by ZaritharBeast

Will we be getting the ability to raise livestock and/or pets? Possibly taming wildlife - wolf cubs for example?

It's very early days for the design of this feature, so we cannot give out more details. We're keeping an eye on your comments, though!

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by runetrantor

Many know the map shall expand northwards, specially now that there's a frame around what is presumed to be the final size.

But one thing I have not seen asked, are there plans for vertical expansion of the map?
Its clear this game inspired from Zelda BotW and TotK, so I wonder if there's a chance to see sky islands, or even a Depths like underworld, full of Shroud and darkness thats super dangerous but rewarding and cool looking.

No spoilers. The only thing we will say is that the world is now a full kilometer taller than the map that was available during the closed beta. For... reasons.

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

Originally posted by The_Gamers_Crucible

You guys have a Discord channel that gets plenty of interaction. Why do you go to other platforms when you want to interact with the community? Building contest om X? AMA on reddit? But your main info dumps are on Discord.... This seems very counterproductive and a hassle to your community as much as yourselves.

Well if we said "ask your questions wherever you want" it would probably be even harder to keep track of them, we had to pick a comment-section-like platform for something like this, so Reddit was the obvious choice.

And if you hate it here, don't worry, we'll be collecting all the answers we give and posting them elsewhere after we're done in a more organized format :) Most things we post (that are important, at least) we cross-post to the majority of our platforms.

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

Originally posted by Ikelo

First off - thanks for providing a great experience. Have spent more than 300 hours and still racking them up while I build and explore new content releases.

For my question: Are there any plans to revamp the combat a bit? Things like heavy/light attacks or charged attacks? Maybe (more) conditional activation effects for abilities?

Of course! Our combat systems are not final, especially at this stage of development. We already have changes planned for the near future, and will continue to make changes as players give us more and more feedback over time. The team already has improvements in the pipeline for our melee combat, for example.

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by weightofast

My Question: Do you see making the survivors able to be spawned at multiple flame altars/bases.

As many others stated, I love building and also rebuilding areas. But not having my npc survivors there to crafts means I never visit those places. I would really like to have the survivors spawn-able at all base locations.

This one is actually on the roadmap we published (which you can find here, as well as in our Steam News and on our website). It's not update 2 material, but it's definitely something we're keeping in mind!

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by Quack_Smith

whats up with the begining lag at game startup? i'm running 32 gb of ram (nothign else running in background with a 1 gb 'net connection) and once i log in it takes nearly 5 mins before everything else loads in the game, and every time i fast travel it delays as well, it's been happening since the dungeon release.

Can't really help you troubleshoot stuff here and with this little info, but if you drop by our Discord or send us a ticket through the F1 menu, we will do our best to help you out.

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by Beckhaver

I am a designer by trade in my 50's. My wife and I have been waiting for a game like Enshrouded to come out since Landmark shut down (I believe) in 2017. We both adored Portal Knights (but disliked how small the maps were) so it should be no shock to you all at Keen that we are simply thrilled with Enshrouded and everything the game offers. I say this with as much sincerity as I can muster, thank you for all your hard work and effort, I can not stress (our) gratitude enough.

I can think off the top of my head 10 things I'd like to see implemented in Enshrouded, some of which come from Portal Knights such as nightstands that work as small inventory crates (same with wardrobes, cabinets, etc). armor stands (we loved making "armories"), mounts....and on and on.

But I'd rather focus my question on character customization. Wife and I love how the NPC's have very unique heights, body sizes, and attire. We'd both like to see this same level of customization for our in game avatars.

This is one of the few things we miss from some other games, simply a deeper level of character customization.

So I guess my question is. Is there a long term goal to implement a much deeper level of avatar customization. Character height, body size, attire inluding accessories like backpacks that show, quivers, ammo pouches (I'd really like to see gunpower weapons in game), cloaks, etc?

I find that often, if a game is in a lull state that if I have characters I REALLY adore and feel a deep attachment to, I will log in just to run around and sometimes this leads to a reason to keep playing. If I do not have that attachement, it can often make the game error towards the forgettable side.

Thank you again for all your hard work.

(ohh, if you decide to do some customization DLC like portal knights, please keep the prices realistic like portal knights was... spending 20 pounds/euros/dollars on mounts, outfits like in ESO turned wife and I off from the game so deeply that we will not play/buy anything from Bethesda/Zenimax ever again. I don't mind spending money on a game for future development, but I can't stand unfetterd greed).

I'd like to personally thank everyone involved with Landmark for preparing the terrain and helping create our fanbase over a decade ahead of time. So many Landmark veterans have been reaching out to us, it's crazy. We're very happy you have found a home in Enshrouded.

We will for sure add more variety to the existing systems in future updates.
Full body customization (height, body type etc.) is currently not a focus.
The vanity (cosmetics) system will allow a deeper level of expression with outfits as well.
Adding new types of accessories (like backpacks etc.) is a bit tricky as it has to play well with all armors/outfits, so we currently don't plan to do that, but for sure might consider improvements in the future.

We also don't have any plans for additional sold items during early access. Our focus is to offer a compelling game. We might consider additional DLC or cosmetic items after full release - similar to what we did with Portal Knights - but there are no specific plans at the moment.

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by shimizu14

Have no questions. Just wanted to thank you for the good ongoing work ♥️ keep going, you guys earned the trust from your audience

*cough* Hopefully the trust and the money of our audience.

Our community's support has been incredible and we are super thankful to not only everyone who's supported us so far, but also to you in particular, shimizu14. <3

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by Forebel_

Hey, actually I don't have a question I just wanted to thank you for this amazing game. My boyfriend and I are huge fans of your work since Portal Knights. We binged Portal Knights several weekends in a row from 9 am - 6 am then 3h sleep and back again. We were really looking forward to your next game and you didn't disappoint! Keep up the good work! We're already excited for the new updates

Grüße aus dem Schwabenland :)

We're very happy to hear that so many folks who loved Portal Knights are also having a really good time with Enshrouded. We hope we can bring both of you many more sleepless nights!

7 months ago - /u/VeryCoolUsernameBro - Direct link

Originally posted by runetrantor

Thats wonderful to hear then.

Though will still hope that also means the world surface got moved higher to allow more under it. ;P

500m of blue sky, 500m of good ole dirt ;)

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

AMA is over, thank you so much for all your questions! Sorry, we couldn't get to all of them, this thread got much bigger than we could have possibly anticipated.

For now, here's a list of all the questions and answers. In the coming week, we will create a more organized blog post showcasing every answer in detail (and not a bunch of hyperlinks 😅).

Here is a complete list of every question/answer:

Multiple devs:

Question 1

Question 2

Antony (Creative director):

Toast and Cub (Community Managers, we were working behind the scenes):

Running out of space, I will put a follow-up comment below this one with the rest of the answers <3

7 months ago - /u/KeenToast - Direct link

Originally posted by KeenToast

AMA is over, thank you so much for all your questions! Sorry, we couldn't get to all of them, this thread got much bigger than we could have possibly anticipated.

For now, here's a list of all the questions and answers. In the coming week, we will create a more organized blog post showcasing every answer in detail (and not a bunch of hyperlinks 😅).

Here is a complete list of every question/answer:

Multiple devs:

Question 1

Question 2

Antony (Creative director):

Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

Question 4

Question 5

Question 6

Question 7

Question 8

Question 9

Question 10

Question 11

Question 12

Question 13

Question 14

Question 15

Question 16

Question 17

Question 18

Question 19

Question 20

Question 21

Question 22

Question 23

Question 24

Question 25

Question 26

Question 27

Question 28

Question 29

Question 30

Question 31

Question 32

Question 33

Question 34

Question 35

Question 36

Question 37

Question 38

Question 39

Question 40

Question 41

Question 42

Question 43

Question 44

Toast and Cub (Community Managers, we were working behind the scenes):

Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

Question 4

Question 5

Question 6

Question 7

Question 8

Question 9

Question 10

Question 11

Question 12

Running out of space, I will put a follow-up comment below this one with the rest of the answers <3