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Welcome to the post-launch Dev News Update that we wanted to share with you now that it’s been around a week since Outriders Worldslayer launched.
The first few hours of Early Access logins aside, we feel that it has overall been a very successful launch for Outriders Worldslayer. The servers have remained stable and players seem to be having a lot of fun with the spread of viable builds as well as the hunt for great Apocalypse Gear.
The overall stability of the game allows us to focus our efforts on a larger patch to implement any required balancing and tidy up any bugs that may have slipped through. This patch is also intended to introduce some requested Quality of Life upgrades, such as Item Locking and improved Quick Mark functionality. Experiments concerning increased stash limits continue to be run, so we cannot confirm any news there yet.
- This larger patch will continue to be assembled over the next week and will enter testing thereafter. A prospective release window for it is the end of July.
- The option to instantly implement certain balancing changes via a backend update remains, though we are being mindful of what we use this for.
- A small patch will be released next week, but will be focused on a handful of bugs that were identified during and prior to early access. We’ll confirm this patch’s content on Tuesday.
With the overall housekeeping out of the way, let’s get into the nitty gritty details of what’s next for Worldslayer’s design and balance!
INDEX:
- Philosophy of Design
- Realignment of Tarya Gratar Rewards
- Balancing Builds
- Apocalypse Tiers Grinding
- Bug Fix for Tiago’s Mystery Re-roll
Philosophy of Design
We are always aware that it is natural player behaviour to gravitate towards the most efficient ways to complete content within a given game, even when those ways may be less fun. A key goal within game design is to ensure that the most efficient ways of playing the game should also be the most fun.
This theory can be applied to many things, from what content players choose to engage with (e.g. farming one spot instead of playing the full breath of content) to how players engage with content in general (e.g. choosing certain builds for their overall power even if their long-term fun factor is quite low).
The squad being efficient AND having fun.
Realignment of Tarya Gratar Rewards
The changes in this section are planned to be implemented via a Backend update next Tuesday (July 12th). We are announcing them now to give everyone enough time to access the current rewards structure for a little while longer, but also to give us time to review feedback and make sure that we’re on the right path.
- A large number of players have been abusing an exploit which allows them to bypass all other content and infinitely farm the final Arbiter in the Trial of Tarya Gratar.
- A code-based solution to this exploit would take a very long time to develop, as the only viable way of closing it properly would be to rewrite the entire way save-games are handled while in the Trial of Tarya Gratar. This is not feasible.
- The current exploit is only in place because we purposefully designed the Retries system within the Trial to be player friendly. We did not want players who need to take a break from playing or whose internet connection momentarily fails to be punished with lost retries or be sent back to the start of the Trial.
As mentioned in the Philosophy of Design section and as we did last year, rather than punish players and reduce overall farming opportunities, we would like to realign your options to give you more choice, rather than less.
- We are adding an extra guaranteed Apocalypse Legendary RNG drop in the following Trove areas:
- Cliffside Path
- Daughter’s Sanctuary
- The Arboretum
- This guaranteed drop will correspond to the targeted loot option for the respective trove.
- We are reducing the final Arbiter’s Apocalypse Legendary drop rate, but the “Choice of Legendary“ reward that appears after defeating the final Arbiter remains unaffected.
- These changes will make the Trove areas of the game more attractive while also helping ensure an overall run-through of the Trial becomes more rewarding than before.
- Compared to before, where the amount of Apocalypse Legendaries obtained from a full run through of the Trial was a minimum of 6, in the new system a complete run through all rooms in the Trial will net a player a guaranteed minimum of 9 Apocalypse Legendaries + RNG chances for others.
The most efficient way of farming legendaries should therefore shift to something much more fun and variable, rather than players feeling like they need to repeat the same fight ad infinitum if they want to be as efficient as possible.
Balancing Builds
Another topic we wanted to touch upon today are a couple of very specific Build options which are fundamentally broken. They are not “OP” in the sense that they are just more powerful than other options. They are “OP” in that they circumnavigate mechanics within the game.
When we hear someone say “my co-op partners just put their controllers down because I instantly kill everything”, or we see a boss being long-range deleted by a co-op partner before a player can even get in range to use their skills, we think it is fair to say that changes must be made.
A few examples of the most problematic builds below:
- A few builds can instantly one-shot bosses, regardless of difficulty level, making all content trivial and ruining any co-op fun.
- While outputting huge numbers of damage is what the game is all about, doing so during a boss-fight should be something players build up through the flow of battle, rather than being able to do so in the first few seconds of the fight.
- One build allows players to become virtually indestructible while still outputting a large amount of damage. Players running this build can face-tank multiple hits of the final boss and not even drop their shield.
- While there is a reason Tank Builds exist, we feel they should at least require a modicum of challenge to keep the game interesting.
- A different build has excessively reduced skill cool-downs so that they are non-existent.
- While we very much agree that “more skills = more fun”, almost entirely removing cooldowns is problematic to the overall balance eco-system.
The effectiveness of most these builds is based on a specific handful of mods, and it only increases as players continue to level up. They allow players to completely ignore everything going on in a given battle and thereby remove any challenge the game might have offered.
As always, when such options are available within the game and as knowledge of them becomes more common, they will completely invalidate all other choices, even if those choices are more fun to play (See Philosophy of Design section). This argument is similar to the way pre-New Horizon Fortress blocked one weapons mod slot because changing it to anything else would always have been a loss in output.
One way or another, the builds mentioned here will need to be addressed in future. And while we identified these issues last week already, we deliberately chose not to immediately nerf them.
Instead, we are taking our time to observe the prevalence of these builds, but also to identify areas of the game where we can buff players. An early example here would be the Trigger Twitch set bonus, which we currently have ear-marked with a significant and tasty buff.
The plan is to ensure that when any balancing is implemented, players are given more options rather than less.
This overall balancing pass will be implemented in the larger patch in a few weeks’ time. The time ahead will allow us to continue gathering valuable data about which areas of the buildcraft game are over and underperforming compared to our vision.
We will of course, as always, also be reading comments and thoughtful discussions regarding this matter.
Apocalypse Tiers Grinding
Finally, we wanted to mention Apocalypse Tiers, as their rate of progress has been a topic of discussion since shortly after launch.
Understanding our initial vision for Apocalypse Tiers and Ascension Levels will help explain the way they are currently implemented.
From the way Outriders was designed and what we observed from many players over the past year, the game is most fun when buildcrafting.
Finding new gear and mods or experimenting with new build ideas to see which armour best synergizes with what mods. Coming up against a difficult encounter and needing to make improvements to a build to overcome that challenge. Playing and enjoying the sandbox nature that Outriders’ large spread of viable builds creates.
Rather than maxing them out being the main goal, Apocalypse Tiers and Ascension Levels are intended to be there throughout the journey of continual build exploration and experimentation. They are there for the many players who, purely for the fun and enjoyment of it, continued to invest hundreds of hours into the base Outriders game, even after having completed the Eye of the Storm on Challenge Tier 15.
The newly introduced mechanics in Worldslayer are primarily intended to give such players a long-term progression path, something that makes every play session worthwhile, as you will always be levelling up in some way.
Being able to max out all Tiers and levels within one week of launch would be antithetical to the idea of providing a long-term progression system.
That’s the vision.
However, it is a fine balance to strike. Our intentions for aspects of gameplay shouldn’t mean that the final completion is so unattainable as to be off-putting for those players who may consider maxing out Apocalyse Tiers to be their only goal in the game. We are also keenly aware of this debate within the context of players wanting to max out multiple classes.
For now, we can say that we are closely monitoring how players engage with Apocalypse Tiers. Depending on our findings, we may well make some adjustments or soften the grind in future, but we feel that one week after launch is still too early to make changes to a system that has intentionally been designed to last longer than a week.
Bug Fix for Tiago’s Mystery Purchase & Elite Offer Re-Roll
- Due to a bug, Tiago’s “Mystery Purchase” and "Elite Offer" in the Expeditions Camp was able to roll Worldslayer Gear for players who did not own Worldslayer. This gear would not be usable, so it would effectively waste the resources of those players.
- We’ve made a backend change to Tiago’s store that means that it will no longer drop Worldslayer Gear below level 51. It will still be able to drop Apocalypse Variant gear for Worldslayer players at all levels, but this fix means that Base Game players will be able to use Tiago's store with confidence.
Outro
That’s it for today – Thank you very much for reading so far and for your support of Outriders Worldslayer! We’ll be back with more news regarding the patch/planned changes when we have tangible details. Until then, see you on Enoch!
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