[2021] From CremaCorp to your doorstep: the Tournament update is here!

Hello there Tamers! The second content update of the Cipanku cycle is here to put a bow on the weeb era, so here’s a more detailed look at some of the new features and content added in this update! Be aware that it will contain spoilers about the patch, so read at your own discretion.

While this update, lovingly called CU2, doesn’t uncover any new Temtem or island, it does add some spicy content to the roster: you’ll get to unlock a new building in Cipanku, experience new Quests and gears, a lot of QoL changes and features such as Tournaments and playable musical instruments.

Let’s dig in!

Welcome to our offices!

You’ll be able to walk into Crema Corp in this update, and meet some of us working there. In fact you will help out in various stages of game development, starting from the simplest of tasks and going all the way up to the CEO. But don’t worry, you’ll be compensated for your work in the shape of gears (everyone knows game devs don’t actually get paid, duh).

We’ve carefully recreated the actual Crema offices, and the same goes for our characters, who’ve been hand-made to resemble each one of us. Please take lots of selfies and show us! As you can imagine, this bit is really emotional for the team and we hope you’ll enjoy this opportunity and get to know us better.

Tournaments: time to prove your competitive worth
You read that right! We’re deploying in-game Tournaments now, and they’re quite important so take a seat.

Tournaments will be a weekly occurrence, initially on Sundays. There will be three tournaments each Sunday, spread across different time zones so our Tamers can choose the one that suits them best (or, you know, enlist in all three, who are we to tell you how to live your life). Each tournament will have infinite brackets of 32 players each. These brackets get created as people join in and can be infinite. Brackets will factor in the TMR of the Tamers inscribed, and will designate leagues based on the average TMR in the bracket. There are currently four leagues, and rewards get better as the league gets higher.

Joining a Tournament is completely free of charge, too! All Tamers who win at least one match will get a Pansun reward, more or less juicy depending on their performance. But this is about winning. We’ve tried to make the winning prizes appealing and worthy, so the winner of each tournament will get an exclusive in-game title that is unique to each month, and a winner medal that can be displayed on the Tamer Info.

We’ll be holding our first in-game tournament tomorrow, Wednesday July 7th at 12 am PST / 7 am UTC. The whole Crema team will be watching, so consider it a grand event! We’ll also hold the 3 usual Tournaments on Sunday, but this one’s so we can be on top of the first in case something went wrong. We encourage everyone to give it a try, and wish you all the best of luck!?

Competitive improvements

To match the sparkly new Tournaments, we’ve also made some improvements to competitive playing. To begin with we’ve tweaked some timers, and we’ve changed the way Gears were placed in PvP squads: from now on, you’ll place the Gears in slots instead of on Temtem. This allows you to have different Gears on the same tem depending on what Competitive Squad you’re using. This was a long-time request from the competitive community, and it involved changing a lot of the original system of competitive squads, gears, etc.

Apart from competitive in itself, we’ve added a couple things to Spectating to really breathe some life into it: your spectators will actually be in the very Battlezone with you, and you will see and hear their emotes in real time (you can disable the emoting if it gets too distracting). We believe this will make tournaments more exciting and give it an actual sense of unicity and eventfulness. Also, the Spectate button now changes in real time so you never miss your favorite people’s matches.

We’re very eager to see how these changes impact the competitive and tournament scene, and as usual, we hope you’ll like them and will be watching out for your reactions!

Get ready to rrrrumble!

Are you feeling it, Mr. Krabs? We’ve put a lot of care and attention into vibration and Haptic feedback so our players can feel Temtem on a different level. Haptic feedback was uncharted territory for us, and it gave us a lot of room to play around, and we’ve tried our best to include it seamlessly so PS5 players will feel right at home in Temtem. I promise you will feel Techniques on a new level now. Of course, we’ve added vibration to a whole lot of features, so you should experience it for yourselves. And, because we know rumbling and vibrating can be overwhelming at times, both Haptic and vibrations can be turned off from Settings.

Also, while we’re on the topic of control, we’ve made Temtem entirely playable with a mouse! We understand Temtem sessions can get long, we understand some people work better with a mouse or have conditions preventing them from using a controller or a keyboard for a long time, and we understand some MMOs feel better with a mouse. All in all, we believed that giving our players this choice was well worth the resources and will provide everyone some quality of life and comfort.

Let’s get musical ?

We’ve added a functioning musical instrument as a reward for a very musical quest. It even has scales and a very focused piano face. While this might come off as surprising, one of our focuses in Temtem is, and has always been, social elements, and we highly value what they add to the game, even if it’s not traditional gameplay per se. It’s finally time to talk to Damián and finish the Musical Crystals quest! We’re jumping into the club of games who have playable musical instruments, and as such, and for the arts, we believe this requires an exception in one of our usual policies. This is why, using macros to play the Toy Piano, and only that, will be allowed. Please don’t attempt to use macros for anything outside of the Toy Piano, as it’s a bannable offense. Of course, we’re super eager to listen to your creations, covers and reinterpretations, so please make sure to post them where we can see them!

Smoother running 

Temtem will run smoother and perform better on most machines from this update onwards! For those interested, here’s why:

Up until now, the game would load mostly anything it could use at some point, regardless of whether Tamers were going to see it or not. One of our long-planned, pending tasks (scheduled for version 1.0, in fact), was to redo this so only the essential would initially load, and everything else would only load when needed, dynamically.

We wanted to wait until 1.0 to tackle this because it’s infinitely easier to design and implement when the game is already “finished” and everything is laid out, instead of adding and retouching it with each update. To top this off, Unity has historically had a lot of issues with systems like these, so we wanted to wait as much as we could to ensure our engine version would be well prepared for the change.

But this was the cause for both the long initial loading time and some of the black screens that happened when changing scenes (including the Co-op ones!). Due to how much Temtem has changed and grown from our initial standpoint, this situation has escalated to a point where we simply couldn’t wait until 1.0 to introduce these changes, so we’ve gotten down to it. We started internally implementing this change in recent patches, and we tested it out with Technique animations even as far back as PS5 launch. With this patch today we’ve applied this change to many more areas in the game, so it should be fairly noticeable and we’ll continue adding improvements and bettering performance in future patches.

Tl;dr: Temtem go brrrr.

Of course, this isn’t everything! Read our patch notes here to check out the full list of bugs we’ve fixed, the (few) balance changes, and all the other stuff in this patch, like the split of Telomere Hacks or the changes to PvP timers.

We hope you enjoy this patch, and see you soon!