Another week, another hello to you guys!

Difficulty & You: An Entryway

A few weeks ago, I had mentioned that we were going to start a conversation on difficulty in Ephemeral Tale, and that time is on us. When the game launched, there was no doubts that Ephemeral Tale was a challenging game. However, since the beginning of February, things have changed. This leads us into this weeks patch, and the general focus of it: balance and bug-fixing. Not the most exciting thing, but one of the more necessary ones!

Patch #12 Changelog

• Fixed a bug where Florence would always lose his hammer in the Oasis (he can now misplace it in the Forest, or Castle, too!)
• Fixed a graphical bug with the Forest’s sun rays
• Fixed a bug where Upholstergeist’s combat message was the wrong color
• Fixed a bug where Jellies could be accidentally consumed
• Fixed a bug where the player could be invisible after beating the game
• Boneshard Shield now grants +15% ATK/MATK, -15% DEF/MDEF (from 20%)
• Oog-Boog Hammer now grants +15% ATK, and is the Oog-Boog Mallet (from 25%)
• Steadyshot now grants +20% ATK/MAT (from 50%)
• Devourer's Edge now grants 25% HP on a critical kill (from 50%)
• Vengeant Whip now triggers from being <50%, instead of 25%
• Combat has been sped up a tad (removed "dead frames" in some animations, less delay between actions)
• More feedback to the player when an item breaks (NOTE: Not finished here, will do more in the future)
• Autosave has been disabled to address concerns of load times on transferring between maps (NOTE: Saving the game will still cause a momentary hang for lengthy save files)
• Another SFX pass done
• Enemies are now slightly tougher, universally
• The players core stats have been lowered slightly, universally

The last item is to address some concerns, both internally spoken and externally spoken, that the game may have swung too far in the other direction from our previous balance patch (Major Update #1). Rather than make big changes and reeling them in, we’ve opted towards smaller tweaks. For example, players used to get 5 points for every level in the core 4 stats (atk/matk/def/mdef)-- they will now get 4. As for enemies, their HP now scales more aggressively to stop them from getting cake-stomped as much as they were. Plenty of stomping should still occur, just ever so slightly less.

These last two changes will also have the impact of making gear choices more important, as by altering how many points the player gets per level, we shift the balance of “where the hell are the points from?” more towards gear. Additionally, a few stand-out items have been toned down to be more reasonable. Boneshard Shield was creating issues when paired alongside certain other items, same goes for the Oog-Boog, and Steadyshot. As such, these guys have been tuned down to being "very freaking good" from "holy cow, these are unquestionably the best." Vengeant Whip has also been buffed in order to get it to proc more frequently, in an effort to improve its value.

This list of changes can easily come across as a drastic change to the sandbox balance, but to be perfectly clear: it's not. While it may have a more moderate impact on builds focused around stacking stat bonuses using multiplicative values, those really are few and far between, and are much more reasonable now. So, while this balance sweeps is minor, it's an important step in the right direction. This will become increasingly important in the future, as more balance changes occur, as new uniques get added, and the general sandbox changes. One sandbox change that will be occurring at some point in the future is the addition of New Game+ to Ephemeral Tale, for example. I've mentioned this in the past, and try to be open about the fact that I'd like NG+ to have value to it, but I'm not sure what that necessarily means at this particular moment. If I add content that is exclusive to NG+, it could be viewed as adding play time to the game-- or it could be viewed as locking the content behind an artificial wall. As a gamer, I want to provide you guys with cool experiences. But as a developer, I want to treat all of you equally, which is also not really fair to those that are dumping more or less time than everyone else. So, over the next few weeks I'll be doing research into how some of my favorite games have approached New Game+, and start to walk the path of developing that feature.

Internally, there's still discussion occurring over the idea of multiple difficulty levels in order to better accommodate players of varied skill levels. While I'm not quite ready to talk about that, we'll surely discuss it again in the future. Time will ultimately tell whether or not we can create a universal experience that speaks to all players, or if I need to give better options to you guys. Speaking of the future, let's talk about the next patch, Into the Deep! As a major patch, there are going to be a slew of changes to the sandbox-- new enemies, items, The new zone that you will explore in this update lies deep underwater, in a lost section of the old world: the Sunken Summit.

Rumor has it that a spring of vitality at one point lied at the heart of the Summit, but who knows if it's still there today? A quick heads up in regards to the release date of Into the Deep: this update should launch next week, March 3rd! We're finally putting the update through its paces now in our internal tests, and want to make sure that everything is nice and ready for you guys. If the update isn't ready for technical reasons, it may be pushed to March 10th, and in that instance we'll swap the (currently planned) March 10th patch for the 3rd instead. Both should be content patches, so we'll see how things pan out. Game development is always a wacky thing, after all.

One last thing before we call it for the week: when Into the Deep drops, we'll be switching to semantic versioning. What does that mean? Nothing much for you guys, to be honest. Just means instead of a patch cycle looking like .99a, .99b, .99c, etc., it would be closer to like 0.9.1, 0.9.2, 0.9.3, so on and so forth. We'll be calling Into the Deep 1.0.0, but that's just because I worked myself into a corner w/ the .99 weirdness. We'll still be in Early Access, still releasing content patches, balance patches, and bug fixes. We'll just have a shiny new system for determining what "version" the game is currently on. Simply put, this change makes things easier for me to manage.

We'll be back next week with another fun patch so until then, have fun!

-- Ryan