Eternal Remnant's 2023 In Review!

This marks Eternal Remnant’s first ever update on Steam, and it’s been a long time coming. First of all - thank you for your interest in our game. The people working on this project are dedicated to bringing you the best game possible, and one that stays faithful to the original vision of Eternal Remnant.

I, the lead developer, would like to take you through some of the big steps we made in 2023 to fleshing the game out, as well as inform you of how close we are to completion and what remains in 2024.

Completion of Chapter I Main Story:

Almost at the very start of 2023, all the main gameplay segments, related equipment to the main quest, and scenes, were completed and locked in. There have been some minor tweaks since, but for all intents and purposes - the playable content of this main segment is finished. This was probably the project’s biggest step forward, as this forms the largest piece of development.

Quality of Life Features:

Player feedback is extremely important when making a game of this nature. Being a narrative-driven game, gameplay must feel fluid, with minimal points of unearned difficulty. Enemies must be challenging but beatable in no more than a few tries, puzzles must be both engaging but progress quickly, and crucially, the delivery of the story must move at the player’s pace. Upon releasing the demo, there was really helpful feedback that in turn, was used to make the game better. Here’s what’s been added in light of that feedback:

• Text speed options, including instant. - Scene speed options, if players find they progress too slowly. - Skippable scenes. - Autosave functionality. - Battle speed options - including an instant ATB charge to effectively make the combat purely turn-based. - Additional tutorials, with the ability to turn them off completely. - An in-game logbook with indication of quest goals. Somewhat tangentially, because the scope of Eternal Remnant encompasses much more than just Chapter I, it was important to save direct healing abilities for Chapter II as it plays heavily into the story. In light of this, there have been more healing items added to the main quest early to make the difficulty curve more forgiving.

Console Releases:

This would mark the first time in an official sense that we can say that Arcfinder Studios has an arrangement to bring the game to all major consoles!

This will also enable us to have stronger marketing reach leading up to release.

What’s Left?

Remaining additional work on the game fits into a few different areas - the most of which is playtesting and bug-fixing.

However, an extensive post-game episode is in development currently. This will function as an aside to the main story, and won’t just be about engaging in extra combat trials - there will be a rich story that runs parallel to the main quest, which shows us a side to the characters and world that we haven’t seen before. There may or not be a superboss. Okay, there is. There is a superboss. There is one designer (full time), one programmer and two artists (all part time) currently working on Eternal Remnant to aim for an end of year 2024 release date. This potentially could be brought forward depending on the progress we make in the areas of administration and marketing as it pertains to release.

It’s important there’s enough of a splash to be made when we’re ready to go, so it’s important that we rope in as much attention as we can in this last leg of development to ensure we can go into Chapter II with a bit of buzz and hype!

I would like to once again thank you for keeping Eternal Remnant on your wishlist for this stretch of time, and I can’t wait to bring you a game that I earnestly hope will keep you entertained for its duration, and keep you thinking about it long afterward!

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