Finishing Touches

All of a sudden we’re less than a week away from the release of MythForce. Sorry it’s been a while since the last devblog. The team’s been focused on getting the game into the best shape possible for September 12, and I’m really proud of how much we’ve accomplished.

We’ve been teasing the new chapters and episodes on our socials, and I’m super excited to see how everyone likes the game.

This week, instead of a focused look at a single vendor or mechanic, I want to address the gameplay experience of MythForce and how we’ve addressed some of the feedback since we first got the game in your hands during Steam Next Fest.

Huge thanks to everyone who’s engaged with us on our Discord and other socials, where we’ve witnessed some awesome discussions around game mechanics from dedicated players. We appreciate all of you who answered our questionnaires to identify which parts you felt needed a bit more love. And that’s what this blog post is about: the ways we’ve polished the game to make your play experience even better.

I won’t be able to describe everything we’ve done, since there’s been so much going on in the last few months, but I want to touch on some broad themes.

Optimization and performance have been at the top of our list. We want the game to run as smoothly as possible for everyone. We’ve been profiling, improving, optimizing, and cleaning up as much as possible to deliver the most bang for your CPU and GPU buck. This has been especially important for our last-gen consoles, but the savings trickle up. You should find that your game just runs smoother—or, if it already ran smoothly—at least a bit cooler than before.

On a similar note, we also have been deeply focused on improving the multiplayer experience. As a peer-to-peer game, lag is still subject in part to your connection to the host player, but we’ve been working to migrate a number of actions to become client-authoritative. That means that—instead of the client’s telling the host, “I want to do this,” and the host’s needing to verify the action and pass it back to the client and any other players—now the client says, “I have done this,” and the host accepts and lets the other players know.

I’m sure network experts are shaking their heads, horrified by my gross underselling of the complexity of peer-to-peer client-host relationship, but you get the idea. All this is to say that the game should feel much smoother as a client player in a multiplayer game. You should rubberband much less often, and your attacks and spells should be much more usable.

Moving on from performance, another frequent topic of feedback concerns pace. MythForce has always been about tactical sword & sorcery action. We’ve done our best to strike a balance between action and resistance, but a few elements still felt less like deliberate friction and more like needless slowing of the pace.

We wanted combat to be tactical but also dynamic and interesting—hitting, fading, and frequently using your special abilities. In that spirit, we took another look at our special ability cooldowns and reduced them almost across the board. We’ve re-tuned the Energy cost of many combat actions so that you’ll find yourself exhausted less often. We’ve even disabled Energy loss entirely when you’re out of combat so you can run around and practice as much as you like when you aren’t actively fighting.

After much discussion, we