Towerborne Full Game Launch Update - Letter to the Early Access Community

To our Early Access players:

While our Launch Overview provides a useful list of what has happened over the past six months at Stoic, it is written for both new and returning players. That makes it harder to get into specific differences and direct responses to player feedback. Reducing that context to a TL;DR or bullet list would also do you a disservice, so we wanted to take a moment to go deeper here.

When we decided to shift Towerborne from a live service game to a standalone premium experience, it wasn’t a decision we made lightly. We knew it would be a change some players wouldn’t be happy about. But it was also the best way to ensure Towerborne could stand on its own as something can keep in your library, take offline, and play anywhere.

Most importantly, thank you to everyone who played during Early Access. You spent real time with Towerborne while it was still evolving, and your feedback, discussions, bug reports, and shared frustrations helped define what this game needed to become. Early Access was a collaboration, and we are genuinely grateful for it.

Everything we learned during that time guided what came next. We revisited nearly every part of the game and added major new content, including a new campaign, a reworked world map, expanded progression and forge systems, class mastery skills, Umbra, new bosses, and more. The goal was simple: to take what Towerborne already was and make it the most complete version it could be.

We know a message like this can’t fully show the care behind that work. The real proof is in playing the game. Still, we want to be direct and walk through a few concrete examples of how your feedback led to meaningful changes.

Motivation

The Early Access campaign for Towerborne is a light touch. It set up enough of a story for us to continue to explore over years, and so it doesn’t tell a clear story on its own. It’s definitely not enough to know your role and goals, and how you affect the world.

When you start a new game, you’ll see that you can select your class at the start. No more all-Sentinel parties at the start. Once you’ve started, you’re thrown into the thick of it: the City of Numbers just as the protective Pylons fail.

All storytelling took place in the Belfry, so it was hard to remember what was going on or why after chewing through so many Discovery missions. We saw some success with the small stories in Chance Encounters, and that showed us what tools we needed in order to shift the focus of our storytelling from the Belfry to the missions.

All players are beginning a 15+ hour campaign spanning over 50 missions. Some of these are bespoke missions with a focus on the story. Many of these missions have an NPC companion, which came from player feedback. They also include small cutscenes, dialog, bespoke environments, and plenty of fighting. The campaign will take you through most of the Ventures, all of the environments, and all of the bosses.

That means we can tell our story as you’re brawling instead of summoning you back for the next conversation. For fans of the Pylon Enthusiast, he’ll be waiting.

Repetition

We use the phrase “grasslands and gobos” to denote how repetitive the game could get. Many of our players saw nothing but this for their first hour.

While it’s fun to explore the map, the forced Discovery missions added some real design challenges. It weakened the