Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms – Update Philosophy

Following some hotfixes for Alaloth: Champions of the Four Kingdoms, Gamera Interactive brings us this Steam announcement outlining the team’s approach to early access updates going forward. The general gist of it seems to be having a functional build at all times while gradually iterating this or that system.

Here’s more on that:

Hello Champions!

It’s a rainy Sunday here and we would like to drop a super quick note about the latest hotfix released on Friday. As you know, we are super fast with bug fixing and this is the most important thing we’ve considered when we started thinking about the long term plans for the game. We’ve released 10+ patches so far and i think nobody in the world can say a thing about our availability here or on our social, trying to solve as much problems as possible when they pop-up. We are proud of the work done, and we would say that we’ve always pushed the EA launch as something different from the usual EA launches. We don’t have a vertical slice of the product to iterate, we have a fully playable product that needs to be iterated, polished and balanced to became what we had in mind since the very beginning. No game breaking bugs, no crashes, solid builds: we can say that all of this is real and again, proud of this and happy to know that players appreciated it. By the way, all of this does not mean that we have done with the development of course. We’ve updated the game trying to keep game saves safe everytime [and we’ll continue like this], we’ve updated the game testing stuff on our internal branch and we’ve updated the game keeping in mind what we said above. A solid build to play is a must for us, and this is not going to change, but it’s important to remind that development is a pain and sometime we can’t simply know what is going to happen with the implementation of new features. The last patch was basically built around a first round of economy balancing that will be completed tomorrow. Two weeks ago we’ve put in the revive for companions. Yesterday we’ve receveid a few messages complaining about both things so it was worth claryfing once again what’s going to happen next.

The revive feature was working fine when patched. We’ve worked on the feature this week too, and apparently the last update caused some regression. A few players experienced crashes or have been forced to restart the game trying to revive companions or trying to interact with them once gone. Crashes or no chances to interact with items/loot chests in FA, are directly connected to this, we are going to fix this tomorrow. The other economy-related issue is the one about repair costs and durability. We’ve increased durability for items on Friday, we are going to release the [almost] final iteration tomorrow. Repair costs will be lowered [by now, they are lower than the costs we had at release] and a first bunch of items will get their real in-game value. Remember that is never about a single feature but we are talking about connected systems. The problem with the repair cost is that the value of the items is still wrong and super high, compared to the money available in loots, quests and so on [even because right now, the sellling price for items have been decreased and we’ve iterated loots and rewards as well]. In both cases and for future patches, please, don’t panic 🙂 . “The game is broken” or “The last patch destroyed everthing” or stuff like that is non sense now, because bugs can happen at this stage, even if we had no significant tech issues since launch. And we are aware in real time of things gone wrong in case. Regression is pretty normal, we usually talk about what we do before and after a patch note and we build and fix at speed of light. Our idea was to update twice per week when possible but to avoid issues like this, we are probably going to patch on Thursday instead of Friday, to avoid scary weekends like this and let you play safe. Thank you for the support as usual, Major Update on the way soon! Have a great Sunday!

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