Archmage Rises - the play-how-you-want mage simulator - now available on Early Access

[Tweed]

Be sure to wake me if they...ya know, actually release a finished game.

 

[Mortmal]

Be sure to wake me if they...ya know, actually release a finished game.

Will if still alive .

 

[Delterius]

Be sure to wake me if they...ya know, actually release a finished game.

Will if still alive .

we'll have to do an In Memoriam for the posters who left us since the first page

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.archmagerises.com/news/2023/4/21/early-access-differences-to-the-nextfest-demo

DIFFERENCES BETWEEN BUILDS: DEMO VS EARLY ACCESS

As I write this five programmers are in a meeting trying to figure out how best to merge all the source code changes between the two branches. It’s a lot!
First, let’s talk about the different goals of the two builds: The Nextfest Demo and the upcoming Early Access Release.

THE NEXTFEST DEMO​

THE DEMO’S PURPOSE​

This game has been over 9 years in the making, and we wanted to show the world (or at least the subset of awesome gamers like you) what we have been working on all this time. It was important to show not what it is, but where it is going and what it could be. For this reason we left a lot of untested unbalance features turned on.
Like the Mage Tower.
We didn’t think it was good, but we wanted people to know/see that building a mage tower is a cool and integral feature of the game.
As I mentioned, many many features were untested and unbalanced. It wasn’t until it went live we learned how badly unbalanced and buggy some of it really was. Oops.

THE DEMO QUEST​

Like a good themepark ride, we wanted to reduce friction and get everyone through the entire experience.
To get players jumping into the various elements of the game right away, we created a very structured demo experience with a mandatory quest: the hunt for the Senindarin Artifact. We introduced some of the world and the ongoing competition between our three major factions: The Nobility, The Conclave of Mages, and the Free Mages (Renegades).

We made the demo easy: low hp enemies, low gold costs, small combat group sizes. We basically took a level 30 quest and made it achievable by level 1 mages.
We hoped to provide one hour of engagement, allowing people to explore a procedurally generated world.
Mission accomplished! Over 50% played for more than 3 hours.

THE EARLY ACCESS RELEASE BUILD​

THE EARLY ACCESS RELEASE’S PURPOSE​

We’ve finally built something that we are proud to release to a wider audience. This is the real game experience, the foundation from which we will be building upon for the next year+ with you according to our Roadmap.
We hoped to add more features in time for Early Access, but instead focused on stability by fixing all the bugs. A stable release is better than a buggy one with new features you cannot really enjoy.
When I say “real game experience”, I mean in the demo you could easily one shot a skeleton. But skeletons are actually one of our mid tier enemies and new players should RUN like from a killer rabbit. This will be jarring for longtime players.

TEMPORARILY REMOVED FEATURES​

Before we get into the new stuff coming in the Early Access Release build, let’s talk about the features we’re temporarily taking out, and why we are removing them (for now). These are features that we wanted players to try in the demo, but were half-baked, untested, or buggy.

• Mage Tower
  • It needs a new UI and lots of attention to the costs. This is the primary feature of Update #2: The Mage Tower, so it will be making it’s return soon.
• Demo Quest for the Senindarin Artifact
  • As mentioned above, this is supposed to be quest designed for higher level mages. This quest will come back as an optional quest you can pickup at a Conclave Chapterhouse.
• Monster Race of Bandits
  • There are a minimum of 5 enemy types per race each of a different archetype: caster, ranged, brute, trash mob, etc. For bandits, we only managed to get one in and they were a dumb one and fundamentally broken: every time it was their turn they hid. This is more interesting when there are other creatures bashing you and this one leaps from the shadows.
  • The bandits will be returning as a monster race in Update #4: Crime & Punishment.
• Enchanting
  • Mechanically it works, but within the broader context of the game it needs lots of balance and help. It will be returning Update #2: The Mage Tower.
• Misc NPC Stuff
  • We left some things turned on which didn’t work well: letter writing, inn performances, jokes, followers. We’re turning it off until they come back in Update #1: Townsfolk.
  • Slavery is being turned off until Update #9: Rulers and Kingdoms where you can help pass Royal Edicts to ban it.
• Casting Spells on Hexes in the World
  • We’ve just made massive changes to our combat and spell casting (which we’ll get back to in a minute) and need some time to get it working with the hex casting. So for now, you can’t rain fireballs on towns. This will return Update #2: Mage Tower.

As you can see, most of the removed features will return very shortly (within the first 2 updates) to give us some extra time to polish them up, so you won’t be without them for too long!

NEW FEATURES​

The whole team has been working hard to deliver a better, more polished experience. The primary differences in the Early Access Release build are:

1. COMBAT​

I’ve been playtesting the demo for the last few weeks and the combat wasn’t achieving any of it’s goals. It was simplistic and boring.
Based on feedback from the demo, we’ve revised combat to be rarer, more strategic, and involved. 80% of our effort over the last month has gone into this combat update. So much so that a separate writeup of the specific changes is coming in a few days.

2. SAVE SYSTEM​

The game is permadeath… but also buggy. And while we’ve done a ton of work over the last few weeks to reduce as many bugs as we can, they can still happen and it’s no fun to lose a run due to a bug. So you can save your game at any time and load a game at any time (and quit without saving, a much requested feature). The new save system shows details of your save files so you can pick the right one.
As we get further into the development roadmap and things get even more polished, permadeath will become the defacto way to play the game, while the new save system we’ve introduced will become optional.

3. UPDATED CHARACTER CREATION & START​

The beginning of the game plays out a bit more of life and schooling, leading to many different starting situations.

4. STARTER QUESTS​

As we mentioned earlier, we’ve taken out the demo quest to be added back in later as a higher level quest. That means we need a new way to start players on their adventuring journey, so we’ve put in eight new shorter starter quests, appropriate to the starting player. This is the beginning of a much broader work on our quest system. We will continue adding quests and improving the quest system over the coming weeks. This is just a starting point.

5. EXPLORATION​

It was hard to know which hexes had resources and which ones were already explored. We now desaturate an explored hex and automatically pop an icon if you found something there. This is just the first small step to Update #3: Exploration where this will be polished and expanded upon (among other features to be added).

The hex to the north east has been explored. It’s subtle and doesn’t make the map too noisy.

6. ECONOMY REBALANCING​

Updated the costs of everything. Can’t claim it is perfectly balanced, but it is at least consistent. No more free rations!
Also updated the distribution of resources throughout the game world. And resources are available by season now, no more picking strawberries in the middle of winter! Due to a recent fix I made yesterday now there are too many resources. Oops!

7. INN’S NOW OFFER MORE THAN BEEF JERKY​

As much as I’m sure all of you love the bountiful supply of beef jerky found in every inn in every town, we’ve now got a variety of food and beverages at various price points to restore hunger and wellbeing. You can roleplay a vegetarian, vegan, and teetotaler.

8. REBALANCED ALL DYNAMIC QUEST REWARDS​

It was silly turning in 300g worth of stuff for a 75g quest reward.

9. IMPROVED ARTWORK WHEN CAMPING, SLEEPING, AND SAILING​

We’ll let you experience these ones for yourself

10. MORE NPCS PORTRAITS!​

We’ve doubled the number of heads and added more skin tones to the pool.

MORE BUG FIXES​

• Vendor stock now refreshes
• Financial House now tells you when you are too poor for their services.
• Inn gambling game now always shows your dice rolls because it is a dice game and makes no sense if you had dice rolling turned off.
• Harvest button not enabling upon finding a resource
• Better loot dungeon distribution
• Better item descriptions - you’d think this was easy (I did!) but took many many hours.
• Player log now saved in save file
• Another 65 other bug fixes I won’t detail but ultimately makes the game run better.

That’s all for now, but we’d love to hear what you will miss the most, and/or what you are most excited for in this new build!
Drop us a comment below.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Anyone actually spend the 25 dollars on this? Seems a bit rough going by some of the youtube vids.

 

[Tyranicon]

Reviews are good. I'm thinking of getting it, but the apparent bugginess is keeping me at bay. Judging by the steam page and hotfixes, devs seem very active too.

I wonder what % of the game is finished in the EA version.

 

[mondblut]

Wait, it is in early access and already got DLCs?

LMAO, peak videogaming.

 

[Late Bloomer]

Wait, it is in early access and already got DLCs?

LMAO, peak videogaming.

No DLC's in sight on the Steam page. Its price seems somewhat high. Perhaps it's a really deep, well polished EA though. Not from the looks or sounds of it so far. I'll wait a bit longer I am thinking.

 

[Mortmal]

Reviews are rating it good but there's only 35 of them , you can identify testers and the others seems to be friends and /or have really low expectations. The reviews are unhelplful undescriptive, useless most of the time . First detailed negative review i read is about gamebreaking bugs ,game being pretty much unplayable, unable to learn new spells and so on. Still no clue on how complete it is, there's a huge roadmap , pretty much like ostranaut...

 

[Raghar]

Well, and that's why you are making first game as a freeware.

 

[Infinitron]

Huh, all the videos this guy released over the years but no Early Access launch trailer.

 

[ArchAngel]

Huh, all the videos this guy released over the years but no Early Access launch trailer.

Those videos are the game.

 

[Tao]

i played a bit on a jack sparrow copy this afternoon. It's a proof of concept demo imo. It can generate a random map and all that jazz which is an amazing job but it's barebones and bugged. To be fair i read on the steam forum page that they are removing features bc of imbalanced, bugs and being incompleted in general.

The game is VERY FAR away to be anything of what was promised all those years ago.

So i don't know. I want this game to be real, it could still be real but from what i played and seen i wouldn't pay 25 bucks even if i believe they could do it, which i heavily doubt it.

The psudo 3d camara in the dungeos and the "where is Wally" mechanic is annoying as fuck btw.

Here is the roadmap so you guys can get an idea of where they are:

https://www.archmagerises.com/roadmap

 

[Tyranicon]

Jesus Christ, and I thought my games were ambitious.

I want to see this dev succeed, but every step on that roadmap beyond the first two is a massive undertaking.

Could work in a mostly text RPG. Not sure about this.

Hope it doesn't take another 10 years.

 

[Bester]

Downloading from torrents. Ambition usually comes from the dev not knowing what to cut, not knowing what is the fun core of the game. Not from actual ambition.

 

[Spectral Pontifex]

Graphics too advanced for my prestigious taste.

 

[GentlemanCthulhu]

Jesus what is this roadmap. Don't get me wrong, I would love to play a robust game with all of those features implemented, but at this rate we'll be here for another ten years at the minimum.

 

[kris]

I will give my impressions when I got more than 30 minutes in the game (I just had my first fight). I did like the world creation and seemingly you can play several mage lifes in the same world which will then develop?

Some of those things in the roadmap I already thought was in the game.

 

[Cromwell]

Some of those things in the roadmap I already thought was in the game.

dont be ridiculous, how can this much be int he game after only 7 years.

 

[Infinitron]

Some of those things in the roadmap I already thought was in the game.

dont be ridiculous, how can this much be int he game after only 7 years.

Nine years actually! We only learned about it in 2016.

 

[kris]

So I put a bit more time into it and it seems to be a very rough template for a great game. Its basically a combat simulator at this point. While I seen a couple of different quests there isnt much else to do and I get the feeling there is not much advancement for your character either.

- There are spellschools and you get expience in those.
- You use that experience to buy spells in that school ("research").
- You can only use two spells from each school in combat. (equipped spells)

Problem with spells is that you currently dont seem able to get stronger in them, you can just get more spells so in the end you cant get more powerful apart from new equipment. Only experience you get is in skills you use and more experience in the spellschools. So its an early combatdemo. I also dont see what their plan is when it comes to your characters advancement. Can you get more stamina or be able to put more power or effect in the spells. If you meet the wrong group of enemies or has built your character bad you will quickly die.

The exploration so far is pretty good, with a system for tracking monsters and entering their lairs. I can accept that all lairs/dungeons look like inside a windowless house at this point. There is a system of traps and with some loot. Although the only loot I encountered is gold. And everything is trapped.

System with the cities/villages look good so far, with easy navigation to talk with and get quests from NPCs. Even in a quest I was told to talk to the mayor, a person that didnt seem to exist.

World building so far is a disappointment as soon as you create the second world you realise it is same as the first, just with other names and tiles shuffled around.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Bester]

Where do I buy food for stocking up to go explore around the town?
How do I rest other than in the inn? The "Camp" item says it should be available in the location, but it's not.
I ran out of money doing quests and resting/eating at the inn. Game over? How is this sustainable?

Anyway, it looks like it's game over due to a bug. No way to exit this conversation:

 

[Bester]

Reloaded from way back. Then ran into this bug 3 more times, 4 in total. Then spent all my money on rations, but they never appeared in inventory and my character started starving. I like the game, but fuck this, I'm done. This isn't early access ready.

Should be playable in another year or two.

 

[Jarmaro]

I've played for a few hours, now I'm baffled at the developement process of this game. The concept for the game is solid, but the execution raises questions at every turn. Why does it feel like every system in the game was worked on for a few days then abandoned for another system, which was after few days abandonded in favour of yet another...You know. The development is all over the place. The damn Status Page is bugged from the get-go, with wierd organisation of statistics and text bugging out of the windows. If you told me it's a niche project that was developed for a year or two I wouldn't bat an eye. Instead it was supposedly developed for years. I don't criticise the lack of refinement or low-quality of it, I just don't understand why the author didn't focus on the fundamentals first.

Everything is jarring, confusing and don't mesh well together. I bought a damn Pony and I'm unsure where it went and if I actually have one, or maybe the game just bugged. The combat's the worst. In concept it's bearable, but it's janky, slow and runs as if it was 2023 AAA game, not basic image 2D with 3D models. After few encounters I cried for speed-up button, but alas, you have to bear each monster taking an eternity to make its move. Why the dungeons look like freshly abandoned castle-corridors is beyond me. Everything about dungeons is surreal, from running the cursor around every item in a room to check whether you can find anything (90% of time you just see a room full of stuff you can't touch, oh joy) to their lively furnishing. Every dungeon has a bar for fuck's sake.

I would honestly consider scraping dungeons as they are, looks like a money and effort sink without concrete benefits. Many things in the game look like that. AR's development feels akin to seeing a man wanting to build a river canal, then doing it by trying to first make a narrow 1 inch deep canal with a self-crafted shovel, hiring a dock official that just stans there confused and ordering a ship built. Everything here is backwards.

Good concept, will play a bit more, but the developer needs to fucking remember you are supposed to make a solid base first. I don't want to see an ounce of new content before the basics aren't running in servicable way.