Hey guys, with our upcoming development focus being around progression and the launch of our Kickstarter I wanted to talk about our upcoming plans and philosophy around how we expect acquiring cards and other goodies will work.
Progression - How It Works
First, at some point in the near future well begin testing actual account progression. This means players will no longer have full access to every card, and will begin to acquire cards persistently for their account.
The long-term plan is for there to be three different ways youll be able to earn cards and other rewards:
Vaults
The first way is by fully powering a Vault on your Houses Shardfall. When the Vault is fully powered, youll be able to open it to gain rewards. The amount / quality of these rewards scales with your contribution tuned such that everyone participating can get the best reward tier as long as they do their fair share.
For the Alpha, well be starting by only dropping Boxes (explained below), specific cards, and In-Game Currency (Ill refer to this as Earned Currency or EC onwards) from the Vault in various amounts. As we march towards Beta and Release, we want to expand what is on the drop table to include other collectibles, such as customizable emotes, color palettes for your armies, and other fun goodies.
Twitch Events
The second way to get loot is by participating in Twitch Events. When one of these events is completed, rewards are immediately given to the streamer and the viewers who participated. Nice and simple.
Streamer Reputation
The third way is reputation, which is not in the game currently, and isnt coming super soon, but is something on our roadmap that we want to get to before full release. The plan here is for there to be a long-term progression axis with streamers that encourages you to go check out, and then continue to interact with, a variety of streamers both big and small.
Streamers will be able to set custom rewards at various reputation thresholds. By participating in the Twitch Events on that streamers Shard youll not only earn the immediate rewards for doing so, but youll also earn reputation with that streamer. Play with that streamer enough, and youll be able to unlock their long-term rewards. Maybe a specific streamer has a legendary card that you really want? Earn enough reputation with them, and youll unlock it!
Progression - Development Roadmap
Well be rolling out the progression features over several patches throughout the next month or so. Heres our current plan for how this feature rollout will look, so that you all know what to expect.
Vault Opening the first bit well be getting in the game to test will be the ability to open a Vault and get rewards from it, this allows us to test our inventory backend and begin persistently letting people accrue content onto their account. While youll be getting rewards at this stage, you wont be able to actually do anything with them yet, and as a result youll still have access to every card in the game.
End of Game Rewards We need the infrastructure to reward things immediately after games, and present this to the player. This will be used for things like rewarding faction starter content after the prologue missions.
Barracks Update + Card Details The barracks will be getting a facelift in support of being able to view the details of a specific card, this will include a nice big 3D model viewer, lore and gameplay bits, being able to play their VO lines, and be able to unlock (craft) that unit directly via earned currency.
Box Inventory + Store This is where youll be able to purchase boxes with real money, as well as unlock them with earned currency. Itll also be the area where youll open boxes that youve acquired just by playing the game. Once this is online, the full player loop should be playable, and well begin testing actual progression, meaning that at this point players will no longer have every card for free and will start unlocking them over time.
Monetization and Boxes
Weve opted to do something a little different from the traditional pack model a lot of card based games use, and right now were colloquially calling our version simply boxes, which asks the question, whats a box?
When you open a box, it will randomly roll a rarity (common, rare, epic, or legendary). Itll then present you with three different cards of that rarity, and you get to choose one to keep.
Why not just traditional packs? When youre really trying to get that one specific legendary, or need a couple specific rare or epic cards to make a deck work, trying to get them out of a regular pack can be frustrating since if you are lucky enough to roll the rarity of thing you want, you need to be super lucky to actually get the specific card you want. Our hope here is that this model lets people get their targeted cards more quickly and consistently, while retaining the excitement of not knowing exactly what itll contain.
At Spiritwalk its really important to us that the game feels generous. Our plan is to drop a lot of boxes very frequently by just playing the game (via opening vaults and playing with streamers) and to make them much cheaper than a traditional pack would be, since while theyre much more targeted, youre still only getting one card from them at a time.
Hopefully this gives a good primer on where were going over the next month or two its going to be an exciting time. Thank you guys SO MUCH for being such an incredible community! Having so many people who are willing to go on this journey with us at this early stage is truly humbling.
