Our Goals with Black Rose Keep
Black Rose Keep was a big release for our team. Not only is the zone extremely important to the lore of the Kingsreach continent, but we also wanted to make it a challenging and fun experience for adventurers across a wide range of levels. Each encounter needed to matter, and each fight had to be compelling. In addition, we needed to make sure that the area could support many groups of adventurers playing side-by-side, with plenty of content to go around for everyone. It wasn’t enough to just have two or three named encounters, but we needed more goals to strive for across the entire zone. Finally, we really wanted the Keep and its surroundings to feel like a real, inhabited area of our world, which meant designing our NPCs differently and considering the flow of players into and out of the various parts of the zone.
Since releasing the area, we have not only been taking in all the feedback from our players, but we have also been watching to see how they tackle the challenges in the zone, and how they interact with the different systems and mechanics contained within. While we think the area has been an overall success, we can always do better in the future, and so we wanted to talk a bit about some of the conclusions we have come to.
What We Have Learned: The Positives
We have been extremely pleased with how everyone has reacted to the extra level of detail in the zone. We have seen many positive comments about how the Keep feels like a real, lived-in place, which is exactly what we were hoping for. As we look forward to future areas, as well as to potentially polishing and updating some of our older content, we are planning to strive for the same level of visual detail in our environments, so that our world really comes to life and feels interesting and fun to explore.
It also seems like the increased number and variety of our rare and boss NPCs in the zone has been an overall success. We are seeing more groups of players making repeat trips into different areas of the zone, searching for that rare named NPC they have heard about or just exploring to see what’s there. Many of you have reacted positively to some of the surprise encounters, and the mix of different spawn mechanics has helped to keep things fresh and interesting and allowed us to help keep some things less predictable and make better use of the overall area.
What We Have Learned: Areas for Improvement
That said, we have also seen plenty of feedback from our players about how some NPCs feel too rare or their loot feels too limited, and we will be taking that feedback into account as we move forward.
Finally, watching everyone experience Black Rose Keep has reinforced for us that we still have some work we need to do on our game’s overall difficulty. We know that it is very difficult right now for groups to replace members who have to leave, or even in some cases to get back to their corpses after a battle goes poorly, and this often acts as a barrier that prevents everyone from fully enjoying the content. We want Pantheon to be a challenging game, and having difficult areas is a part of that, but we recognize some areas where we can evolve and improve our game systems as we go forward.
The data we are gathering from your experiences and feedback has been invaluable to us as we dial in the overall experience in Black Rose Keep, and the game as a whole, during Early Access. We are using this information to make informed decisions as we develop the rest of the game’s content, including our upcoming Wildbloods Point of Interest, where we are looking closely at how groups of players will be able to move into and out of the area, as well as the placement of rare encounters and named NPCs. Please feel free to drop by Discord to leave your thoughts.
Until next week, when we talk a bit more about the lore behind the Wildbloods, thanks for playing, and see you in game!