Blog: Steam, Xbox, Crossplay and The Golden Update!

Turug Durin!
Durin’s Beard!‍

With The Golden Update, crossplay, Steam and Xbox around the corner (Aug 27th) the team met on our Official Discord to discuss it all in Forge Talk Episode 6!
You can listen via YouTube and the Transcript of the Forge Talk is included below.

Transcript for Forge Talk Episode 4:

Please note: Certain parts of the transcript have been edited and may not perfectly align with the audio. Our goal is to accurately reflect the conversation while ensuring clarity for readers who don't have access to the audio. - Oisin.

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Clare Byrne: I'm Clare, I'm the community manager. You'll often see me kind of on the side line in Discord or popping into the chat every now and again. I'll also be checking for questions in the chat, and I'll do my best to pop in any relevant blog posts as we're talking as well in to the chat.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Hey everybody, I'm Jon-Paul. I'm the Game Director here at Free Range Games. I'm excited—this is our last Forge talk before the big launch, I guess.

Genie Hyatt: I guess I will go! Hi, I'm Genie, I’m the Lead Gameplay Engineer. I'm glad to be here, hi!

Bradley Fulton: Hi, I'm Bradley, I'm the Art Director.

Ryan Mattson: And I'm Ryan, Lead Level Designer, I guess designer at large on random other things in the game too.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, before we really get started, Clare, I was curious. You were telling me someone was saying that because Spartans don't exist in Middle Earth, kicking an orc off a cliff is now called a "Genie"? Is that right?'

Clare Byrne: Yes, yeah, that would be Guy who decided that that's what it's called. They only discovered they could do it because of the YouTube short we had where Genie explained how to do that. So apparently, it's called a "Genie" and also you have to shout "Genie" as they fall to make it that much more authentic.

Jon-Paul Dumont: That is high praise Genie!

Genie Hyatt: It is my favorite thing. I told my parents immediately.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Haha Nice!

Genie Hyatt: Also, for those that did not watch the short, you hold block and do an attack to do the kick. It's very similar to how you do a shield bash, but you have to do it without a shield equipped. So, if you have a single-hand weapon or if you are on a corpse run and you only have your fists, you can front kick or "genie" to make yourself some more space to keep running to your corpse chest.

Jon-Paul Dumont: It's funny, in the early prototypes of the game, it was actually really easy to do that, and we found that you never had to actually fight the Orcs; you would just kind of kick every one of them off the cliff. And we were like, "Okay, we need to make this a little less easy to do." That's awesome, a move named after you.

Genie Hyatt: All my Game Dev dreams come true.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Well we should probably get into the biggest thing which is we've done a lot of these Forge talks and every time the questions are usually you know when is it going to hit another platform when is when is something going to come out and we've always kind of gone oh I wish we could answer that wish we could answer that well this time we could answer that August 27th is when Steam and Xbox and cross play are coming, so I feel like this is probably our biggest like: this is when all this stuff is going to happen so we're pretty excited about that!

Clare Byrne: Sorry I was muted, yeah I think my favorite thing has been like: because those of people had theories of when we were going to be able to say that this was coming and we're releasing it so much earlier as well so it was it was a lovely surprise for me when I found out and then they just had to stay quiet until we could actually say it properly as well.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, nobody liked my idea of just not announcing the date and then just Shadow dropping it but you know that's probably not best practice in Game Dev anymore but that would have been fun too to see everybody's head explode.

But I know there's a couple of big questions we should just get out of the way because we've seen them a lot in the community: the Xbox is going to be on August 27th, the page isn't up for pre-order yet that's going to be happening very soon, it's a long and complicated technical thing of why it's not there but it will be there. There's not a pre-order bonus so you're not really losing out on anything by it not being up there but it'll be up in time for it to come out so it is coming out at the same time. Steam: I know a lot of people have asked: "@"hey can I copy my epic save game over to steam" and  we believed you could and then Genie I think you test edit yesterday and it looks like it works fine you can just is the hardest thing is finding where the save file is and where it needs to go in Steam and once you can do that I believe you just copy it folder to folder and it just works.

Genie Hyatt: Yeah so I took my actual saves that I play when I am playing the game like with my friends and family and moved them into our Steam folder and it works they were there the character was there the world was there so that should all work, there is Steam Cloud save will be enabled as well as Epic Cloud save so definitely back up your saves because some weird things can happen when you move saves between folders that are being backed up like that

Jon-Paul Dumont: That's a world premiere! We haven't announced that we're going to support Epic cloud save, We ARE going to have Epic Cloud save on this build something that we've been wanting to do but sorry go ahead Genie.

Genie Hyatt: So that that was it so just be careful about those things because once you get it set up it's really convenient but there can be some wonkiness when you're moving files between folders like that and then you have to find the app data folder typically where your saves are but that's a Google away.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Just to be a little a little wonky when I've done anything like this I would say open up your Epic build after the update let it update play a little bit close Epic, open up Steam make a character in a new world play that a little bit close it then back up all of your files and then do the copy but definitely back everything up just in case.

Ryan Mattson: Yeah I just unmuted to say once again just back up your files if you're moving your save files around please back them up.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yes and then that's the “you know we’re not a game with a backend or microtransactions or analytics anything like that” so because of that it's a pretty old school like “your save file is that file on your hard drive that we don't we don't keep copies of then we don’t back them up we don't have the ability to insert more gold into your account “or anything like that. So there's a lot of great reasons why it's like that but it also means that we can't from a customer support if something happens to your file we can’t do anything about it so that's one I know that one came up and we're going to talk about crossplay. Are you going to need an Epic account in order to play cross play? You do not need an Epic account: you do not need the Epic installer, you don't need any of that stuff in order to play. For full disclosure, because the game is in Unreal a lot of the networking does involve Epic related stuff because epic makes the Unreal Engine so there is some Epic networking in there in order to make crossplay work in the same way that there is Epic Graphics code in there that makes Unreal work so there is some epic stuff in there but you do not need an epic copy you don't need the Epic installer you don't need an Epic account you won't have to type in a user name or a password or anything in order to play crossplay. You should be able to just play. Basically, if you've been playing in multiplayer where you host a game get a code, now the difference is you could just give your code to your friend on PS5 or on Steam or on Xbox and they'll be able to join your game.

Let's see and I think there was one other question hosting numbers: similar to what has always been true on Epic and on PlayStation 5 the versions of the game, both Epic and Steam host can host up to eight players of any type on any platform. The console games can only host up to four, there’s technical reasons for that and some other reasons but so PlayStation 5if you're hosting even if it's on crossplay you're going to be capped at four same thing for Xbox you'll be capped at four. But as usual with things like crossplay, if you've got a friend with a beefy PC, have them host that's always going to be a little bit better. So, Clare were those the big "just get them out of the way" questions?

Clare Byrne: Yeah, I think that was most of the big stuff.  I just saw one question there for a lot of the new stuff, I know you were saying start up Epic before you move to Steam which makes a lot of sense, but for a lot of the new items I know you mentioned it in the last forge talks, but just remind us like do you need new world for a lot of the new stuff that's coming as well. Ryan, that's probably a good question for you. It's kind of a mix. Some of the things are going to be new worlds there's some new secret areas to find. Those are going to need new worlds, but they are in campaign and sandbox the things like a box and the books and scrolls from those are going to be in existing worlds. Those will just show up. Is that right Ryan?

Ryan Mattson: That's right, yep! Just to be inside baseball about it, if your world is already generated you won't get new areas that Bradley and I have been working on, but loot drops and things out of containers and such you can get. So yeah, absolutely get Abakhs in your existing worlds.

Clare Byrne: Awesome, I just actually I spotted a good question from Guy there, which actually I think we were chatting amongst ourselves about over the past few days, asking on PS5 when I play with others they see my PSN name on PC I see other players see their dwarf character names what will happen with crossplay when it comes to names?

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, I'm really happy you asked that because one of my personal pet peeves was seeing the PSN name and not the dwarf name. Really kind of took me out of being in Moria on PS5 with this update, there's an option in the settings where you can toggle if you want to see the PSN name or you'd rather see the custom dwarf name. I think you should have the custom dwarf name. We're also– I know this was a big question– we're going to enable you to rename your waypoints and custom name your waypoints which is big because PS5 was sort of using default names and you couldn't actually edit any text So those are–they might feel minor– but big quality of life changes forPS5 players. So what you'll do is you'll go into your gameplay settings when you launch the update and there you'll see two new settings which use custom Waypoint names and display custom dwarf names and once you set those to the correct setting it will work a lot like the PC games.

Genie Hyatt: I think you made John Paul really happy asking that question, he cared a lot about that!

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah we had a lot of meetings where like: "do we really want to do that if Sony doesn't like it" and we did it anyway so I'm very happy about that. I always hated seeing like PSN blah blah blah instead of um... one thing that we did– oh actually that is anew thing– we probably should put somewhere: part of getting crossplay approved was adding a profanity filter when you are in network so you'll always be able to see your custom text no matter what but if there is something that fails the profanity filter your friends play we’ll see it asterisked out which could be a little bit of a bummer but we weren’t able to get an exception for that so there and that that means sadly we're gonna have to pour one out we had to remove Groin as a name in the dwarf Creator G-R, that's how you pronounce it that's where the that's what the accent on the "I" means "Grow-in" but unfortunately it didn’t matter what we did we could not get it to pass Sony and Microsoft’s profanity filters so I believe if your if your dwarf is named Groin it will stay there but you know it's funny it's kind of an conundrum when you pronounce it with the accent we should move on I I've talked myself into a corner here so Clare can we change the subject...

Clare Byrne: Yes, we absolutely can haha, I suppose go we’ve kind of like mixed things up a little bit do you want to start with the going through one of the blogs because we talked about the date and Xbox and a bit about crossplay well.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Maybe we hit just a little bit more crossplay I want to spend a little more time on this because crossplay was I would say from one of the there's a term we used to use on some of my old games of like a big beat or a bold beat the thing that you go what's going to what’s going to really be a big difference and obviously there's a lot of things that we want to do and want to get to like more content and Elder gameplay, but we kind of asked ourselves what was the thing that was keep that would really add a lot of joy to everybody that played the game and ultimately we decided it was crossplay. We had wanted it at launch wasn’t really you know all Game Dev is kind of having to make choices and but crossplay was the thing that we feltlike coming into the beginning of this year was the Bold beat we really wanted and so you know I just want to, you know Genie is the engineer here although there's multiple other Engineers that have been on working on it throughout this year just want a little pat on the back because crossplay is not a simple thing to add to a game after it launches so Genie great job on behalf of all the engineers and getting that going I think everyone's going to really enjoy it because it kind of just works it’s pretty neat you don't have to jump through hoops you don't have to log into epic you don't have to suddenly have a Moria account or anything like that you just put in the code like normal and suddenly other players are there so I don’t know Genie if you want to talk a little bit about the making of crossplay

Genie Hyatt: I mean the making of it's not all that interesting I think you basically said it it's a lot harder than it sounds it has a lot of potential for things to go terribly wrong but we had a team that really wanted it and worked really hard and did an amazing job and I think itwas something we all wanted and we're all really excited about it. Because we all have friends that don't have the same platforms that we have and our game is a lot of fun to play with friends, so yeah just shout out to the other Engineers they did a really great job.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah it's going to be great because know we all have friends that I mean we just saw so often players in Discordtalk about: man I really want to play with ... usually it was like siblings or family members I really want to play with my brother but he's got an Xbox and kind of a bummer that I can't and we all have friends like Ryan who only play on Steam and you're like oh okay finally I can play with like I can play a game with Ryan now because he will only play on Steam thanks Ryan.

Ryan Mattson: You're welcome.

Jon-Paul Dumont: So yeah Clare, were there any other crossplay questions we should hit before we go? But it's yeah I guess like I want to talk more about it because it was such a big deal but I think about it’s like it doesn't like it's not like the Xbox dwarves glow green or anything like that it's just it just kind of works

Genie Hyatt: yeah I guess the only the only interesting part is when you have to test it and you have to have like all of the machines running all at the same time and we don't have a very large team so there would be times when there was like more machines than people so you have to run back and forth between the controllers to it work

Jon-Paul Dumont: yeah, I think I had like a PS5 and an Xbox and then my PC running all the like trying to hold the controllers.

Genie Hyatt: but you need two PCS because you gotta have Epic and you gotta have Steam.

Ryan Mattson: You can warm your office that way that sounds like a lot of heat being generated.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Oh man yeah I when I moved into this house I made the mistake of putting the PS5 and my Xbox both behind a cabinetand was playing and realized that it was like 300° or something and was like oh I need to I need to vent this. Cool okay! well I mean if that's that let's talk let’s move on let's talk about so I want to jump into you know we launchedthe1.2 update I think there were a couple of questions about what is the Golden Update The Golden Update is what we're calling 1.3 which is the one coming out August 27th and that's mostly because we did a lot of gold stuff so there there's a lot of gold so maybe we should talk about the blog if you haven’t seen it guilty pleasure and you just talking about like we did a couple of things this partly came out of an in joke that we had some we accidentally shipped with gold ingots in the game at one point but there was nothing to do with them because we hadn't finished some of the art for the gold and so this update we were like well we're if you want to use gold ingots we're going to give you reasons to use gold ingots.

So, Ryan, why don't you and I just talk about some of the things in that blog post Claire posted in there so just starting with that lead image at the top .

This is probably one of the most requested things that we’ve gotten. One of the things that we were excited which is the ability to shove the treasure piles together.

Ryan Mattson: That's huge Bradley actually solved that problem for us which was good I think I went in and did the work to make it work but it was you know silly things in game development where it's not so hard no so easy to do things until somebody points out a novel way of doing it and then it's very easy, and you can mint coins and there's a gigantic treasurepile that we added to I can't remember what we're calling that one specifically.

Jon-Paul Dumont: I hope I named it something cool.

Ryan Mattson: Treasure Trove maybe?

Jon-Paul Dumont: Treasure Horde?

Ryan Mattson: Anyway, it's bigger it's better you can build treasure everywhere so that's yeah that was the that was the lead image and it was really fun to get that in

Jon-Paul Dumont: Bradley, want to talk a little bit about behind the scenes on that? I know it wasn't a super complicated thing but it was still a big change.

Bradley Fulton: Well the fantasy that we always had in mind when you know we were talking about just even the idea of dwarves you know wanting to have a space in their homes that was dedicated just to the storage and display of treasure, was to have that like the swimming pool you know that you're diving into and you know: at launch, we got the feature functional but it didn't quite deliver the emotion

Jon-Paul Dumont:  I can’t wait to see how people change their Mega bases up a little bit in order to make it really look big.

Yeah, that's going to be great. Yeah there's probably a lot of tricks now that you know it's funny so we (jumping around a little bit)but like when we did the building Awards and then I know Ryan one of the things that you were doing with sandbox and as we were trying to iterate on the building snapping system we got save games from some of our Elder players and we were able to jump in and walkaround in it and looking at some of the little tricks that people use in order to make things look cool so I'm excited to see what some of our hardcore builders are going to do in order to now that they've got the ability to make kind of a big Smaug style treasure room

Clare Byrne: I feel there's a gold Build Challenge in our not too distant future

Jon-Paul Dumont: Oh absolutely especially after those base build videos that we saw from people yeah it's gonna be great.

Well the next thing in in this blog is talking about we wanted you to not just with the treasure piles but we felt like we wanted some build options that were a little more gold and some of that was inspired by there’s just parts in the game there there's ancient architecture parts of the game that are a little more guilted than you can build so we added the checkerboard floor with gold and then the gold plated walls

Ryan Mattson: And there's several variations there too. There's a lot of walls to build now which is great. A lot of gold walls.

How many did we add Bradley we added a few variations of of a normal size wall I think a couple of variations of a thin wall

Bradley Fulton: Yeah, and then the floors that you can see on the screen. I think it was also really great because it gave us an opportunity to take some of the you know the Dwarven iconography like thefigures that we have and offer them as building Parts you know so you really feel like you're dressing up you're, whatever you decided to be a palace or adisco floor or whatever you know that that it feels in character.

Jon-Paul Dumont: And these will unlock... if you’re an elder player they will unlock when you open up the game  so these will be in in original or previous saves as well you don't need a new world to unlock these, and then the last thing is the gold black and white armor variants. These were we you know we always we always had this design thinking which is you play a lot of these games and you end up like towards the end of the game and everyone's kind of wearing the same one armor set and we knew obviously for the game mechanics we needed to have a endgame armor set that you really wanted to work towards and build but we still wanted you to be able tohave.. if you're playing with a bunch of friends where all eight dwarfs could look different if you wanted and that was why we did things like The Shield and the helmets having a lot of variety but capping out their abilities or their power  and so we knew we also wanted to take some of our higher level armor sets and give you even more options or ways to do them so we have the tinting but these were really inspired by I they were really inspired by how much I loved collecting the white black and gold variants of the outfits in a game called Ghost of Tsushima, that one was just super fun like making things all white making things all black was always kind of neat for me and so when Bradley and I were talking about how could we do this we felt like it was it was not that hard to go in and make some of these.

So you can see in the blog the Gold version the Black Version and I think my favorite is the White Version because it's got so much contrast with the darkness of the world, I don't know if Bradley you want totalk about those or Ryan you worked with these a lot too

Bradley Fulton: Well, it's just cool right? like with the tinting system as it works it was a way of having that kind of color coordination but with this you know we're affecting more than just you do and tinting so it it's just a really awesome style that I'm also excited

Ryan Mattson: yeah, there's a lot of different sets that we added the black white and gold variations to.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, we haven't really listed them have we? We've only shown a couple of examples.

Ryan Mattson: I think we've shown a couple, I feel like there's at least four different sets, maybe four.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Do you have the list do we have the list somewhere I bet one of us could pull that up.

Ryan Mattson: Yeah, the way that you where is it I’ve got it right here somewhere

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, and I see you guys ask these are all cosmetic,  so these don't change the power level and they won't be in the tints you actually have to make them because they've got a slightly different recipe mostly for if you just want to really show off.

Yeah, The sets that we have you can do all those variations on the Erabor set, on the Belagost Set, the Khazad Army set, Durin's set and the Nogrod set.

That's a lot of good stuff, and the way that you will be be able to unlock them is as soon as you have crafted a full set of any of those arms then you'll unlock those variations that you can build and yeah, they do have different recipes to them.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah and the Nogrod set I think the color variations of Nogrod set might be a week or two after the launch we’re planning on another quick patch in September, just a couple little bugs that didn’tquite quite make the deadline this time so there'll be a small patch in September I think that will end up having the Nogrod Set.

Ryan Mattson: That's correct.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, the Nograd set looks really cool. I'm excited about that.

Yeah, I think that's it for the guilty pleasure blog. Does anybody want to throw anything else on that one before we move on maybe talk about the sandbox blog?

Yeah, let's jump into sandbox so Ryan you know this was kind of your area. We launched in 1.2 the sort of Alpha version of sandbox and then got a lot of really good feedback from the community played it ourselves and we made we made some big decisions there and made some.... you know we felt like we left room for we might do a whole lot of changes but we ended up doing more changes on the margin and some improvements here and there if you could talk a little bit about it and of course I keep forgetting sandbox has hasn't been on PlayStation 5 so this will be the first time it's on so that's going to be pretty exciting I think for everybody, but Ryan talk a little bit about what did we learn from Alpha that we put into play for this one.

Ryan Mattson: There were a few big things that we learned not big like foundational, we didn't throw anything out we just we did just iterate and tweak what was there in order to make it work a lot better but we did some improvements on the world layout side so a couple of problems that happened in a few different areas both early mid and late game were the world was generating in a way that was making it really hard to progress because you’d have to go often times you'd have to go through areas that were much more difficult than you could handle that was never the intention. We wanted a difficulty ramp but we didn't never want to put a really a difficulty wall in front of you that you weren't going to be able to handle so we did some World Generation improvements to make that better I think the community found a few of those I think internally one of our Engineers found one so that was really good to have a lot of people playing and play testing and give you feedback on that. We added a lot of these new items too to make the unlock ramp and the gameplay ramp work more work better and feel more like the ramp the well tuned and crafted ramp that you had in the campaign so there's more stuff to unlock different areas that you unlock and I think something that's come up for people and it's just a it's an artifact of the way that we change the game around a little bit is just some of the unlocks and some of the ways that you progress in the sandbox mode are different than you would experience in campaign.

That's caused a little confusion but hopefully the community can help each other figure out what those things are.

What else did we do?

Jon-Paul Dumont: We did a lot of I know Bradley did they add the new version like we added more in small environments like the Elven areas yeah Bradley you want to kind of go through? and then there's one thing that's more campaign than sandbox that I want to hit at the end but Brad if you want to talk about maybe some of the things that you did to improve the environments.

Bradley Fulton: Yeah, we really had like two goals: one was to just improve the way the world generates because of you know certain kind of requirements for that under the hood just in increasing the number of connections like the ways that these spaces could to each other. So that meant making that meant making some changes to existing environments and also involved making some more  tighter spaces and some more variety so like the Elven quarter has got a little bit more variation to it now there's some secret areas in the urban areas and a few locations there that I'm looking forward to and just generally trying to increase the density of nooks and crannies and like little spaces out of the way or you what's down this little oh there's actually a door down here! and then that door leads to a whole another space then that space connects to another area of the map. So that just exploration is a little bit there's just a generally a sense of surprise

Jon-Paul Dumont: yeah, and then there's a couple things that we learned from sandbox that we pulled back into campaign, if I’m remembering right Ryan is this this is the update that we're adding some of those stairs from sandbox are going to end up in campaign?

Ryan Mattson: Yes, that's correct.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, because that wasn't in1.2that's a new thing for this one right?

Ryan Mattson: I believe that's correct, I'm sort of beginning to lose track of exactly what's been released but I think we did that update after 1.2 came out to make sure that campaign was getting some of the improved navigation from those stairways yeah.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yes so with the (I'm going to dance around this because I don't want to be spoilers) but the very last area of the game is one of our most like one of our one of one of two most questioned like “I don't know how to get through this area" and part of that was there was a couple of particular places that that like a couple of environments that repeated in a way we didn't really like that made vertical traversal really confusing and so this will be for new campaign worlds after this update that area at the end we've ripped out and put a set of stairs in there so it should be a lot more straightforward how the vertical traversal works at the very end of the game.

So I hopefully I think I'm dancing around on the spoilery stuff so for those of you who've beaten the game you probably know what I’m talking about the other one in case you're wondering is find trying to find the first OrcTown that's the one that we're like every that I think it hurts Ryan and I every time we see someone post that we're like; "it's hard to find town"

Ryan Mattson: Soul destroying!

Jon-Paul Dumont: so the stair the stairs and campaign that’s going to be new and then the other one that I'm really excited about is the the there is a basically let me see if I can say this so  basically at some point in the game you probably know if you haven't played it you do get to the big city of Dwarrowdelf and part of that is the area that the Balrog destroyed and when we launched last year for a bunch of reasons we basically...were playing it afterwards and we were feeling like "hey you know I feel like this doesn’t really tell that story" the environment art doesn't tell the story the way that we wanted it to and so with this update you know Bradley you went through and really made it feel more like a destroyed city than you know sort of collapsed caves

Bradley Fulton: Yeah, we made a whole new set of assets to populate so you have buildings that you know have been truly demolished and can also be rebuilt.

Jon-Paul Dumont: you're cutting out a little bit, go ahead.

Ryan Mattson: that update will serve both new worlds in campaign and new worlds in sandbox as well so everybody who creates a new place to play gets the update to that area which is really cool and it does look a lot better and it feels so much more so much closer to the direction that we wanted it to be I love it, it's great !

Bradley Fulton: The other thing that's cool about it this for the real hardcore Builders: it's also the first time that we're putting a large Adamant walls in the world so the buildings in that space are built using a different subset of the parts so there's just a different sort of style building those I think.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Ryan, was there anything else in sort of sandbox or environment changes that's worth bringing up that we haven’t talked about yet?

Ryan Mattson: I think we touched on all of them from my notes, I don't see anything more.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Then the other thing I don't think we’ve talked about in a forge talk (and this is in the behold my stuff blog) so one of the things that was always kind of on my list in in terms of, if you think about the last year of our road map since launch some of it was fixing things that were broken. Crossplay was a huge one. Adding in the non linearity of sandbox so that players that that wanted to play the game again had more of a survival experience but one that was always on my list was I felt like there was a little bit to the core gameplay Loop that felt a little more shallow than I liked and that was that there’s a lot to explore in Moria but there wasn't always something around every corner and so that was something Ryan and I really spent a lot of time trying to figure out how do we make it feel like you want to go in every building and scavenge and that when you're going down the crystal descent there’s going to be things behind each dirt plug and so that was one where we really sat down and said well what are the things that what are things that we could distribute throughout the world that would be fun that you would be excited to go and find. And one of the things we also wanted to do is how do I feel like I don't have to break every single old crate and that I can kind of quickly walk into a building scan it and go up: "yep there's something I want there" and so that’s where we decided to add in new breakable containers and vases that you can spot a little easier and go ah okay I bet that's going to have some food in it that one over there with a gold Edge that's probably going to have some good crafting materials in it so that was one big thing just make it when you go into a building it's a little quicker to kind of triage it do I need to break everything in here or can I just get what I need and go.

Ryan Mattson: Yeah, it should be easier to find the different values of things you'll start to recognize and learn the language of what those containers have which is nice. I think it changes it. We went back to play some live game recently when investigating some bugs and I wasn’t seeing those of course cuz they're not in there yet and I was like oh wow these added a lot to it feels really different now in the in the in the new update so it's great.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, and we also just felt like we needed more things to find, and so we invented two new things: one is the books and the Scrolls so there are decorative bookshelves from the last update, those aren’t going away you can still kind of do them but there's a much bigger more grand bookshelf and scroll shelf and when you fill when you know as you’re exploring you will find these build lore tomes and scrolls and you can bring them back and you can add them to the shelf and as you fill the Shelf up you can study it and give yourself a buff and then when you have that buff going there is a kind of dice roll chance that every time you build something it will be totally free and it just won't deduct the ingredients from your inventory and so that's that gives you something to go and collect and also gives you something we really struggled with how do we buff people that just want to build and so that's where we landed.

Ryan Mattson: That and there's the new dinner buff that you get for restoration too right so that kind of those things those compliment each other.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, the let them cook blog talks a lot about that we you know we felt like with meals that was another thing is we wanted you to kind of want to go find food ingredients. Not just make meat you know roast meat over and over again, and so we took the meals, and we broke them up into breakfast, lunch and dinner and each one has a different buff and yeah one of those Buffs the dinner buff I believe is a buff to your hammer in restoration. So, if you're going to go restore a lot of stuff you probably want to do it at dinner time because it makes your radius better and I think it means you don't use stamina while restoring.

Ryan Mattson: Genie, I think you asked for that.

Genie Hyatt: Yes, it's amazing! I used to complain about how much stamina trying to restore my base used and now there's a dinner buff and so after you finish adventuring, you go home and you eat your dinner and then you just restore everything in sight until the buff runs out which when I was doing it in the play test was exactly as long as it took to break my hammer so I spent about 20 minutes fixing stuff and then the buff ran out right as my hammer broke and it was time for bed and it was perfect!

So, I highly recommend the dinner buff.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, that's part of Genie and my goal of Trojan Horsing a totally cozy game into our a Survival game.

Ryan Mattson: Game except when the except when the sieges happen you're in the middle of your restoration and then they come and they just start wrecking shop again

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, yeah having Shadow Orcs show up that's probably one of the hardest things, probably the hardest things in sandbox is that the Orcs that Siege you tend to be from the hardest area you've gotten to so you can you can get pretty wrecked in sandbox, but I find the trick is to take the coward's way out let them kill you and just wait and then eventually you just get all your materials back and rebuild. So, it's like they’re just helping you on demo day to remodel your base!

And then the last thing on the new stuff to collect is the Abakhs and that's where you know we had talked about how we didn't want to mess with the power curve too much but we felt like we wanted you to find something that you go oh that's pretty neat I like these and so Orcs drop Orcs will drop these broken versions that you can recraft and repair but you'll also find just scavenging out in the world you'll find these things and there's Ryan there’s six of them is that right?

Ryan Mattson: Yeah, there are eight, there's eight!

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah oh eight then so I think my favorite is really early in the game you can scavenge the ones that makes sprinting free and not cost stamina especially in sandbox you want to hoard those and you go I need to get back to my base and you crush a couple of those and manage to Sprint all the way back to your base but there's ones that they're solving a couple of problems we wanted to there's a few things that we knew were just a little bit painful and that we wanted to give you away beyond just the Brew.

If you think about the Brew for poison and Shadow are more preventative you know you might bring a keg with you might bring a brew skin with you but they tend to be I think I'm going to get poisoned let me bring this with me these We There are Abakhs that instantly cure all your poison and instantly cure all of your shadow and those were mostly because we just found how often you could get Shadow poisoned or regular poisoned and not you might just be kind of caught without any way and you just have to sit here and watch your health drop and so this way you can always carry a couple of those in your inventory and have a way to solve that but then we also wanted to give you like things that just kind of give you small little boosts if you're about to go into a hard fight you know each one of them tends to only last like 10/20seconds they're pretty short so they're not like an overall like huge permanent buff but if you're about to take on an Orc camp and you feel a little underpowered  you can use the warding Abakh to give you a little more defence or use the power Abakh to give you a little bit more attack power and just give you that little oomph to get over that that challenge

Ryan Mattson: I remember when we were implementing these and tuning them originally Jon-Paul we were playing in a game together and got ourselves into a little bit of trouble in I think the orc Town yeah and we both had some of those Abakh.

I think we had the Boost and the power and the warding. Used them; got ourselves out of trouble, felt really proud and then I think we ran into one more orc and he killed us and was like okay we deserve that we were a little we were too cocky so.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Well in kind of solves this one part of the core gameplay Loop where when you go into a new dangerous area you're really underpowered until you get the new armor and the weapons and that can take a while so it feels like you kind of have to sneak around and now if you have a couple of these you can actually kind of level yourself up a little bit to not be quite so vulnerable in that in that time period and so all of those taking together the finding of the Abakhs, the need to think about hey I need specific ingredients so I can make breakfast or lunch or dinner so now the different food ingredients out there are a little bit more valuable to go out and hunt and then the new containers and then the books and the scrolls. There's a lot more things to find every time you go.

Oh and in new worlds we added a Musnikhan into the mines so there's figurines to collect in the mines too because that that was missing, so just hopefully now a lot more things to go and find and collect and bring back to your base and use so I think that will give just a little more density to the exploration reward gameplay.

Ryan Mattson: The rewards you get from that from finding all the figurines in the mines are really cool, I'm not going to say what they are, we can keep something secret, but those rewards are fun.

Jon-Paul Dumont: oh, now I want to go look at them because I don't remember what they are.

Ryan Mattson: You don't remember what they are, yeah?

Jon-Paul Dumont: Don't tell me don't tell me!

Ryan Mattson: I'm not going to; you have to play!

Jon-Paul Dumont: It's Area 51 here!

Okay so let's see, and then I think we should hit the Build Awards. So we're won't go through the actual Awards here but if you haven't seen the video where Ryan, Ty and I go through a lot of the entries. Just want to thank everybody in the community, go to the challenge thread here in Discord and just look through people's builds I mean a couple of people are here Axebeard, Mirak, Guy.

Clare, who else is here that was in the awards or entered some really awesome ones?

Clare Byrne: well Sleeper Agent of course

Jon-Paul Dumont: And Sleeper Agent yeah just incredible builds in there, go take a look it's just kind of inspiring you know as developers we think we're giving some creative ability here and then we see people do stuff and we're like is sort of mind-blowing what you guys did, but definitely go look at that video and go into the thread and take a look at some of the winners in there they're pretty incredible stories here yes.

Yeah, I don't know Ryan or Bradley: anything on the build awards, just like how kind of incredible some of the big mega bases are.

Ryan Mattson: I feel like I was very repetitive in the video just every time seeing something new and being like "wow this is very cool I would not have imagined doing this". The creativity that people have with the building system and finding different places to build was awesome to see so I keep saying it but yeah, it's always nice to see people’s bases I'm excited with new players coming in with steam and Xbox to see all the new fun things they're going to build too

Bradley Fulton: Yeah, you guys are talking this up I got to go check it out I was actually out of town when we did this so I’m really excited to see what players have done.

Jon-Paul Dumont: That's right oh it's going to blow your mind Bradley, I forgot where you were taking a break. Yeah I think probably in terms of who created the most content Mirak I gotta call out because it's like I mean seven eight nine 10 videos of like multi-level fortress pretty cool and you know calling out sleeper agent I think the one that that we called the it was we debated whether we should call one the best build cuz they were all really incredible but I think the one that just kind of took our Breath Away was the stairway Fortress in the crystal descent mainly because we really didn't think you could do that, I think Ryan you right didn’t you go back and look and go like wait I don't I don't think how do you can you even build in this area. But the fact that you did it and made stairs there is or was really cool.

Ryan Mattson: Well that's one that's also one of the areas that is probably most difficult to build in because it's so organic and in order to make the Descent work well we had to be a lot more free with how were placing meshes and building that area out so it's just really it's not grit and it's that would make it really frustrating to build in and so there the amount of patience necessary to actually go in and do that build is very impressive.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Anything off grid is very hard to work with. So, thanks to everybody that put the time into those very cool to see those and let's see getting close to the hour so we should do questions and I think that was most of the stuff Claire we wanted to talk about right?

Clare Byrne: yep I think you kind of hit everything there for the most part I suppose there's some questions about things like I know we've talked about the gold stuff that's coming in that sort of thing but is there any additional buildable items or materials that players can use in this update I know there's like people are looking for things like the whitestone and then there was some building blocks that I think we're removed at one stage that they were hoping might be added back in is there any plans even if they’re not in this update for in like continuing to iterate on buildable items for people?

Jon-Paul Dumont: I think this update most of the build stuff is the gold stuff. I think we've released most of the architecture pieces there are I think a few here and there that are out there, but we can keep looking into it I mean if there's specific ones that that people are really wishing to have. You know toss those into a suggestion and we'll we’ll figure out if we can get those out there.

Bradley Fulton: Yeah, I do want to mention since it’s on topic that we did also spend a significant amount of time overhauling how some of the pieces snap. There is a combination of bug fixing and just taking amore direct approach but stairs should be a lot easier to work with now some of the walls and columns should be a lot easier to work with now and a lot more predictable and I think some really core pieces a smaller parts of the walls it really touches on a number parts of the building set so for the kind of casual builders trying to build a base they going to be certain things they can do that'll be just a lot easier very happy about and for the really hardcore builders I think it might even open up new possibilities.

Clare Byrne: Yeah I think I think there's going to be a lot of really fun like people either well I know for some of the major builds might just be improvements but there might be some builds and new bigger cooler bases as well as cozy corners for people as well to set up in Moria.

Other questions? oh there any updates to the map in this update? I know some people were asking about a different way to display criticality. That sort of thing.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah not in this update, it is on our list you we always keep a running list of running list of things that we want to get to and improve the map the map we took that stab at it when we released Xbox to make it a little easier on the eyes the verticality part is one we haven't we have on the list but we haven't done anything about yet.

Clare Byrne: oh Durin_Deathless is just asking there: will there be any exclusive stuff on Steam, and about will there be voice chat included in future builds?

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, no voice chat and that’s pretty I think, (Ryan you could correct me_ pretty typical now is that Discord is kind of one on voice chat and you can do them on the consoles now so we won’t have voice chat we're relying on y'all using other ways to do that. Then exclusive stuff: no actually they there isn't any exclusive well at least in the game there isn't any exclusive stuff and partly that's crossplay I mean we want to make sure everybody no matter what platform gets to play with with all the cool stuff steam will have we haven't announced that yet we are working on at some point in the future an original soundtrack and an art collection that will most likely go on Steam. The original soundtrack so far is sounding pretty cool but can't talk about when on that one yet.

Clare Byrne: Yeah, that's a that's a watch this space for more information there as we get bits and pieces together for that.

This is like the update we're talking about now we've kind of covered most of the stuff that's in there I know there's loads of questions where people are asking about future updates and the NPCs and fully cleaning up moria, like removing those dirt piles and everything which I know is tricky because I think Bradley has answered that before it's it depends on how the dirt piles are put in.

Jon-Paul Dumont: yeah, I feel like we should save the chat because so many of the questions is another way of the community indicating what on the list should be higher priority.

Clare Byrne: Yeah, that's what I'm thinking because Iwas going to say like there's so much there and I know you want to obviously get this update out first this is an absolutely huge one but we'll obviously be talking. Keep sending us feedback and all of that stuff because anything that’s a question there that's not this update can become a feedback and suggestion for the team to consider for the future as well.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, so we should probably work, coming right up on the hour  so I think we should thank everybody for coming and really excited for everybody to see and play the new update ,and play with each other and we're hoping in the next you know between now and (it's less than two weeks now) between now and Tuesday the 27th we're gonna have some more videos showing some stuff off and some hopefully some live streaming and a couple of other ways you can kind of get eyes on things ahead of the update but yeah be ready to grab a build on on August 27th and jump in and play.

Clare Byrne: Yeah, keep an eye on the announcements channel and also Dev updates as well because if there is going to be a livestream I'll do my best to give you as much notice as possible if you want to join in live as well yeah and watch yeah I think that's everything

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah thank you everyone

Ryan Mattson: Thank you everybody

Clare Byrne: The Dev team for joining us as well asalways

Ryan Mattson: Well thank you Clare.

Genie Hyatt: Thank you.

Multiple People: Thanks Clare!

Clare Byrne: Oh guys!

Jon-Paul Dumont: all right we'll see everybody around Discord have a good weekend

Clare Byrne: Have a great weekend everybody.

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