TMR – Dev Blog #2

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1155120/The_Magicians_Research/

Dev Blog #2

We continue to make a ton of improvements and balancing changes to the game. We want to have still quite a polished experience even though we’re launching into Early Access.

One aspect I’m particularly happy with myself is that we’re moving into more story elements and almost a more RP setup for the windows and introductions. We even updated the Steam store page with a whole new text set that matches it.

The most major change in this notice is the removal of the Equipment System. Don’t worry though, we’ll be replacing it with two new systems instead!

The mages came to us and explained that they don’t care about armor, they’re mages, and they really don’t want to be lugging all this heavy armor around. So after much negotiations with the mages we’ve decided to take out the armor system.

In reality what it was providing was another source of permanent stat gain which you already have several in the game so far. We went through several iterations and types of the armor system from crafting, to random drops, to purchasing, to combining to level up etc, but none really complimented the current systems and feeling of what you needed in the game. For a game of this scale the gear itself was going to have to rise at such a minute ratio that it seemed unrewarding and we really didn’t want that for you guys.

Instead we’re replacing the system with two new systems. One is already in the game now for launch, the other might not make it in until shortly after launch. I’ll talk about both of them though so you know what you have to look forward to.

First is the Arcanist. Instead of just a permanent set of endless choice of stats from an arbitrary gear system, here, you’ll apply Arcane Scrap to the Arcanist and at benchmarks he’ll give you rewards. These rewards will be for other systems in the game. This will provide you with a combination of short term and long term gains that should feel more fun and goal oriented over what the gear system was doing.

At the end of each bar you get a bonus extra reward and every ten bars you’ll get a big extra reward (x5 of a reward). This means constantly as you progress through the game you’ll always be getting something to help you progress. This being a non-rebirth game, it’s important for us that you still feel the progression and not the frustration of not rebirthing. If you’re even stuck on Arcane Scrap you can still find Wisps that will give you 1% of the Arcanist bar so you’ll always get to keep moving in that window.

The second system we’re planning to add is the Guild Hall! The mages were appreciative that we weren’t going to make them lug around ten pieces of equipment at all times so they volunteered to Research some valuable information for us… for a fee of course.

The guild hall is currently planned to be a timed research system with slots. I can’t go into too much of the details of the system because it might change before we finalize it, but in order to still provide the long term bonus feeling that the armor provided we wanted to implement a research tree so over time you could build up bonuses for your playstyle that you like. (Such as potentially increasing offline gains or the like).

We are strongly attempting to balance the styles of both the active and auto (idle) crowds, while giving the incremental and management feel and still maintaining our belief in tight balancing and fun mechanics.

We hope you guys are getting excited as we get closer to launch time and thank you for the support!

-LM

PS: Feel free to join the discord at https://discord.gg/Khm9UUm !