Hello everyone! It’s been a while but welcome once again to another Dev Blog headed up by Christian. As we’ve began to rev up for the Free-To-Play release during the second half of 2017, today we are going to talk a bit in general about what Stunlock Studios will be focusing on in the coming months and some of the updates coming to Battlerite.
But before that, I have some additional points I want to touch upon as usual.
First, something quick. There has been some confusion regarding the Legendary Outfit Chest and why it was removed. The simple answer is that it was always a time limited exclusive, and was meant to go away at a certain point. It may or may not return sometime in the future but for now you’ll have to look to the other chests to get new legendary outfits.
Second, this post marks the return of the regular weekly schedule of the Dev Blog. I’ll be handling at least a few of the upcoming ones for now. However, more and more of my duties as acting Community Manager will be transferred over to Liz in the coming weeks. This means that you will see less of me in general, both on the Dev Blog but also on other places like the subreddit. I’m fully confident that Liz will handle these responsibilities excellently and I hope you will all welcome her with open arms. And if you’re wondering what I will be up to instead of all this community stuff, I will return to the Game Design team to help out with gameplay implementation.
Now, let’s get moving!
What’s Happening?
During the majority of July the work done mostly involved improving upon our pipelines or cleaning up underlying systems. One example was improving how we create additional game modes, which should be easier for us moving forward. Besides this, some general prototyping was also going on, for said game modes and also for champions. Now we will once again start focusing on things that will affect your experience in Battlerite in a more direct way.
During the coming months we will primarily be focused on the eventual Free-To-Play release later in the year. This means that a lot of our efforts will be aimed specifically at that launch. Along the way we will of course still want to test run some things before we let in all the Free-To-Play people, so there will be updates coming.
Upcoming Patches
I’ll start off with giving you guys a general outline of some of the next upcoming updates. First, we have a smaller patch planned towards the end of August. For that patch you can expect some general balance changes, along with tweaks and updates to champions. You can also expect some new customization content being included. There will most likely be a change to the active Brawl at this point as well. We might slip in a few more things, but overall it will remain a smaller patch.
Towards the end of September we are planning a larger patch, which will bring the next Champion to Battlerite and additional new cosmetics. Besides that we will also be implementing more preparations for F2P, such as supporting Champion rotations for Lite (and eventual F2P) players. There will be new improvements coming to the Ranking system and after these updates have arrived we should be in a state where League is more or less ready for Free-To-Play. Naturally, your feedback will be vital for us to verify this and of course there will be some additional balance and champion updates included too. Not long after this patch we will see the return of the Creepy Chest as we get closer to what will be the recurring yearly Battlerite Halloween Event.
Somewhere around these two patches our new Landing Page should be making its way into the game. As you might have surmised it’s proven to be a bit trickier to finalize than we had initially hoped. Right now though we just have some final kinks to work out before it should be ready to go.
Free-To-Play
As I’m sure you understand we are working on some things specifically for the eventual Free-To-Play patch (no date to reveal yet but we are indeed getting closer to it). You’ll get to know more as we get even closer to its release.
UI 2.0 will most likely be ready to go in right before the eventual F2P patch or be included with it, which will bring a lot of general improvements to navigating and experiencing Battlerite outside of matches. With or slightly before the F2P patch the plan is to include improved systems to better handle toxicity as the influx of players at F2P will increase the importance of such systems being in place. Naturally our plan is to have another champion all ready to go for the launch as well.
… and Beyond
Other things we are looking into, not necessarily for Free-To-Play, but at least during the period until then:
- As mentioned in the beginning of July, some sort of pre-lobby or draft system for matches. This to allow for players in the same team to, at the very least, coordinate their champion choices in some way after they get a match
- Experimenting with more game modes, both bigger and smaller, for F2P and beyond
- Ways to make the Battlerite system more flexible and easily applicable to more potential game modes
- We’re gearing up and preparing for being able to release new champions at a quicker pace and having them roll out regularly beyond the Free-To-Play launch. We have a lot of ideas for champions and have assembled some promising prototypes that we’re continuing to work on
Closing Words
That’s it for this week. We will continue to release more information and details over time. We will try to keep you in the loop as much as we can, while still keeping some nice surprises for cool reveals. Thank you for all of your support, and as usual, thanks for reading!
/Christian