Hey guys!
I have been playing Arkheron for around a year (I think I started in march last year), and I have witnessed a ton of change in Arkheron. Now there’s some I can talk about and some I can’t (plz bring back holster) but I want to talk about what I can remember thinking and feeling from certain test periods.
March
So when I first started this game I was lost. I set aside time to play the entire (I think) 4 hour play window, and regardless of whether I liked the game or not I was gonna play it. I dropped into the tower (there was no sprinting back then) and felt immediately swallowed by a world I didn’t understand. There were red marks on the map that i thought were things to fight but they were unkillable, there colors of items and names of characters I didn’t understand. I died in like 2 minutes to an oracle and was never rezzed. OK this game has sauce, it felt like a puzzle I hadn’t solved. 8 queues later of dying almost immediately to any confrontation I decided to go to training mode. I had played the tutorial but CLEARLY I was missing something. I load in and I see these pedestals of characters I had never seen before, but they looked so sick. Grimmwold, Dahla, EDANI. Immediately I loved Edani. She was disruptive and powerful and fun. After realizing which items I liked I dove back into ascension, DETERMINED to find the winning set. The last game of the test, Bex pulls the lever sending us to the bottom of the tower and I find it. 1 then 2, 3, and 4. I immediately transform and I feel like a wolf on the prowl. First team i encounter immediately bested. Banish is ridiculously op surely. I make it to floor 2 for the first time. It’s incredible the scriptorium the library all incredibly. I pick player after player, ascending to floor 3. My first time on floor 3 felt like I was in the fucking SUPERBOWL. It’s eerily quiet here, we don’t see a team we go to beacon and we go floor 4. I expect an even more extravagant map but no. One room. Two teams. It begins. Immediately I snatch someone and my team chews him apart. We wrap up the rest like every single cooldown of my hooks is a guillotine waiting to sentence you to your end. We win. The absolute bliss I felt winning that first game was unbeatable. Being good at this game FEELS FANTASTIC.
I move back to the discord to talk about my win and my feedback, and I see most people saying some variation of “I played 3 games, died instantly.” I understood that feeling. I died more than 3 times. So I begin to wade through and try to inform people of the training room. The ways to practice and see what items you like. Y’know before you hit the tower, so that you know what to look for to at least have fun even if you lose. Some people listen, some people don’t. Then I saw Bex typing. I had no idea who Bex was at that time. I never really played PoE, but saw she was a community manager. She was out there in the thick of it trying to help people. It felt cool to see someone from Bonfire Studios out there talking to the community. There were some devs around too. Tetragon, Domojo, Stove all out there talking about this game with so much love and passion.
- March feedback = Make tutorial better, have more information out there, give us numbers and damage tracking so we can do more testing and know more things. (all of these feedbacks have been improved on in leaps and bounds btw BIG W.) I do think I can mention as an aside here that elusive crown used to be way more insane, and looting cells used to be ez full sets.
Friday night Experimental tests start happening. We tested a bunch of things I don’t think I can talk about. What I can say is feedback felt 1 sided. We would give feedback, changes that seemed to have very little to do with what we said would be made and very little communication was shared from Bonfire at that time. We sought to understand what they were seeing that we weren’t or just a conversation about changes. We got our dmg numbers, we saw some secret cool stuff under the hood, so we were at least satisfied. Also we had our dreams of the fabled fish eternal to keep us strong. Praise be to fish.
September
The big alpha playtest weekend is upon us. My team had been FIENDING for more Arkheron. Oh right my team. Arcala was apart of the first win I ever had on ascension, and Laminated was a tomato obsessed freak who plays a WICKED Leodin. We had been training and practicing, honing our skills so that we could show people how much we liked this game. The time came and… we crushed. If one of the other ‘Sharks’ teams weren’t in the lobby we would completely demolish nearly every team. It felt vindicating for all of maybe 5 games. Then we decided we should take it easy. These players were where we had once been, so maybe if we try goofy stuff like randomized items, or #onlyclusterchallenge we could have more fun. It was for a bit. We needed matchmaking. Specifically a system to sort the sharks into their own tanks. Also balance was weird. We all had established a META between the good groups of players, but new players meant new opinions and views. It felt like a renaissance.
- September feedback - We need matchmaking so I don’t beat up new players, they nerfed sneklan so now i’m sad, and please can we play this game more.
November
Community-run playtests. It felt like a dream statement. It was a way for the community to host playtests when they could agree to be online together. It felt like organizing a raid when I was 12 for ICC in World of Warcraft. The details were… troubling. We have a new partner MOBAlytics who was gonna help host, which seemed fair, they were a trusted discord server with reasonable connection to the type of game Arkheron was. The problem came in setting them up. You’d have to contact MOBAlytics discord mods, get a response, have them work through the process of getting it setup logistically which took an indeterminate amount of time, and then finally you could try to organize a group of people and a time. There were prescheduled ones that happened on Fridays and Saturdays (I think) but we wanted to play MORE GAME. I will say this, a group of Arkheron GIGA-gamers games together got their own discord met the requirements to be considered a ‘trusted server’ and got some games up and running through their own channel. Honestly one of the most incredible positive game community moments I’ve ever seen. An aside here. Complaints about the games camera angle were some of the most prolific feed back given, and Bonfire released a big huge post talking about it. It’s a good read.
- November feedback: Let us make our own custom lobbies please, I remember the game being super unstable during this time (dying through mending hands, being able to walk off the map, etc.), and more crashes than usual.
The silent era came right after this. Bonfire went heads down, the had their feedback meal, and now it was time for them to digest it. Months passed and some people had doom in their minds. I held out hope. In the between times I had talked to several devs, I had faith in their vision and commitment to making this a great game. I disagreed with things but I trusted them, because they talked to me and earned it.
March (but new this time)
Bonfire came back to us with renewed purpose. They listened and understood and gave us so much of what we wanted. New Eternals, Custom games, New game modes, matchmaking that separated old players, Community night so old players like me who are just ‘mid’ at the game can teach new players. It’s like Arkheron has hit it’s Baroque period.
I know some of this isn’t “feedback” but I wanted to put out the emotional rollercoaster I felt and hope that people can understand why no matter what happens. I LOVE ARKHERON. Bonfire studios has grown and become so much of what I think game development should be. I am an Arkheron stan, and I AM ETERNAL.
(fish eternal when…?)
