Hello there, Alex Poysky with the first weekly progress report on how the new Balance patch we have been working on is coming together.

We are adressing EVERY object in the game, each and every weapon, item, and passive is getting a makeover and kudos to that, THE GAME WAS UNBALANCED AS HECK!

You see, as developers, we RARELY have the time to actually sit down and PLAY the game, and that means some of the things we put in may or may not be completely tweaked. We had playtesters, and for the most part they said that the game was balanced and all, but obviously in order for things to be perfect, you need dedicated people and not just random forum goers.

We have a closed skype group with a balance team who tweak the game 8 hours a day, but I'd much rather let Mikko give the information directly so as to be both more ACCURATE and not beat around the bush.

"The balance changes are still too early on to be considered "fixed". I see three parts to the balance equation:
1. the way the stats work (the one we're working on now, and the changes look good on paper)
2. the way the items, weapons are defined (I like the idea of refining how the loot is dropped, the weapon stats themself are a part of that, but it needs to provide a progression rather than to just be random - testers said you can find the best items in the game on the starting island. That's not good progression)
3. The enemies (currently they're too similar, it's the same fight over and over again. Items with more variety will help with this, also tweaks to AI or even limited AI profiles might help a lot more)"

When I asked him about the inner workings of it, how long it could take, and if you guys could play with the new beta patch he said:

"I'm bad at estimating time but I'll give it a shot:
for the stats part, one more week MAX, tweaks to numbers can be done in minutes once all the game rules are clearly defined. That's probably more than half-way done.
For the weapons and items numbers tweaking itself takes little time now that the resource files can be loaded and anyone can edit them. For the loot part, it would probably take at least one week since we need to define a system by which the loots drop. That means defining loot tables based on some variables (danger level, enemy type, item type and utility etc..) Ideally these would become external resource files as well so we can have people "modding" them
The final part, enemies is more difficult to estimate, it depends on what scope of things we end up doing for that. Small tweaks, a few days to over a week, new subsystems or subsystem rewrites, probably longer than 2 weeks

Yes, people can opt into the beta branch if they want to check out the current progression. They can get the same builds as the balance group, there's no password for that branch right now. I would advice to only test it using new saves because the variables will change and probably ruin the balance of current saves in the process.

We can make it so the current saves by default use the old ruleset, I'm leaving it in to prevent people bemoaning about their dear saves being ruined. We'll save the ruleset data with the save file, so new saves will only have the new ruleset active to prevent any kind of funny business

In fact, we can probably make it selectable at the start if for some reason people want to play with the old ruleset and items etc.

Not sure if we should make it selectable if the balance changes make for a considerably better experience though

Wow, I need to take the dog out for his long walk now, I'll get back to you later "

As you can see it'll be an ongoing process, and his dog REALLY needed a walk! We have the right people on the job, and come it's launch time, the game will feel much more like we had wanted it to from the start. Gameplay will be much less chaotic, much more methodical and strategic, combat will not feel "samey" and hundreds of your long standing issues will be adressed.

Regarding the LOCALIZATION patch that was supposed to come before this one. I switched the two around and had the BALANCE patch come first for a very simple reason. We are waiting for a VERY important UI overhaul to launch on monday, and once we push it into the game, you will be able to do a wide array of new things with it once we tinker around with it. THAT faciltates the localization of the game much quicker than "By hand" translation ever could, and I feel it's only logical to save time by having the Balance come out first, as that doesn't touch any sort of language string or need us to re work it once the ui patch comes in on monday.

TL:DR
Beta patch is available, it's a huge balance patch but it's about 3/4 of the way done for weapons, then we need items, passives, and finally enemies. It'll be around 3 weeks to FINISH it full-on, but in the meantime we will also incorporate a new shiny UI, a localization system, and somewhere down the line, a tutorial.

Enjoy!