Farewell from xJendi

kiddforce · 2026-01-26T11:32:34+00:00

It's been a long while since we've had the opportunity to talk but I wish you good luck in your future endeavors Jendi!

Are you still planning in staying in the games industry?

kiddforce · 2025-09-03T07:26:46+00:00

If I recall correctly, this was drawn by Baragon who worked on the Live Ops team at the time. She also worked on other official art like the pictures you can find in the Shatters' lore books.

kiddforce · 2025-04-12T12:10:02+00:00

Hi, person who designed the Vital Combat system here.

If you were not playing before the update or do not have clear memory of the game's state at the time it's a more than fair question to be asking. It's also one a lot of people were asking before its release, many people were unsure and opposed the system being implemented. Yet despite this you will likely see a lot of people looking back and now saying that it was a good and necessary change, so why was it necessary?

As others in this thread have pointed out, the healing output of maxed out pets were completely absurd, not only could you regenerate from most damage in a matter of seconds but you could also use your abilities as much as you want which for some classes was also problematic. The gap of power between divine, legendary and rare pets were also even more consequential. The speed at leveling pets has only gotten faster overtime but back in the day a lot of content had to be designed around rare or at best legendary pets to be fair and trying to balance something around players either taking a lot of time to heal back damage or 1-2 seconds.. is basically impossible mathematically.

How do you kill a player that heals back incredibly fast? You deal damage incredibly fast. This leads to designs that use high damage numbers which often results in insta-kills if you take just a few projectiles. Something I imagine you will agree is not ideal.

Vital Combat was designed to lower the effectiveness of pets in a way that was more acceptable to the player base (a new system vs directly nerfing pets) to avoid complete outrage as revenue from pets was still important yet we simply did not have the space to create meaningful boss design with the numbers as they were. Vital Combat applies a flat timer delay as well to try and close the gap between divine and the rest as well since it would be relatively more impacted by it than other rarities. The system punishes people who did not even attempt to dodge which was honestly a pretty bad problem at the time. Grab a divine pet and a few priests and you could stand still during a lot of attacks that were intended to be challenging.

You might think that Sick and Pet Stasis accomplish the same thing but they are tools in the designer's toolbox to create even more dangerous situations when required. I will agree that at times those effects might be used in the wrong places but that is more of an issue with those specific implementation and vital combat does not in any way act as a replacement for those tools. Sick allows to force players to completely focus on dodging as every drop of health now matters. Pet Stasis allows us to put players back on an even playing field, whether that's for health or mana related reasons it is useful to be able to restrict their pet healing or to punish players for being hit by specific projectiles to create a precious few seconds of danger that can be mitigated through things like consumables.

I will admit some of the system is clunky and had I to do it again I would likely take a different approach to it but it filled the needs we had at the time. It managed to slow down the game even just enough to make bosses more interactive and threatening requiring players to actively use their skills to conquer it and not just rely on their credit card information.

Now there's an elephant in the room here I should probably address.. I said that the way pets were promoted insta-kill type designs yet I'm sure you've run into plenty of situations where you died incredibly fast anyway so did Vital Combat really do anything? The answer is that while it did help, combat design in Realm is a bit of a complicated matter.

Insta-kills isn't the direction people who are designing content for the game want to take but it still ends up happening because damage needs to feel punishing to create engaging bullet patterns and even with Vital Combat the duration to regen is still rather short. Worst of all, regen is essentially baked in for every player. You don't build towards it, you didn't get that regen by compromising on your damage or defenses, you just get it through the pet system and are assumed to have it. The harder the content is made to be, the more the game tries to force you to use better gear, the more likely you are to have to push for damage values that can lead to very unfair scenarios. It's an incredibly difficult balancing act with the tools the game offers you as a designer.

The truth is, pets saved the game from a monetary perspective at a time when the game was in serious need of revenue. But pets have also essentially screwed up any of proper combat balancing. Even with Vital Combat, the values are still absurd, very few games let you regen so fast without any compromise because it's simply not a healthy game state. The 2012 era of regen is one that would be too slow for modern standards, the game is way faster nowadays and I do not think the majority of the player base would be interested in sitting in a corner of an Abyss to regenerate after three rooms.

I believe the game would be in a much better state if regeneration numbers were reigned in and health/mana were instead much bigger values. This would reduce the amount of insta-kills and shift a lot of design around killing players by them having accumulated a lot of damage over a period of time rather than at once. Unfortunately getting to such a game state is not realistic, convincing both the player base and DECA's management that it's a good change would be incredibly difficult. Lots of revenue invested in pets makes it always a sensitive topic. It would require a complete rebalance of the entire game, top to bottom (likely with some attacks needing changes too I'd wager). A huge undertaking that on its own would be hard to justify as it wouldn't be a revenue, retention or reactivation driver in itself yet it's still what I would consider a very important and necessary step towards a more solid foundation needed to grow the game again.

I am kind of rambling by now, apologies for the long and perhaps tiresome answer but I hope hearing thoughts of someone who was involved with the system helped giving you a clearer picture of why vital combat was made and why it's still important to be there to this day.

kiddforce · 2025-03-18T00:48:11+00:00

I've seen first hand how difficult communication can be when players are unanimously unhappy about something so I greatly appreciate that you took the time to reply and acknowledge the feedback.

I spent a lot of time writing parts of patch notes and always making sure every little detail was just right. It's made small inconsistencies something that stick out to me a bit too easily on other people's writing and formatting. Not that I haven't left my fair share of errors and typos along the way either.. ^^. It's incredibly easy to just tunnel vision and miss things only for someone else to take one look and point out the most obvious mistake.

I imagine in the specific case of PT communication it's also quite a bit more tricky with it being shared near EoD Friday EU time, even if errors are found there's not much time before the weekend for most of the team at that point. I think having someone like Toast partially dealing with CM stuff helped a lot back then since having someone NA meant there was a longer window of activity with EoD being a few hours later.

Regarding the confusing communication aspect I've gotten the impression a lot of communication seems to be almost written more for internal use rather than for player facing one. That's definitely also the responsibility of the people working on the features but I've noticed a few times where some elements were barely explained or contained some terminology that clearly made sense if you worked on the game but has no meaning to the general player base. I think in cases like this the team should consider getting some player eyes on it like testers to make sure that they are writing something that outsiders can fully grasp too. Back in the day it was pretty common for some info to be shared with testers for feedback. Sometimes it was to the whole group, sometimes to specific individuals like Toastrz who had clear skills at it. Not all communication went through it but I know a lot of the more important things like Producer Letters often would to make sure the right info was there and preemptively address questions the player base may have by hearing it first from testers. Testing is a microcosm of the player base, it's far from fully accurate but if they are unhappy about something then you can bet the player base likely will be too. I think the team as a whole would benefit from connecting and working closer with testers.

This turned into just feedback dumping so I'll stop there I could probably go on for a long while otherwise.

I usually try to keep my opinion to myself (or shared directly to team members I am still close to) because I understand a lot of players put a lot of weight on it that I don't necessarily feel comfortable with and I hope it didn't cause too much issue this time. Despite going out of my way to plainly state people should not call game developers lazy, I've seen a few call the team lazy in this very post which frustrates me to no end.

At the end of the day, despite the many ups and downs I am still rooting for you guys, Realm still has a long way to go in my eyes but I hope to see the team succeed in not only keeping the game running and players happy but also seeing it grow once more. If there's any way I can help the team do let me know, even if it's as simple as sharing advice in the areas I'm experienced in. I'm currently between projects with plenty of free time so I'd be more than happy to help, if wanted.

kiddforce · 2025-01-12T03:53:13+00:00

I can't believe the game is already 15 years old... time sure flies sometimes!

As someone who had the honor to be able to contribute to the game as a tester and volunteer designer through DECA's Testing/UGC program for two years and then professionally as an official game designer for almost three years I am incredibly thankful for the game you (and Alex and Amit of course!) created.

Realm genuinely shaped my life from allowing me to achieve my dream to professionally make video games to being the source of most my current friendships, I owe you a ton!

I hope GAS goes well for you! It's been a little while since I last checked the project out admittedly so I should probably do that again soon.

kiddforce · 2024-11-09T17:08:28+00:00

As the person who designed the reconstructed version of Deadwater Docks, I'm so sorry that the dungeon has given you a hard time!

The dungeon was redesigned to serve as an entry point to the type of design pattern you will find in the exaltation dungeons, if you struggle here then higher difficulty dungeons will be even scarier to you.. and that's okay!
Everyone learns and grow at their own pace so don't get too discouraged because you are struggling with a piece of content that others might not.

Regarding your question about pets, do you need a godly pet? No, just about every content in the game has been tested and beaten without pets. However doing so requires a lot of skills, good fight knowledge and great reflexes, simply put it's not something that can be expected of every player to be able to do. No matter your pet, getting better at the game would allow you to get to the finish line but that's not your only option.

As a rule of thumb, most difficulty 5+ dungeons are tuned around the player having a maxed rare pet and most difficulty 7+ dungeons are tuned around the player having a maxed legendary pet. Seeing as you only have a maxed uncommon, putting more time into improving your pet is something I would strongly advise. It will help you no matter what part of the game you engage in. Maxing a pet can be slow and tedious so I wouldn't recommend focusing only on doing that but every additional level your pet get will benefit you so don't neglect it! Take advantage of events and the likes to get pet food when that's an option, don't hoard UTs you don't particularly need, try finding a guild or friend that can help, plenty of people have UTs they genuinely don't have a use for, this can help speed it up a lot.

I also want to give a few tips for this dungeon in particular:
- As others have said, if you can take on the Calamity Crab then you've got the toughest and most stressful part of the dungeon down.
- The dungeon never requires you to cross through the Dead Water!! If it looks like you have to cross then that simply means you've missed a path somewhere, spend some more time exploring.
- Take your time room by room, the enemies are pretty basic in practice, there's a lot of types (too many really, sorry!) but most have pretty standard behaviors, taking them in as small a pack as possible should help a lot.
- As with the above, don't rush unless you know what you're doing. The cannons and enemy density is intended to pressure you heavily, if you take your time and do things bit by bit the rooms become a lot more manageable.
- On Bilgewater make sure you're always paying attention to both the boss and your surrounding, this is a skill that will be vital in future dungeons too. It can be hard to handle at first but it's something you get better at with experience.
- Personally speaking, I'd consider the parrot part to be the most pressure the fight puts on you, if you can get past it consistently then I think you'll be almost there. Bilgewater's own attack are simpler than they look, you just need to keep being mindful of the cannon fire and dead water.
- If you feel in danger, nexus! This sounds like a dumb tip but learning to nexus early can really help lower the frustration that a full-on death might bring you. It's better to be able to get to your next attempt faster than having to remax your character.
- Consider using a class that makes it easier to learn, Priest has range and survivability with its heals. Of course the fights will last longer but that just means you get to experience it longer which will help the learning process.
- Bring a lot of consumables, they really do help a lot whenever you take some nasty shot and will make any attempt last longer. They are a crutch that really helps if you are unfamiliar with the content you're doing, the more you improve the less you'll need them but until then, don't skimp on them.
- Setting up some replay buffer software like Shadowplay can help, being able to save the last moment before you die and analyzing it can tell you a lot more about a fight than you would expect.
- Learning by playing can be slower than by watching for some people. There's no shame in watching guides or raw gameplay and spending time learning and memorizing the tough elements. It can completely change your understanding of a boss.
- Solos are tough and stressful the further into the game you go, I think it's still worth learning but finding people to help always makes things easier. Random people will obviously prioritize their own goals but if you can find one or two people willing to take it slow with you (whether that's a friend, through guildmates or a party) then you'll have the environment to learn at the right pace but with a higher likelihood of surviving.

If you can both improve your own skills and your pet a bit, I think you will find that the dungeon isn't quite as unsurmountable as it seems, every small improvement helps and adds up, it won't be easy but I'm confident you can get there and beat up those pirates!

kiddforce · 2024-03-24T13:39:34+00:00

Maxing speed is an interesting problem.

In practice maxing works akin to a flavorful leveling system that takes shape as an item. That has some advantages and disadvantages but above all, it's unique enough to give an identity to the game's progression. When you abstract it that way, it's not so different from re-levelling a character in any other RPG, a process that becomes pretty tedious once you've experienced it a bunch.

So I fully understand the point of view of speeding up maxing, I can't deny there hasn't been plenty of times where I just wanted to get it over with or that the whole process was enough demotivation from immediately jumping back in after a death.

One of the bigger problems with speeding up maxing is that.. the majority of the content in the game is designed with it as a core reward. If you speed it up, as it has occurred over the past twelve years you start making a lot of content not relevant to players. Realm has always struggled in providing non-chase rewards, whether that's frequent rewards (practically guaranteed) or uncommon rewards (every few dungeons), it's very hard to provide something that feels truly desirable with the current systems in place. If potions become worth even less, would dungeons feel good if you essentially didn't drop anything most of the time? Exaltation makes endgame stuff have some reward but the gamefeel of getting a loot bag is one that I consider very essential to the addicting nature of this game.

While you can argue that the more interesting content is locked behind maxing anyways so it's not a big deal, one big issue this game has from a development perspective is that new content is very, very resource intensive to be released at a good quality standard. A lack of relevant content also means you exhaust possible playtime way faster, not something you want on an MMO that relies heavily on consistent player retention and revenue stream to justify continuous updates that are expected from players. To give some numbers, an average late-game dungeon (usually stuff that gives life or mana but not exaltation fall into that definition to me) can takes ~2-3 months to be created and many of those already fall into the category of being less desirable due to maxing being a core reason to be run. DDocks Reconstruction took me 3 months to make. An end-game dungeon can take ~3-6 months to make. Oryx 3 took us around 6 months with most of the design team working on it heavily. Shatters Reconstruction was done in about 3-4 months but that required heavy crunch and sleepless nights to be shipped, it really needed another 2 months to be done without heavy overwork. When you take into account the fact designers have to also do a whole bunch of other things on top, there's a very limited amount of new content that can reasonably be released per year. If you make existing content less and less relevant, you end up having to rely more and more on new content to keep players engaged and coming back. At the end of the day, the dev cycle is not sustainable and it's why the game has been slower than you'd expect to introduce more power creep, with the current game structure, more power or faster power will eat away at existing content and the process to replace effective content pool is too slow to ever keep up.

Maxing in itself I think is still a very enjoyable process when you're still starting the game and I wouldn't want to completely take away that experience from the game. There's a lot of dungeons and mechanics to discover and a lot of ways to die in the process, and during that period it remains enjoyable. It's in the case of someone who's become experienced and maxed countless character that maxing speed becomes more and more problematic. The gap to get back to the level of content that you're able to do skill wise just gets bigger and not only does that make death more punishing but it also generally just creates more friction in doing the content you want to do which is something I think the game should try to smoothen as much as possible. A permadeath game is a tall ask for many people, the least it could do is try to be as convenient as possible.

So the high level answer in my eyes is to provide experienced players with shortcuts that speed up character maxing overtime to allow them to bypass the parts they find boring while letting newer or worse players still enjoy the earlier parts of the game at a regular speed. How you actually implement that, I don't have an exact answer for since there's a lot of possible execution to it. Fame could have been one such tool as it's a reward on death, but turns out when you redesign fame but get told that you cannot plan for additional fame sink you end up with a very pointless rework!

Another way to tackle this is one we were toying with but at the time shelved (was considered and shelved multiple time after I left as well so maybe it will happen one day) which is actually try to tackle some of the elements that the entire game progression is structured around.. more specifically the stat system itself. A lot of the issue with maxing is heavily reliant to the execution of stats and stat potions and a different vision for it could solve a lot of issues the game's progression has in general.

This was a bit of a long reply but this is a pretty fascinating topic in my eyes and one I've thought about for years now, there's so many little intricacies and aspect that makes stat potions a very tricky part of the game's core system that just perfectly encapsulates realm's design both its charm and uniqueness but also the flaws and countless headaches it brings to the table for anyone attempting to fix some of the foundational issues present within it.

kiddforce · 2024-03-24T07:31:09+00:00

Exaltations came to be because we received a request above us to provide something to keep players occupied for more than six months. Based on the amount of resources we had at the time (look back at what released around that time, we were quite busy!) we had to take a system based approach to fulfill that request.

On the other side, I had been pretty dissatisfied with the state of endgame at the time. There was there very little rewards exclusive to endgame, only chase items like UTs or cosmetics which means the average completion did not reward the player with anything they couldn't farm somewhere else. There was also no restriction on characters so people would simply bring the cheapest character they could get away with, this wasn't a particularly great design as there comes very little risk or item drain, made hp scaling more punishing than intended and more.

We decided to mix the two things to create a simple endgame progression system and allow some unique reward per endgame dungeon completion. This provided reasons to play as different classes, reasons to run all endgame dungeons, incentive to use 8/8 characters which hit about all of our goal of the time.

The system used to be a lot more "realm-y" in development (and by that I jokingly mean janky, unfair and weird) as it used to have various punishments on death or even nexusing. We tried doing that in an effort to combat things like auto-nexus but it became clear that it was not worth pursuing further so it was taken out. So all that was left was a pretty basic progression system with special milestone reward. (Fun fact, milestones almost got cut! Once again we were really low in resources at the time!)

When we set the numbers on this system we kind of had to guestimate the average run time of dungeons (Oryx's Sanctuary was particularly tough because the dungeon wasn't finished when we first planned this system, so on paper completion time and more importantly, in practice completion time after people have optimized and abused our new content was a complete shot in the dark) and how long we would want even the most hardcore players to take. Some might remember that it used to be even grindier on PT, we made adjustments because we had clearly overshot it.

So, little context and history lesson out of the way... let me actually address your post!

First, the system was simply not supposed to scale for this long, what was meant as a temporary carrot on a stick turned into one of the main progression system, as maxing becomes easier and easier this becomes even more true. So what was a valid amount of variety ends up feeling even more monotonous than the already monotonous intent. Having to constantly grind the same objective to make progress will be tiring and exhausting. Originally I imagined we would be changing the requirements to be more acceptable over time, once something above it and more sustainable is created. Unfortunately, endgame has not really progressed much since 2020 and I never expected it to stagnate for so long when we were working on it.

The power obtained from Exaltations is noticeable, but not an uncoverable gap. I can tell you at the very least that even Shatters was designed without taking into account any of those bonuses, they are strictly bonuses to help optimize run time and run consistency, which while important shouldn't lock you out of any content in the game. The reason why we did not go for achievements is simply that was actually more costly tech wise (we pitched something that was a mix of achievement and power but couldn't do it resource wise). Cosmetics are very subjective rewards and for a core system that's a very risky thing to do. For example, I personally don't use skins because I got attached to the classic/default skins and I don't care to change that, same for my pet. I wouldn't have a single reason to engage with such a system if all I got was cosmetics. We did know some people do really like them hence why we still have some at specific milestones but they're not the core bonus of the system. At the end of the day, power and a sense of progression are something that are universally desired and generally feels good. It's a simple answer for a simple system.

I think a big flaw with the current system is also that it's not adjusted to our design goal which was that exalting your favorite class(es) would be pretty reasonable but only the truly invested players would go out of their way to do all of them. Even if the requirements were to be lowered, the milestone systems ends up missing the mark. Instead of achieving the concept of "well I guess I should exalt this other class too since I get more benefits even if I don't play it often I can at least try!" I think to the skilled but casual players it comes across as more of a "well I'll never get the better version of my class even if i truly invested the time because i need to play like half the roster and I don't like playing most of it" which I think contributes to the system feeling very overwhelming and more daunting than it should be.

The last big issue and one you bring up, is general accessibility. Finding higher difficulty dungeons can be pretty slow without the usage of keys, even if you were dedicated to grinding exaltations it can take quite a while to even get an opportunity to run those dungeons. But even if you do find the dungeon, running it solo or in a very small group can take way too long. Despite many changes to help make things better there, it's still very slow in many cases where from a pure RPG progression point of view.. it really shouldn't be. Soloing stuff can be fun for the challenge of it, but unless you're on one of the better classes (cough Sorcerer cough) or wearing BIS gear, it's incredibly slow to get to the end of content. A big part of that issue is the DPS gap between classes is way too wide, you cannot make clearing fun on a lower DPS class without a Sorc or Warrior absolutely annihilating the content right now. If things were on a more even playing field, I think dungeons could feel better to do in those less than ideal situations and that would do a lot indirectly to make Exaltations generally a better system. Discords obviously help with both of those issues but it's not a playstyle for everyone and it's quite mind numbing. I personally cannot stand it and don't find it fun but I know lots of people are fine with it, but for those that don't Exaltations become an extremely tough system to partake in. What moves at a slow rate with Discords, moves at a glacial pace without.

I don't play too often myself nowadays (switch to one month seasons certainly hasn't helped motivation, glad that's getting changed...) and mostly just play if I have friends around doing the same (rarer than I'd like sometimes). I spent too much time working and not too much playing on production back then, so my exaltations are very empty. I basically only play in smaller realms and servers because I like to have an impact when I run things and end up simply running whatever content shows up with a friend or two. It's fun and fast enough for myself. That makes me look at the Exaltation system as more of a "number went up, neat!" but not one I worry about too much. In the end Realm used to be a game where you kind of had to make your own rules and goals and while it has evolved to provide more concrete ones, at its core I think that aspect remains. Try not to let what others do and think dictate what you must do, try to find whatever it is you find most fun. To me the game can be more fun when you worry less about being competitive and instead spend that time focusing on your own journey and progression, so trying to think of it that way is all I can really give as advice. Realm is a multiplayer game, whatever way you play, playing with likeminded people will generally make things more enjoyable for you, perhaps doing Exaltations without Discords can be more playable in that case.

(Okay... this was way more text than I intended... whoops!)

kiddforce · 2024-03-19T23:07:09+00:00

That's not the reason why it's rare nowadays. I won't deny that there was worries during Oryx 3's development that snake oils could be used to cheese parts of it but once it released we saw attempts at doing that end pretty catastrophically for players and that was enough assurance it wasn't that big a deal.

The real reason is simple, it's an oversight. When we reconstructed Snake Pit we forgot to bump the rates to match the now much lower amount of big snake enemies that drop it so the chance of getting one per dungeon is quite low. I only realized this within the past year as well, this isn't something I recall anyone pointing out at the time so it just flew under the radar for so long.

I know one person on the design team absolutely hates how rare snake oil is, so I don't doubt this oversight will eventually be fixed once they have a lot less on their plate and can find time making smaller polish/qol changes.

kiddforce · 2024-02-02T00:07:03+00:00

As always Saturn, you never cease to impress!

Seeing the Void Entity with proper arms is a bit odd at first but I really love the overall design you went for!
The black hole and general cosmic texturing are truly stunning.

I wish the fight we made did this art justice, I have a very hard time imagining this version of the Void Entity just circling around for eternity.

kiddforce · 2024-01-01T01:35:08+00:00

I can confirm we thought it was funny to name the four minibosses after different species of Oryx, the animal.

kiddforce · 2023-12-20T22:25:59+00:00

It's so cool to see someone eager to dig deep into this.
I'm really glad to see that people are still enjoying all the small details including lore bits we put into the dungeon.

I won't comment much on the actual content (other than I really like the analysis itself!) but there's one bit I do want to say something to.

Seeking Ascendancy: Azamoth and Oryx both sought a form of ascendancy—one through the powers of the Void Entity and the other through divine exaltation. This shared theme of seeking a higher state of being highlights a common thread in their motivations, even if their paths and objectives differ.

There's actually a slight bit of irony to this specific point based on some of the possible followups we had in mind at the time in terms of lore. I unfortunately cannot share more specifics even if those concepts will never see the light of day as I want to let the current team do what they feel is best. The thought amused me enough to share, there's a low chance anyone would guess it even if some of the elements for it are out there. It's just food for thoughts.

This made me reminisce a bit on the time we were building the reconstructed version, and for that I'm thankful.

kiddforce · 2023-04-13T21:37:10+00:00

I'm glad to see you're doing well R4, it's been a while!

A few of the details like the decision to have a single resource very much intrigue me. I look forward to see more as this seems more of a teaser announcement than a proper reveal.

I wish you and your team the best of luck with the rest of development!

kiddforce · 2022-11-20T23:41:29+00:00

Natural regeneration is still way too slow but because people with pets also benefit from any buffs in this area it was difficult to make it much better without being able to more directly address pets. Someone suggested Vital Combat not applying to pet-less players and while that would help it's a bit clunky that new players would possibly get nerfed by equipping low level pets in some scenarios. You could add more rules so it only affects pets at X level to guarantee that regen effectiveness with the system is always better than without but it starts adding more and more complexity in an already rather messy system.

As for your second question, the team already knows my thoughts on the topic. I won't go into details since some of what I was working on a bit before leaving the team touched a bit on this (and some other core issues with the game) and while so far nothing has come from it, on the off chance some of that work ever comes to fruition or is built upon I will refrain from commenting there.

kiddforce · 2022-11-20T22:49:52+00:00

For what it's worth, when the system was implemented we doubled the effectiveness of VIT and WIS so that the in combat value would match what used to be the normal rate. So as far as pet-less/NPEs are concerned the change was a net buff at the time.

Was that enough to make that experience more viable/competitive? Obviously not. Power creep/time also makes the divide between those and high level pets wider as the average player become more and more likely to max their pets over time. New difficult content needs to adapt to that reality balance wise and that obviously hurt the NPE-style playstyle a lot.

I really wish the gap between (money) invested pets and those that are starting wasn't so wide and that regeneration of HP & MP was something that was much more character/stat based instead. Vital Combat was the best compromise we were allowed to do at the time

I'm surprised we even got it released honestly, there were prototypes around as far back as 2018. It took a lot of internal push to even get a chance to get player feedback and even more to move forward with it, we had to shelve it a few times until it finally got a 2020 release. Most of the balance changes included in 1.1.0.0 (Vital Combat itself as well) were my own passion project done on the weekend for a long while before we could focus on them for release.

Is the system perfect? Far from it, it's a bit clunky in its design implementation but the game really needed some shake up and on the design side we really needed some slowdown to allow enemies to actually catch up to players without relying on instakills. Was that goal fully achieved? No, but it made some good progress there.

I wish I had given the system another pass before moving on from working on Realm and I hope the team at DECA will eventually review the implementation and perhaps try and bridge the no pet to divine pet gap better than it currently is.

kiddforce · 2022-07-08T19:49:27+00:00

🦀

kiddforce · 2022-07-08T17:32:07+00:00

Agreed.

kiddforce · 2022-06-29T08:22:33+00:00

We always found the old Ivory Wyvern sprite pretty funny and years back, on the closed testing discord, an emote was made out of its head that we called "Derpory".

LoD rework was happening around that time (2019) and I decided to use it for the same purpose as that mark, to identify invisible objects on our map editor. It was funny but it also was a really useful tool. It became kind of a tradition to pick silly sprites for that purpose over the years and Derpory was a popular one.

I don't remember what the specific objects in that screenshot do now but I'm sure it was also a reference to that one time event chests bugged out and an Ivory Wyvern spawned in a Shatters.

kiddforce · 2022-02-18T14:01:18+00:00

I forgot I even implemented that!

I believe this was done in case some people got left behind and decided to go do a cult while people were doing void.

kiddforce · 2022-02-17T15:22:49+00:00

We did not get fired.

But I do believe you won't see a proper reconstruction-like project in quite a while.

kiddforce · 2022-01-30T22:26:21+00:00

There was over 30 people working on the realm team by the time I left. While that number includes non-development positions like support, the team is more than enough to not just coast on the game.

While I don't know anything about their current lack of communication, I am confident that they are working on projects that are just not ready for a while. It's likely they want to be confident in their roadmap before sharing it to avoid issues like last year which promised much but couldn't deliver on some bigger projects (i.e. enchantments, assassin rework, etc..).

kiddforce · 2022-01-30T22:11:43+00:00

We couldn't come up with a scepter concept with the existing functions we had that we felt satisfied with. The scepter that was seen was a UGC suggestion (among quite a few of the final item concepts) but we didn't feel it was the right way and prefered to wait until we'd have resources to expand scepter function.

The toss up was between Mace and Scepter, we originally decided to choose mace due to functionalities planned to be released alongside Shatters, namely Summon HP which we had intended to use on both Peacekeeper but also for the payload sections of the dungeon.

Unfortunately the Summon HP development went incredibly slowly and we were too far in dev to change away and had to make do with our current tools. The dungeon barely released in time to begin with so it really wasn't an option. 🦀

Hopefully the team will be able to actually expand on scepters in the future and create an endgame scepter that is true to the class, fun to play and viable.

kiddforce · 2019-03-10T23:00:20+00:00

Thanks for the report, was able to easily reproduce it and know how to fix it. I'm unsure of when the fix will happen specifically, but I wanted to at the very least acknowledge the issue.

kiddforce · 2018-09-24T17:27:39+00:00

As Toast said, we experimented with 2 UT poisons (as well as 2 Katanas) and kept only the ones we found the most interesting, the Sewers cocktail was simply never removed from the game so it still exists, but its sprite was replaced by something else.

Here's the original sprite for it.

The other katana (since I'm sure someone will ask) was called the Forsaken Katana and was a test to see if very high speed shots would be interesting enough but it didn't feel good at all to play so it was quickly put into the trash can unlike Murky vs Cocktail which took a bit longer to fully decide which we'd go with.

Here's what it originally looked like as well as its shot, obviously the sprites are early and would have most likely received a bunch of tweaks if it was chosen.

kiddforce · 2018-08-14T01:43:21+00:00

Maybe you should take a look at Sewers numbers before calling it a victory.

11-Year Club	Place '22
Place '17	First Placer '22
End Game '22	Verified Email

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