Dev Diary #7 – A Whole New Wooooorld (it’s Paradiso!!!)

I can show you the world, shining, shimmering, splendiiiiiiid… (and deadly)

Immortals, a whole new world is getting ready for you to explore! AT LAST, PARADISO RELEASES ON MAY 5th! 

Never thought I’d open a 33 Immortals dev blog with a Disney song but here we are ✨

We’re super excited to release the third and final world of 33 Immortals: Paradiso! In Dante’s Divine Comedy, which 33 Immortals is inspired by, Paradiso follows Dante’s journey through Heaven and allegorically represents the soul’s ascension to God.

Except… in 33 Immortals, Beatrice has other plans for you: you’re a Rebel Soul, remember? Your goal is to face the Wrath of God, and that’s exactly what you’re gonna do in Paradiso, so buckle up!

OMG PARADISO AAAAAAAH

Wander through the world in awe (and try not to get killed)

In the Paradiso sneak peek I shared a couple months ago, I explained that our art direction intention for Paradiso is to return to abstraction. The closer we get to God, the more bizarre your surroundings become. You’ll see many elements of Catholicism mixed with organic yet otherworldly shapes of nature, and monsters made of basic shapes, differing a lot from the more human/animal-like creatures we’ve seen in Inferno and Purgatorio.

Paradiso is the last of the three worlds you can explore in 33 Immortals, based on Dante’s final journey in the Divine Comedy. It’s designed for 11 players and has two waves of two Devotion Chambers each.

Like Inferno and Purgatorio, Paradiso also has one secret chamber at all times, for six players. You just need to find where it is!

Meet the monsters

Paradiso monsters are depictions of Biblically accurate angels, which we combined with shapes and abstract elements.

They’ve been patiently waiting to play with you and they’re ready to find their new best friends. Let me introduce you to some of them:

That’s just three of them but there are many more (including a Unique Elite), all eager to meet you soon. Unfortunately though, all of them want you dead. Have fun!

I’m happy I made new friends

Meet the Boss

Your rebellion plans have made God angry and you’re about to face his Wrath.

You know how fire sometimes rains down on you while you’re minding your own business in the Beyond? That was just a warm up, sent by God himself. If you manage to survive Paradiso, you’ll Ascend to face 33 Immortals’ final boss: the Wrath of God.

If you need to remember just one thing, it’s that while in Inferno and Purgatorio you’ve been strongly encouraged to cooperate to survive, in Paradiso, you will NEED to cooperate to stand a chance.

I won’t describe all the boss’ attacks and phases in detail because it would take the surprise away from you, but I got some design sneak peeks from Cem, our Game Designer. We had three main intentions when designing this fight.

• The first was to make sure the boss’ intro would remain the same as the one we revealed when we first announced 33 Immortals, back in 2023 because it’s a nice way to tie back to how it all began, and because we find it cool (which is an excellent reason).

• The second was to increase the difficulty challenge in a different way than what players have been experiencing in Inferno and Purgatorio. The design philosophy for Inferno was to destroy things. Purgatorio was still about destroying things, but also making sure that you’re doing things in a certain order, avoiding getting poisoned, etc. For Paradiso, we’re spicing things up by adding puzzle mechanics to the fights. Some things will feel familiar, but it’s not gonna be like any other boss you’ve faced so far. As for difficulty, we didn’t just go for a pure stats increase: of course there’s gonna be some of that, but the mechanics are a lot more complex and it will require tactical thinking and excellent cooperation.
• And about our third intention… Let’s say you’ll find out soon enough.

Of course Paradiso comes with a set of new feats and new cosmetics, including a new legendary set and new legendary skins for those who complete 12 Ordeals runs.

Now off you go, Immortals! Finish that rebellion and go face the Wrath of God! 😤😤

IMPROVEMENTS AND CHANGES

World Keys

Sometimes you enter a new world thinking it’s gonna be a walk in the park, then you cross this red lady’s path, get annihilated seconds after joining, feel like you wasted a key, and that’s just sad.

Wise words from Romalllka 

Well, world keys are now gone. But how will I access Purgatorio and Paradiso, you ask? By defeating the previous’ world boss ONCE. It’ll give you a key that’ll give you unlimited access to the next world.

No more feeling like you wasted a world key!

Weapon Upgrades

Some weapon upgrades are constantly being left behind, and it breaks our little dev hearts.

We know you love graphs. 

We know that some builds are OP, super fun to play, making them players’ favorites, and that’s great! But we want other builds to also feel fun, so we decided to buff some weapon upgrades that need some love.

Glaive of Temperance – One Motion

• Before: Has a time limit for its effect to trigger
• Now: The time limit is removed, guaranteeing the next attack launched after using your Ability will consume no Temperance and deal more damage.

While the Glaive of Temperance is a little harder to master compared to other weapons, we realised that One Motion is particularly difficult to use. This change aims to make it more accessible and more fun.

Bow of Hope – Double Shot

• Before: Shoots 2 Heavy Arrows at an angle
• Now: Still shoots 2 Heavy Arrows but the angle has been narrowed for a more focused attack

On paper, Double Shot is the most OP weapon upgrade for the bow. But in reality, it’s used by less than 2% of our players. Our guess is that people usually don’t pick it because it’s more difficult to master, so we’re trying a small adjustment to make it more accessible.

Narrowing the angle means that you’ll be able to make more focused shots while keeping a safer distance than before, when you had a wider angle.

Sword of Justice – Mighty Slash

• Before: Slashes are slower but deal way more damage
• Now: Same effect and generates more Justice when using Light Attacks

Mighty Slash was hard to use because it makes you attack less, meaning that you generate less Justice, which impacts survivability.

Making it generate more Justice ensures that using Mighty Slash it isn’t at the cost of your life.

Staff of Sloth – Lethargy

• Before: Strengthens the effect of Slow on enemies
• Now: Still strengthens the effect of Slow and now adds Damage Over Time to affected enemies

Lethargy is super fun to use for Sloth players, but in a game where doing damage is important, Lethargy was kinda left behind.

We decided to add damage to Lethargy’s initial effect, to make it feel like a DoT poison cloud that also slows enemies.

Staff of Sloth – Echoing Orbs

• Before: Orbs on the ground explode after a delay
• Now: Orbs will explode after a delay or when in contact with an enemy

Full disclosure, the new Echoing Orbs is actually the way Echoing Orbs was initially designed, until we thought “wait… that may be too much, let’s calm down”.

We changed our mind and chose to embrace chaos instead: Echoing Orbs was very strong in specific contexts, now it will be more versatile and allow you to cover the map with mines.

Now go try Echoing Orbs + Bouncing Orbs and have fun!

Tutorial Improvements

Many players, especially demo players, felt lost during the first run. While our intention is to give players a trial by fire, we still want them to understand what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.

The improved tutorial still throws players directly into a run, but we made some adjustments to make the goals clearer. Before starting your first run, your objectives will be clearly listed and won’t disappear until you acknowledge them.

• We added a more detailed description of what each weapon does on the weapon selection screen, to help players make a better informed choice
• If / When a player dies during their first run, it will trigger a tutorial to encourage them to find another player to revive them, teaching them that they should seek help instead of just standing there 🧍

Hopefully this will help players navigate their first run more easily! 

Dynamic Difficulty

Many players have been complaining about boss fights lasting too long, especially when you start a run with 33 players, but end up facing the boss with only a handful of survivors. In this situation, the boss difficulty would still be scaled for 33 players, and in most cases players would be decimated after a very long and tedious fight.

Yes, 33 Immortals is supposed to be a challenging game, but we also want our players to have a good time.

Bosses’ difficulty will now scale depending on the number of players who survived the Ascension Battles and successfully Ascended to the boss, whether it’s in Inferno, Purgatorio, or Paradiso.

Note that for Private Session, this does NOT apply. Private sessions are meant to feel like raids, and we expect players to not pull a Leeroy Jenkins and actually coordinate with their team.

COMMUNITY REQUESTED FEATURES

Party Flags

One of the most popular community requested features is now available: you can join a party directly in Dark Woods, without having to use a third party service.

Select your destination (Inferno, Purgatorio or, *GASP*, Paradiso), drop your flag in Dark Woods and nearby players will be able to interact with it and join your party.

Even though you don’t need to use a third party service to form a group anymore, we hope to still see you around our Discord server, yeah? 🥰

End of Run Stats

This one’s for the stat nerds: you wanted more end of run stats, so we added more. Here’s what you’ll be able to see:

• Kills – Amount of monsters killed.
• Biggest Hit – The highest amount of damage done in one hit.
• Total Damage – Total amount of damage done to monsters.
• Co-Strike Damage – Total amount of damage done as co-strikes
• Critical Damage – Total amount of Critical damage
• Total Dust – Total amount of Dust Gathered
• Total Bones – Total amount of Bones Gathered
• Damage Taken – Total amount of damage taken

There you go, you have a way to see how you and each of your fellow Rebels contributed to the fight!

COMMUNITY QUESTIONS

I see there’s a 33 Immortals demo on Steam, what’s the deal with that?

That’s right! The 1.0 version of 33 Immortals is coming to Steam this summer and to allow players to try it before D-Day, we released a demo version! It gives players access to Inferno and the four base weapons, which represents more than 20 hours of content, or a lot more if players want to try Ordeal runs. Also, it gives players a head-start since their save from the demo will be carried over to the 1.0 Steam release! If you have friends who’ve been waiting for 33 Immortals to be on Steam, that’s your cue to send them this link.

To learn more about the demo, we made a FAQ here.

Any news about cross saving?

TL;DR: we’re still investigating and we’ll keep you updated!

Since we announced our arrival to Steam, we noticed that some of you have been asking about transferring saves. The way the game is built currently doesn’t allow for cross saving, and looking into adding it could impact our roadmap. So last month, we asked the community how they felt about being able to transfer their save from one platform to another to gather data and assess how popular the feature is among our players.

We’re still gathering data and investigating, so if you haven’t filled out the survey yet, here it is.

That’s it for today! The Paradiso Update will launch on May 5th, and we’re beyond excited to see you discover this whole new world (and probably get killed, many, many times). We hope you’re as impatient as we are!!

If you have a question you’d like me to cover in our next Dev Diary, let me know via Discord or Reddit! 

Until next time, Rebel Souls!

– Alison & The 33 Immortals Team