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Dev Diary #8 – Update 1.1 and post-launch news
Update 1.1 releases on August 17th! Welcome to our 8th entry in our Dev Diary series, where we're taking you behind-the-scenes of 33 Immortals' development!
Hey Immortals!
How’s your summer going (or your winter, if you’re on the other side of the world)? Ours is pretty good: it’s been almost two months since we launched the 1.0 version of 33 Immortals on Steam, Epic and XBOX and we’re all still hard at work on improving the game!
Right after launch, we took the time to go through your feedback and started working on the 1.1 update. It’s dropping today, August 17th, and will focus on community requested features and quality of life improvements that will enhance your experience in 33 Immortals. It’ll also bring the Fate System, new Daily Events, new Daily Quests and balancing tweaks that will make the game less grindy.
I’ll go over the main additions and changes to the game in this dev diary, but before we start, I have two important messages for those who had save loss issues and for our Early Access players:
Compensation for save loss
To make up with the recent issues some of you had with the recent loss of save data, we added 2,000 Eternal Shards and 20 Paragons to the affected accounts. You’ll find them in your inventory as soon as you get to the Dark Woods. This is only for players who experienced loss of save data issues post launch.
Thank you gift for our Early Access players
To all our Early Access players (i.e: players who’ve been playing 33 Immortals on Epic and XBOX prior to June 10th): the exclusive cosmetics we’ve been cooking for you are ready and waiting for you in your inventory! You’ll find 8 epic weapon skins, a legendary cloak and familiar, and an epic halo. They all share a common theme…
This is our way of thanking you for sticking around despite the countless fruit and veg errors you’ve seen since the beginning. We’re grateful for your support (and patience <3) and hope you’ll like your new exclusive skins!
Back to the main topic: Update 1.1! Here’s what you can expect :
NEW CONTENT
Fate System
The Fate System allows players who’ve finished the game to restart their progress in exchange for greater rewards. It’s an opportunity to face the challenge once again, and show off by letting other Immortals know that finishing the game once wasn’t enough for you.
The Fate System is unlocked after defeating the Wrath of God with the Crown of Immortality equipped. After seeing the end cinematic, you’ll unlock a new Fate Feat and an interactable Astrolabe will appear in Dark Woods. Interact with it to open the Fate menu, and decide whether you want to reset your progression or not.
How does it work?
- Fate Levels go from 1 to 10
- When you finish the game and reach for the stars for the first time, you reach Fate Level 1
- Each Fate level gives you a Fate bonus, granting you more Eternal Shards at the end of a run
- Bonus % = Fate level * 10. So for example, at Fate level 3, the fate bonus rewards +30% Eternal Shards at the end of your run
- Your Fate level will be displayed next to your player name in-game (Dark Woods, World Map, End of run stats, etc.)
What’s reset and what isn’t?
Reset: Perks & Perk slots – Weapons (unlocks & upgrades) – Shrine upgrades (bone, dust, soul) – World keys – Relics – Daily quests – Feats – Stars & the cosmetics gained via the Star system (Crown, Cape and Familiar of Immortality) – Player stats
Not reset: Cosmetics earned – Compendium entries – Archive & Loadout – Currencies (Shards, Paragon, Star Dust) – Tutorials – Trainings
The Fate System is optional and is made for those who like to grind and show that they’re a veteran player.
New daily events & new daily quests
New daily events have been added to the Call to Arms rotation.
- Lucido Hunt: +50% damage against Lucidos. Coupled with the Lucido perk, this will make for a great resource harvest fest!
- Bone Harvest: +50% Bones Gained. These runs will allow you to upgrade more relics and/or have more flexibility choosing your relics.
- Coordinated Strike: Execute 300 co-strikes to get a relic once.
As for quests: Pride, Temperance, Gluttony and Charity will now have daily quests, like other weapons already have.
BALANCING
We’ve been gathering a lot of player feedback and data since launch and did a lot of balancing adjustments on weapon damage, overall difficulty, meta progression, and relics. Here’s what’s changing in the 1.1 Update:
Adjusting weapons DPS
The first thing we wanted to address was the huge DPS difference between some weapons.
Sword, Staff and Scepter
Identified problems:
- The Sword of Justice, Staff of Sloth and Scepter of Charity are a lot below compared to other weapons in terms of DPS.
- Players often feel useless (or not as useful as they could be…) during boss fights because they fail the damage check required, jeopardizing the fight.
Solution:
- Increase their DPS to put them at the same level as the other weapons. The Sword of Justice, Staff of Sloth and Scepter of Charity will do +30% damage.
Median DPS of all weapons
The Sword of Justice especially should be a more viable option now (Mighty Slash in particular).
We’ll be monitoring the data and your feedback in the few weeks following the update to rebalance if needed. It’s interesting to note that despite its overall lower DPS and performance, the Sword of Justice remains the 3rd most picked weapon along with the Crossbows of Pride.
Weapons pick rates
All weapons should now be on the same level DPS-wise, which means we need to counterbalance that by re-adjusting the game’s difficulty and making it more difficult.
Overall Difficulty
Our intention has always been to make 33 Immortals a fair but challenging game. You should expect to die often and come back stronger, and we don’t expect you to figure out every boss’s mechanics on your first try.
The three worlds (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso) are designed to become progressively more difficult. When we designed them, we set goals to monitor how players were progressing and assess whether each world provided the right level of challenge.
After looking at the data, we realised that:
- Inferno is too easy
- Purgatorio is about right-ish
- Paradiso is much too hard
In the 1.1 Update, we’ll be focusing on Inferno by increasing monsters and Lucifer’s HP by 20%.
We’re not touching Purgatorio and Paradiso yet because we’d like to avoid changing everything at once. By isolating changes, it will make it easier to look at the data and find an answer to whether boosting underperforming weapons and increasing Inferno’s difficulty is enough to make Inferno more challenging and Paradiso easier.
Technical side note that you might find interesting: until now, adjusting weapon balance or dynamic difficulty parameters required us to release a patch, making the process quite slow (because we have to go through many phases of testing, certification and approvals for each platform, etc.). We wanted to be more agile and adjust faster based on feedback and data we collect, so we changed how the system works: We can now adjust parameters such as weapon balance, game difficulty, and dynamic difficulty live if needed, without having to release a patch. This will allow us to easily tweak Purgatorio and Paradiso if needed or further adjust weapon balance.
Meta Progression
Meta progression is gonna be faster, especially for weapon upgrades and those grindy Feats.
Weapon upgrades
They will be unlocked faster: your first weapon upgrade will be unlocked after completing your first weapon Feat. It will grant you access to the weapon upgrades menu, the ability to find weapon upgrades tokens during runs and will allow you to increase your weapon upgrade mastery. As a result, the co-op power passive regen will be moved to the second Weapon Feat.
You will also collect Weapon Upgrades faster: we know that many of you are frustrated that sometimes the last weapon upgrade can take ages to drop so we changed that. Now, if you find nothing during a run and IF you manage to beat the boss, the boss’ chest will have a 100% drop chance. To counterbalance the fact that weapon upgrades will be a lot faster to collect, weapon upgrade masteries will take a little longer to complete.
However, if you play with 9 Ordeals, you’ll be able to increase the mastery of all the weapon upgrades you find during your run (which wasn’t the case before the 1.1 update).
Grindy Feats
Many of you have been complaining about some Feats being too grindy so we lowered the requirements for some of them. For example, all Weapon Mastery III Feats will only require you to defeat a boss 1 time instead of 5, and will require you to complete 1 Secret Chamber instead of 8. Many other Feats now have their completion requirement lowered.
Relics
If you played 33 Immortals’ demo or Early Access, you’ve noticed that 1.0 Launch came with a whole new relic system. We know that many of you have opinions about the relics and I’ll address what’s next for relics in a few minutes, but first, here’s what will change in 1.1:
Blast and Missile relics will be boosted
Identified problem:
- Many players feel that Blast and Missile relics are underwhelming. They feel particularly unattractive on our most powerful weapons and weapon upgrades.
Solution:
- Blast and Missile relics got a 50% boost. The damage they deal will depend on how quick you can attack. Players will be able to deal a lot more damage.
About the future of the current relic system
We know that many of you have strong opinions about the relic system, and we hear you. Players have expressed feelings that some relics are underwhelming, they lack variety and that many builds end up being the same. We took note of your feedback and we’re currently working on it for a future update. We’ll share more information when we’re ready. Stay tuned!
Bones Economy
Descending to help your fellow Rebel Souls at an Ascension Point will now cost 20 shards instead of 50 bones. Many of you have been wondering if the bone economy is balanced since it’s now used for every action while in a run, pointing out that once the Ascension battle is over, your bones have already been spent to upgrade your relics, heal yourself or buy things. This quick fix should help and encourage players to Descend.
QUALITY OF LIFE UPDATES & COMMUNITY REQUESTED FEATURES
As I mentioned earlier, we’ve spent a lot of time going through all your feedback since launch. For the 1.1 update, we’ve been focusing on the quick wins: smaller improvements that we can implement relatively fast and that will have an immediate impact on your experience. At the same time, we’ve also identified the larger pieces of feedback (things like more content variety and the improvements to Relics I mentioned above, for example) that require more development time. They’re already on our radar and we’re actively working on them, but they’ll take longer to deliver.
In the meantime, here’s the list of QoL and community requested features you can expect in 1.1:
Dynamic Difficulty
We’ve noticed that many players don’t know that 33 Immortals scales its difficulty based on how many players are in a run, and that bosses also scale based on how many players survive the ascension battles. To help with this, we’ve added more information about Dynamic Difficulty directly in-game (in the Compendium, as Hints on the loading screens, as a reminder during the boss loading screen, and in the boss Training Room).
UI improvements based on players feedback
- The relic bag you get at the start of a run is more obvious. The starting relic often appears with a little delay, causing players to miss it entirely. The bag will now spawn before the player spawns and we added an indicator to relics that are out of screen to make them easier to locate.
- The pop-up for Weapon Upgrade drops has been made smaller. Some players find that it is too large and obstructs the view while they’re in the middle of combat. It forces them to just pick up the upgrade without even reading what it is to avoid dying in combat. We reduced its size and adjusted the UI layout.
- Downed teammates will be more visible. The current white-dot indicator for fallen players can be difficult to identify during chaotic encounters.
- Secret sigils will now have map icons, like Urns do. It will make them easier to find, since you have quests asking you to activate them.
- An armor icon has been added next to armored enemies to make it more obvious that they’re armored.
General quality of life improvements
- Inner Fire and the effects of all the other Relics is now explained in the Compendium
- The pick-up radius when picking up bones, eternal shards, healing and co-op power orbs has been increased
- Relic Chests in Chambers and Boss Chests will open a lot faster (1 second instead of 3 seconds)
- We will increase the Holy Fire timer to give you time to loot the last Chamber after the last Divine Retribution triggers
- The boss camera transition speed will be increased
- An icon for Tethers and Leashes will be added above the Rebel Soul to make it clear when a player is affected
- The Archives will show which weapon you had equipped in your previous runs
- XBOX players will be able to invite friends to a Private Session by clicking a button directly in-game instead of having to share a code with them
We also have a looooooong list of bug fixes coming up in the 1.1 update, addressing weapon, feat and combat issues, among other things. They’ll all be listed in the patch notes when the update drops.
COMMUNITY QUESTIONS
Should we expect more content for 33 Immortals?
Yes, the game will have more content, but we want to be transparent and manage expectations: our intention is to add variety to the game by adding new types of relics and boss variants with new sets of attacks. We don’t plan to add new worlds or new weapons to 33 Immortals at this stage. Aside from that, we’re also working on adding more quality of life features based on players feedback.
When should we expect this new content?
The release date of the next major update isn’t set yet, but we’re aiming for the end of the year. As soon as we have a more precise timeframe, we’ll let you know!
What will happen if/when player count drops? Will you maintain the servers?
Yes. There will always be at least one server up, like we had during Early Access.
I noticed that some servers opened and some others closed since launch: What’s up with that?
We monitor servers regularly and we sometimes decide to close a server and open another one depending on the player population. The period right after launch was the perfect window to experiment and find the best formula, that’s why you noticed a little server movement. We apologize if it caused any inconvenience!
Can I mod the game?
In theory yes, we’re happy to see the community want to add things to the game that would enhance your experience. In practice, the way the game is built doesn’t allow for modding so you might have a hard time. But you’re welcome to try! (please don’t break our game 🙏). I like to cite this fan-made project as an example of something that can be done fairly easily and that we love seeing.
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