Greetings, Merchants! We recently released patch v0.7 for The Merchant’s Guide to the Kingdom which introduced the Logbook, a replacement/enhancement for the tutorial, and a complete revamp of the Storefront experience as well as some other small additions like town portals and group summons for dungeons. Now, we wanted to give you all more insight into the following months of development as we push into our full v1.0 launch, and exit Early Access! [b]Stonehaven[/b] In the current state of Early Access, your starting city is Terafell. However, Terafell is a place you won’t even discover in the final launch version until about half way through the campaign. There is a whole first half to the game that no one has seen yet! Early Access takes place in the Black Forest, the second half to Chapter 1 of the launch version campaign, but the first half will take place in The Hearth, the originally planned starting zone, where you will find Stonehaven, your actual starting city. As we have mentioned in previous State of the Game’s, Stonehaven is a massive city, sprawling over more than 4x the area as Terafell, and it has several features housed within the city itself. We don’t want to give too many details on these features yet, but within Stonehaven you will have access to many of the buildings you are already familiar with such as the Blacksmith, Tailor, Lumberyard and Mystic. However, be ready at launch or shortly after to interact with more new buildings such as the grand Colosseum, a Church, the King’s Castle, a Bank, a dedicated Inn, an Alchemist, Homeless Alley, and yes, some other special buildings like a Pet Shop and even Stables! Each of these buildings will be bringing a new and exciting feature to the game! Stonehaven is a monumental city which will greatly impact the way you play the game, however, we also intend to ensure that the start of the game is a lot more accessible and easier for new players to grasp on to. This means that along with the Stonehaven patch, we will be rolling out a new starting questline. We are very aware of some of the difficulties in learning what The Merchant’s Guide to the Kingdom is, and always knew that with some of the things we are attempting, helping people lean into the game would be one of the greatest challenges, though we are confident that once we get the new introduction questline in, along with the new Logbook and the much cleaner and more readable UI, the game will be easier than ever to get into for new players. [b]Crafting Stations[/b] When we first launched Early Access, if you wanted to craft something at the Blacksmith, Tailor, Lumberyard or Mystic, you used to have to physically be at the crafting station as the Merchant. However, player feedback made it clear how tedious that became with frequent crafting, and we agreed. As a result, we removed the requirement to be at the crafting stations and allowed players to craft for all stations from anywhere using a single UI sheet. As a side effect, this has removed the intrigue from the physical locations for these crafting stations, but we still wanted to have some relevance to these locations. We have some plans to remedy this! First, we are going to introduce Passive Gatherers. More on them in the following section. Second, we are going to turn these crafting station NPCs into their own “Profession Vendors”. Each crafting station NPC (The Blacksmith, Tailor, Lumberjill and Mystic) will have their own set of special items for sale. This can be special gear, unique recipes, valuable currencies, and many other surprises tied in with upcoming features. Each NPC will also have a profession level which you can increase through various tasks or favors in order to gain access to some of the more powerful things you can purchase. [b]Passive Gatherers[/b] Along with the profession level and special purchases from the Blacksmith, Tailor, Lumberyard and Mystic, each station will grant you access to Passive Gatherers. These are dedicated units which will gather materials for you pertaining to the relevant crafting station. For example, you may unlock a Lumberjack for the Lumberyard, or a Seamstress for the Tailor. These units will generate materials for you passively to help supplement your collecting outside of the normal methods. There will be different ways to enhance these gatherers and improve their production, as well as other perks available through each of them. You will be able to collect what has been gathered from each gatherer at the appropriate crafting station where they will be housed at any time, and even have a chance at the more rare materials as you progress their gathering capabilities. [b]Merchant Talents[/b] One of the largest major features coming to the game is Merchant Talents. This will be a system which allows you, as the player, to mold your realm how you see fit, adding extra benefits to many different gameplay mechanics to cater your gameplay to your own playstyle. You will earn many talent points throughout your gameplay doing various activities, as well as simply leveling up your Merchant. Each talent point you earn, you will be able to manually place within a massive talent tree to change how effective some systems are, as well as potentially changing how something may function entirely. For example, if you really love the Crystalline Converter and you want to make that your main source of generating materials instead of just using it as a side source, you may build your talent tree around that to make the Crystalline Converter much more powerful in many different ways. Really want to empower your Merchant so you can take many more matters into your own hands? With the Merchant Talent tree, you will be able to do so by increasing your Merchant movement speed under certain circumstances, and increasing your Merchant gather speed with better chance of rare materials, plus much more. We are beginning work on the Merchant Talent Tree very soon, and can’t wait to reveal just how impactful the system will be on your playthroughs! [b]Merchant Activities[/b] As of right now, you are a humble Merchant and you spend the majority of your time safely nestled away at your shop. This makes sense, but we have heard the call from many of you saying that you want to be a more daring Merchant and make more direct impacts on your progress. For this, we are going to introduce Merchant Activities. Need just a few more Fir Logs, but don’t want to wait for someone to bring it to you? Run out and collect it yourself! Have a good feeling about a location you want to Explore to try and uncover some rare Discoveries? Go out and take a look for yourself! Merchant Activities will allow you as the Merchant to take most matters in the game into your own hands and speed up or supplement your gains. There may even be some special things that only you with your keen Merchant eye can discover! Of course, this goes hand in hand with the Merchant Talents, which will allow you to enhance your abilities if you so desire. [b]Hero Talents[/b] We have mentioned before that Hero Talents will be making its way into the game. However, we have recently had a discussion which we believe takes the system into a much better direction in just about every way. We love talent trees and the versatility that a well built talent tree can bring, however, we believe the Merchant Talent tree will bring a massive variety to the game, and having an individual talent tree for the hundreds of heroes you will eventually have in your Realm would simply be overwhelming, so we are discussing a new system we are currently calling Runes and Runic Powers. Unfortunately, we don’t want to reveal too much about this system yet, as it is in the early stages of planning, but the system will allow a lot more uniqueness for each hero without being too taxing on the process you need to go through as a player to accomplish it. Runic Powers will also be tied to the Star Ranking of a hero, which means you will have much more reason to grow the star ranking of your heroes. Gathering Runes and their Runic Powers will be a task in itself, but as you gather and strengthen each Rune, you will benefit your entire realm in powerful and unique ways that you get to choose for each officer. Along with the addition of Runes and Runic Powers, we will be adding more abilities for each hero specialization to further diversify the roles they each play in a group. [b]Challenge Rift[/b] Another major feature that will be coming into the game is under the working title of “Challenge Rift”. This is a feature that will essentially provide access to fresh and interesting challenges for the player at any given time throughout their playthrough. The rift itself will be in a simple and convenient location, but will allow you to send heroes to many various challenges while earning special rewards. It will be introduced to the player in the early game, but will progress in difficulty and rewards well beyond some of the most difficult content in the campaign storyline. The portal doesn’t open up to normal challenges, though, and will present you with unique monsters, affixes and environments which will require some clever thinking or specific strategy to overcome. There will also be some unique and interesting ways that you yourself can modify the current challenge you’re facing, or forgo it entirely if the challenge is too great. At a cost, of course. Is there an end to the rift? We may never know. [b]The Future[/b] With all of that said, we wanted to set some specific expectations for the coming few months of development. While we do plan to release features as they are finished and not hold on to them behind the scenes for any amount of time, many of the coming features are tied behind the Stonehaven patch which could still be 2-3 months out, or even longer. This means that while we are not going to cease patching the game for balance and smaller features, we are not expecting any more major content or patches until the release of the Stonehaven patch. However, the patch itself is going to be by far the largest patch we have ever released. Even larger than when we entered Early Access by introducing the first half of Chapter 1, a whole new end game zone, and many other activities outside of the standard storyline. It will also be the final major patch before we transition to full launch and we are expecting that, following the Stonehaven patch, most of what should be remaining for launch will be centered around polishing, balancing and bug squashing. Please note, that this is NOT a release date or even a release window announcement! While we do have a specific timeframe for most features to be completed, we are a limited resource team, and we want to ensure that when we do officially launch, we are as polished, balanced and bug free as possible, and we cannot release an official launch date until we are confident that we have this accomplished. Thank you so much for reading this latest State of the Game! We have so much more coming, and we are thrilled to say that we don’t have much longer to go until we are able to get the final version of Chapter 1 into your hands and start revealing how much more we have planned for future Chapters! -Devs