April 2024: The Crimson Festival, Classline Rework, Terra’s Day and more!
Hey Travelers and Heroes,
Spring is officially here and we’re bringing with it tons of reasons to get outside and play!
In today’s blog update we’ll be covering this month’s events, a brand-new gameplay mode focused on environmental impact (and earnable sprite packs) and more, let’s dive in!
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Crimson Festival
Our full month event this month is the Crimson Festival!
Find and defeat acolytes of Cerus, Aries and Perseus across the world and within dungeons to gain the Essence of their particular leader. These Essences can then be used in the Monumental Guild under the Archcrafting tab to create Summoning Scrolls specific to the Crimson warrior of your choice.
With some of the best adornments in-game, this is a festival you do not want to miss out on!
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Terra’s Day
Terra, a planet from far away, lost centuries ago due to their people’s negligence of the lands. Gi, a traveler from Terra who brings with her a warning – the people of her planet have arrived to our own and their gluttony may lead us to a similar fate.
In this brand new event and game mode, travel across the world to combat this new environmental threat brought forth from those seeking refuge from the Terran calamity. Band together with other players to defeat Great Murk raids, receive Elm Essences and plant Light Elm trees which bear the Gaia Apple fruit for other players to collect across the globe. You can expect earnable sprite packs and loads of fun when this new game mode launches on April 22nd!
We’ll be sharing more details around this event as we get closer to Earth Day! This game mode was developed as our commitment to the 2024 Global Green Game Jam that Northern Forge Studios is participating in. If you’d like to learn more about this initiative visit the Playing4theplanet site!
The Terra storyline will continue throughout the year, and we aim to have our community participate in real world action to protect the environment, but more on that later!
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Classline Reworks
If you haven’t heard, we’re doing a revamp of all classes in the game. The goal of these changes are to provide more class identity from an earlier point in the game. You’ll see passives such as Collateral Damage or Avidity start from the beginning of the game now. You’ll also notice that the Valhallen classline will start much earlier in the game now, allowing the follower fans out there to start their Bestial Bonds earlier.
Some other changes include a sizeable rework to the Deity classline, bringing Apex skills to the game where you will charge up a meter to unleash some deadly damage upon your foes. The early mage classline is also getting Weaved Elemancy, which will allow their power to increase by cycling through different elemental spells in battle, offering more dynamic battles and spell usage. You may have noticed that we have been making larger identity changes to each classline over the last few months. While this update aims to add more identity to The Old Gods classline, we will be prioritizing an identity patch to the mage classline next.
We’ve been testing these changes in open beta for a few weeks now and believe we’re getting close to release, so expect more news on this very soon! As always, we’ll be keeping our eyes on how these changes affect players and will make adjustments as necessary.
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Mini-Events
We’ve got some great mini-events this month, including a double feature of Giant Steps in Orna to celebrate the warmer weather (in Canada at least). The lineup this month is as follows:
- Fool of April: April 1-2
- Giant Steps: April 7-10 (Orna Exclusive)
- Legend of Lyonesse: April 10-14
- Paths of Fomoria: House of Nocturna: April 10-16
- Orn Event: April 18-19
- Earth Week Giant Steps: April 23-26 (Orna Exclusive)
- Terra’s Day: April 22-30
- Sisters of Morrigan: April 25-30
- EXP Event: April 27-30
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Sprite Packs
This month also brings with it some seasonal sprite packs available for purchase. Check out the Crimson Festival Sprite Pack or the Legendary Sprite Pack of the month!
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To the Roadmap and Beyond!
If you didn’t catch it on our Discord announcements, we’ve updated everyone with a Q2 Roadmap. Since things move fast at the studio, we’re trying to create quarterly roadmaps that we can successfully deliver on for you! We’re moving steadily on development of a Territory Control rework called the Conqueror’s Guild. This new guild will allow for more players to engage in Territory Control from an earlier point in the game, while also retaining the highly competitive nature of the top level of territorial competitions.
We’re also working on a lot of quality of life fixes that folks have been asking for. We want to make sure the foundation of the game remains strong (and gets stronger) before building too many brand new systems. We’ve added a lot of features in the past year and want to make them the best they can be before going too far in any direction.
We’re also attempting to make both the worlds of Orna and Hero of Aethric feel more alive with Active Local Events, places where folks can congregate and work together to fight against dynamic events, leaning into the MMO design of the game.
Beyond that, we’re aiming to integrate more directly with your Apple Health dashboards to bring you more data, goals and accuracy with the Traveler’s Guild. We hope this gives users a better experience with the Traveler’s Guild and also gains us some traction on the iOS platform!
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That’s it for our monthly update. We hope you’re enjoying the transition into spring and also hope you enjoy the upcoming content and changes to both games! See you next time (or in Discord!)
