In order to achieve these goals, we came up with something called Ancient Hunts, which take regular items and enchantment points as input and turn them into special missions via an intricate generator. Items and points invested this way are permanently lost. This directly impacts the game's economy and ties into our goal of increased player agency: Your input affects how the mission plays out – including which mobs spawn in the mission and which rare ancient mobs you may encounter (more on them below).
There’s still a degree of randomness and the missions themselves are highly procedural, but players have a means to affect the generation to achieve the outcome they want. Once generated, an Ancient Hunt can be played in one sitting or split across several play sessions.
Ancient mobs and Gilded gear
When thinking about how to approach the goal of secrets and rare rewards, we realized we needed a new type of reward. To fulfill this need, there would have to be many different versions of this reward, each of which should feel exotic and exciting.
Based on what we see in our own playthroughs – and when watching others play – specialized gear is some of the most sought after in the game. We decided to create a new gear type with highly randomized properties that gives good variety and significant impact: Gilded gear. These items come in common, rare, and unique varieties, and have additional randomized enchantments built in. Obtaining the rarest gilded items will be difficult, but the items are incredibly powerful!
As for the secrets part, we wanted the way you find these items to feel satisfying, varied, and challenging. To fulfill that goal, we added a large number of new “ancient mobs”. These are a more powerful type of enchanted mobs, each of which lives in their own area that you may encounter during the hunts.
Each ancient mob also has its own loot table, meaning gilded items of a given type can only be dropped by one specific ancient mob. Let’s say you wanted some gilded daggers – to find them, you would need to input the correct combination of items to encounter one specific ancient mob, and then defeat it for a chance to get the daggers.
Apocalypse Plus Changes
Alongside the introduction of Ancient Hunts, we're making significant changes to how Apocalypse Plus works.
The Previous Design
Just as with Ancient Hunts, we had a set of goals in mind when we first designed Apocalypse Plus:
Near-infinite perceived progression as a result of rapidly increasing difficulty.
Few players should ever reach the end of Apocalypse Plus.
Limited actual progression, such that we can add to it later down the line if needed.
To fulfill the first goal, we made mobs very powerful towards the end of Apocalypse Plus. Over the original twenty Apocalypse Plus levels, the difficulty curve shoots rapidly upwards behind the scenes, meaning damage, resistances, health, and other properties go up more than usual per step along the slider.
Our intention was to provide players with an experience where most players would reach partway through Apocalypse Plus and feel like there was a goal beyond the horizon – something to strive for. Only a relative few would ever reach +20.
For some players, this approach was successful. On the flip side, many of our players found builds and methods to reach all the way to Apocalypse +20 with relative ease. We noticed that this often included completing our shortest missions, such as Arch Haven. For these players, the design intent now caused a problem: Their recommended difficulty was expressly designed to be incredibly challenging, which meant that many missions did not feel rewarding to play. Seeing this, we wanted to adjust the design of Apocalypse Plus to be more interesting for all types of players.
New Apocalypse Plus
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