October Community Update - Puzzle Quest 3

October sure flew by!

Since our last update, we intended for this community update to be released mid-month but as you can tell, this is a bit delayed! There isn’t a huge change in our 2022 Roadmap. But in case you forgot, here’s a refresher!

ROADMAP – September As mentioned, our 1.4 Update is being split into two parts. You can read more about that decision in our September Community Update. Let’s talk about the things we can share since that September update! A few changes are coming and based on some of the buzz from our community channels, we can tell you’re excited. With Season 1.4 just days away, we’re excited for upcoming changes in 1.4 and further ahead.

Going on an Adventure! 1.4.5 BAYBEEEE! The team is super excited to get this one out to you. So, we’ve teased it, but what is it? Well, we’ve been taking a little inspiration from the original Puzzle Quest with this one. You’ll learn the full details in the 1.4.5 Patch Notes, but the biggest thing we’d like you to know is… Not every journey is a straight line and not every Adventure is either! We will be bringing you branching pathways in Adventure! Maybe you want to battle, or visit the merchant, or stop for Fae Gifts. We’re very excited about Adventure and its potential for new game modes and Puzzle Quest experiences! More to come. 👀 Pivot! Pivoooooot! We have had the question come up in our community: “How do you choose what to work on and when?” This is a great question and we think it deserves the time for an answer from us. We would like to follow up with a more detailed dedicated explainer to give you a bit more insight into how we put things together. But, for now, to give a bit of an idea… We’re turning a ship, not a car. We approach updates by determining what our long-term goals are for the game and what we can do to get closer to those. We also need a reasonable lead time into updates because we do have to plan out big chunks of work and we need to make sure there’s design time ahead of that. When we say “We’re always looking at and taking in your feedback” we’re absolutely sincere. We’re looking at your feedback as well as our data (and how we feel about the game too). Where we go from there is working out either where we can slot those little quality of life items or, if several small pieces of feedback or trends are actually pointing to something bigger that might need a bigger solution. With that said, let’s take a look at where we’re at with the feedback we got from the 1.3 UI updates! Organization!

As you may have seen in our Patch Notes for 1.4, we’ve made some more changes to the Inventory UI based on some of your suggestions after 1.3. As you know we made a first pass of getting a few smaller changes in for the 1.3 hotfix. Now, we didn’t have time to implement everything this update, so we focused on a couple of things that we thought would have some bigger impacts for you folks:

Adding a Detailed View so you can see more information about your items in the inventory and their names
Updating the item borders to make the item rarity clearer (especially for spells) and adding the rarity colour to the ribbon on the icons

At this stage we’re aiming to follow up with some further changes in 1.4.5 including:

Changing the upgrades flow so Max Rarity is no longer the default
Adding additional Vault Filters for Rarity and Gear Set

And targeting some additional feedback in 1.5 such as:

How do we better show information for Attributes and Gear Sets?
How do we show more information about items being Salvaged?

This is obviously not our full list, but I can guarantee we have looked at the feedback we received across all platforms, have it recorded and are making sure we keep improving! But wait! There’s more! A couple of updates on items we know you’ve been waiting on: Darkhunter Rises Darkhunter’s Runes and Scrolls crafting is currently planned for 1.4.5 to join his first-batch buds. Kingdom Defense – Overkill Overkill in Kingdom Defense would be designed to tackle the issue of members of Kingdoms currently having to hold back so that everyone in the Kingdom can get a hit in on the Kingdom Defense boss. While we think it’s actually really nice that that’s how you folks have approached the issue, we know that’s not exactly the most fun way to play. We’re currently expecting to tackle this in 1.5. However, it may need some more design time than that. (To say that our dance card is very full right now is an understatement.) But this is something that both our CX team and our dev team are quite passionate about so we look forward to getting into it. In Space… No One Runs Out of Inventory… “New updates, new gear… Ah damn…” While some people never run into this issue, our collectors definitely do. We’ve said before that we wanted a more permanent solution to this issue than just increasing vault space ad-hoc. So, for 1.5, we have a Follower coming in to help with that! We’ll give you more details soon, but it’s right there on our list for you. That’s the wrap-up for October! Keep it spooky and we’ll see you in November! Enjoy your Halloween everyone! Need more discussion? Join the Puzzle Quest 3 community!