PTR Release: “December PTR Update”

Happy holidays, friends! Project Director Luke here for one more update before the end of 2022. It’s been a really amazing year for the Beamdog team, having launched MythForce back in April, and with all of the updates leading us to where we are today. While we’ve been regularly continuing small updates to the main branch of the game, a number of experiments continue in the background. We’re going to share just a tiny sample of them with you today in the form of an update to the PTR build.

The main focus of this update is to improve the combat experience in the PTR, particularly surrounding the experience of using weapon loadouts, which we know has been a topic of much discussion. We have started by reducing some of the restrictiveness of our loadout selections and demoing one possible path for weapon selection and upgrades in the future of the metagame. For each character, there are a small handful of “loadout archetypes” to choose from. These are still hand-built at this point, but they represent one idea of how weapons can be improved through the metagame.

This is only the tip of the new game systems’ iceberg, but we hope that you enjoy this small glimpse into the future of MythForce while we continue to work on rebuilding the metagame. Please refer to the notes below for more details.

Improvements

Updated weapon loadouts

• Each character now comes equipped with a secondary weapon in each weapon loadout.
  • Weapons can be swapped instantly with a button press (Default Middle Mouse on Keyboard + Mouse, D-Pad Up on Controller).
  • For this PTR, secondary weapons are pre-selected per loadout.
  • Secondary weapons do not currently receive enchantments from weapon upgrade reward shrines.
  • Secondary weapons level up together with primary weapons.
• Weapons now level up automatically after interacting with some reward shrines during the course of your adventure, instead of only when interacting with a weapon upgrade shrine.

• Each loadout now has an additional benefit that represents what upgrading weapons in the metagame might feel like.
  • Victoria can select from the following loadouts:
    • Balanced Knight:
      • Primary Weapon: Sword & Shield
      • Secondary Weapon: Bow
      • Hitting an enemy with Shield Sling will temporarily “mark” them. If the marked enemy is defeated, Shield Sling’s cooldown will be refreshed immediately.
    • Control Oriented Knight:
      • Primary Weapon: Mace & Shield
      • Secondary Weapon: Bow
      • Reduces the cooldown for the Vanguard ability, and all perfect blocks with the shield against melee attacks inflict daze and knockback to all nearby enemies.
    • Blaster Sword:
      • Primary Weapon: Greatsword
      • Secondary Weapon: Bow
      • Victoria’s Greatsword comes pre-enchanted with the “Blasting” enchantment, firing an exploding projectile forward on power attacks.
  • Hawkins can select from the following loadouts:
    • Sniper:
      • Primary Weapon: Bow
      • Secondary Weapon: Sword
      • Hawkins’s bow shots do increased critical damage.
    • Rapidshot & Melee:
      • Primary Weapon: Bow
      • Secondary Weapon: Sword
      • Hawkins does damage when pushing with his bow, based on the number of arrows that are sticking out of their bodies.
    • Trident Shot:
      • Primary Weapon: Bow
      • Secondary Weapon: Sword
      • Hawkins’s bow comes pre-enchanted with the “Trident Shot” enchantment, firing 3 arrows in a fan on every shot.
  • Maggie can select from the following loadouts:
    • Fire Spellbook:
      • Primary Weapon: Fire Spellbook
      • Secondary Weapon: Dagger
    • Ice Spellbook:
      • Primary Weapon: Ice Spellbook
      • Secondary Weapon: Dagger
    • Electric Spellbook:
      • Primary Weapon: Electric Spellbook
      • Secondary Weapon: Dagger
  • Rico can select from the following Loadouts:
    • Speed Blades:
      • Primary Weapon: Sword & Dagger
      • Secondary Weapon: Bow
      • After successfully performing a perfect parry with the dagger, Rico’s speed is temporarily increased.
    • Dueling Dagger:
      • Primary Weapon: Sword & Dagger
      • Secondary Weapon: Bow
      • Successfully performing a perfect parry with the dagger has a vampiric effect, restoring some of Rico’s HP.
    • Backstab Assassin:
      • Primary Weapon: Sword & Dagger
      • Secondary Weapon: Bow
      • After successfully landing a backstab critical hit, rico’s critical damage is temporarily increased.
• Adjusted Maggie’s infusion tree to reflect that all of her Primary weapon loadouts are spellbook.
  

Improved Perk Filtering

• Perks are now filtered by both character and selected weapon loadout, so you should not receive any perk choices that are irrelevant to your carried equipment.

Reward Tuning

• Tuned the following room-end rewards:
  • Removed Hard/Hard room selection pairs.
  • Reduced the instance of non-branching rooms.
  • Blood gems are no longer included in the list of room-end rewards.
• Increased the spawn rate of trinkets from treasure spawners.
• Monsters now drop more loot when defeated.
  • Common enemies can now drop gold when defeated.
  • Elite enemies can drop gold, meta gems, and trinkets when defeated.

Additional Changes

• Updated the PTR to be up to date with bug fixes & content released in Content Update 10.
  • You can review the patch notes for update 10 at https://bit.ly/mythforceupdate10
• Added a pop-up panel with a note about the PTR build.
• Disabled quests.
• Disabled rank progression in post-game results.
• Stamina now recovers exponentially instead of at a linear rate, significantly improving the pace of combat.
• Improved controls for the MythForce Overdrive feature.
  • The MythForce Overdrive key (Default M) is now remappable in the options menu.
  • MythForce Overdrive can now be executed with a controller (Default L3+R3).

A Note on Saved Games

PTR save games are distinct from Retail branch save games and so should not interfere with one another. Saved games for this PTR branch have the words “PROTO5” appended. Save games between the main branch and the PTR are not compatible.

If you played the 0.9.0.0-PTR1 build, there will be “PROTO4” saves present in your save folder. Those can be safely deleted, as they will no longer be usable in the new PTR.

Full list of known issues found here -> https://bit.ly/ptrknownissues