Greetings, friends! Project Director Luke here. As of publishing this blog, we’ll be just shy of a month from our big launch.

It’s exhilarating, hopeful, and terrifying getting this close. I’m overjoyed at the response the game’s had so far, from the early days of Early Access right up until now, when the features of the game are locked in and the team is focused on finaling the game so it can be as polished, balanced, and bug-free as we can make it.

We’ve made massive improvements to the game thanks to the feedback you’ve offered via Discord, bug reports, and social media. Even compared to the demo we released only two months ago, the game has leapt forward light years in quality.

This time, as promised, I want to talk about the adventure you’ll embark upon as a hero of MythForce storming the Castle of Evil and how it’s improved with your feedback.

Throughout Early Access, we’ve presented Bastion of the Beast Lord as one long, three-floored adventure in which you always start on the sunny first floor and work your way through a number of combat rooms and set-piece events to the final confrontation with Beastor and the escape sequence afterward.

This has been a fantastic way to observe players and guide them through their adventure, but as we prepare for your journey through the second and third chapters, Crypts of the Necromancer and into the Cauldron of Bats, we’ve made some changes to the adventure structure.

Thanks to your feedback and our own observations, we’ve decided to address the repetitiveness of starting every adventure from the first floor every time. Depending on how thoroughly you explore and loot, a single run can take an hour or longer before you face Beastor. That’s a lot of times hearing, “My Minions will deal with you.”

We’ve decided that once you’ve cleared each floor, you’ve proven yourself. You deserve to skip forward to that next challenge, so we’re splitting that three-floor adventure into episodes within a chapter. Each episode is equivalent to one of the three floors you already know, but now taking about 20–25 minutes each to complete.

Chapter 1 of MythForce, Bastion of the Beast Lord, includes three episodes: “Thicket of Bones,” “Fungal Forces,” and “Savage Arena.” For each run, you can access the adventures you’ve already unlocked via the brand-new adventure map showing your journey through the Cursed Lands. Crypt of the Necromancer and Cauldron of Bats both also consist of three episodes that you can skip after completion.

This change allows us also to spruce up the individual run, balance it much more tightly, and add a little more structure, with added merchant rooms and, at the midpoint of each episode, a battle with one of our new minibosses.

To test your mettle (and provide extra shards and glyphs), mid-way through the episode you’ll now meet with some new enemies, like “Spore-takus,” the spore goliath, or “The Snipe,” an elite lizardfolk archer. Each is more powerful than a champion monster and should give you a nice run for your money. Speaking of money, after each miniboss fight and finale, you’ll find a big chest full of metagame goodies for your trouble.

You may also be asking yourself how we tackle the progression of power through overall shorter episodes: In this new structure, you’ll continue to receive perks and enchantments via post-combat-room shrines, around 12–15 in a single run, plus there are more upgrades available via perk shards and upgrade orbs at the merchant’s table, which now appear a few times each episode.

To balance the challenge of the deeper floors, we also bump up your starting level and grant some perks and enchantments at the start of later episodes to catch you up. It’ll still provide a tough challenge, but thanks to a few months of balancing by our design team, we’re confident that as long as you’re keeping up with your constellation and other upgrades in the citadel, you’ll find that challenge to be just right.

We’re looking forward to sharing the adventure with you very soon and seeing which episode is your favorite. Next time, let’s talk about some other balance changes and other improvements we’ve made in your moment to moment gameplay on the way to 1.0.

Stay Tuned!