Greetings, friends! Project Director Luke here. It’s been a few.

In the past month, we’ve had the pleasure of bringing MythForce to a whole new audience by participating in the Steam Next Fest event, where we presented the 0.11.2.1 update both to our amazing early access community and to a deluge of fresh faces. It’s an absolute joy to see so many people getting their hands on the game for the first time, jumping into games to play with one another, and giving us a ton of great feedback. We’re using that feedback to tune a number of our systems so we’ll have the smoothest possible gameplay experience at 1.0.

We’re enjoying watching the community grow and seeing folks playing the game on streaming services. At the same time, we’re been hard at work pushing toward our big release date, which we announced recently with the animated cinematic intro to MythForce Chapter 2: Crypts of the Necromancer. That’s only one of two as-yet-unreleased chapters of MythForce you can play when we launch on all major platforms across the game-o-sphere.

So what lies in store for you on September 12?

Today I want to talk about some of the few remaining pieces around the modifications we’re making to the loot experience: trinkets and orbs. I also want to introduce the Emporium, where the plucky Argyrian Aquilar apprentice adventurer, Keaton, keeps a catalog of all of the trinkets you can find. He can also use his supernatural knack for finding “shinies” to help you find better ones on your adventures.

When visiting the Emporium, you’ll find a list of all of the trinkets and their powers. It’s an invaluable resource for learning about some of the most valuable gear to be found in your adventures. Even more importantly, the Emporium allows you to spend gold to “attune” with trinkets, increasing the likelihood that the ones you choose will appear in the dungeon at a higher rarity and—in the case of Mythic Tier attunement—even guarantee a higher minimum rarity.

For our full-release version of MythForce, trinkets have undergone an overhaul. While some of the artifacts that existed in older Early Access have been converted to perks, most of the rest have been repurposed to appear in the dungeon as trinkets. Each trinket now has a distinct look corresponding to its enchantment, and each trinket slot now has a specific role. Amulets bolster your resistances, bracers add to your ability to deal damage, boots improve your mobility, and charms provide strange and wonderful effects.

Alongside trinkets, you’ll also begin to see large, colorful orbs appearing on rare occasion within treasure chests and at the Merchant’s table. For those who’ve been playing since earlier in our Early Access, these orbs are the return of our Ability Upgrade system, which formerly lived within the metagame. Orbs, which appear in blue, gold, and red, grant the hero a choice of powerful upgrades to the heroes’ core abilities.

Where the ability upgrades were originally something you would spend a limited pool of ability points on to unlock, committing to all of your upgrade choices before an adventure started, this conversion to orbs offers less certainty from session to session but more choice on the fly, leading to strategic decisions of which upgrades to take and in what order.

Between the improved trinkets and the addition of orbs, each dive into the dungeon now offers more opportunities for the discovery of powerful loot that gives you the edge to take on the monsters you face on your journey through the Cursed Lands to defeat Deadalus.

Next time we’ll talk about how the adventures are evolving and how you’ll travel through the dungeon from the Bastion of the Beast Lord to your final confrontation with Deadalus.

Stay tuned!