MythForce Development Update – Power Progression

The latest development update for Beamdog’s roguelite adventure MythForce outlines the new power progression system the game will be getting as part of its upcoming metagame overhaul. There, instead of going down a fairly linear path of ten upgrades, we’ll be able to fine-tune our characters according to our preferences with the help of a new branching constellation system. And afterwards, we’ll keep upgrading their abilities for a long time with the help of special gems.

Here’s how this will work:

Greetings friends, Project Director Luke again. This time, let’s dig a little deeper into a few of our critical progression systems in the new Citadel of the Sun metagame for MythForce. Last week I mentioned the Sun Disc but didn’t go into detail, so let’s take a look at how it will change the way you build your character.

To understand where we’re going, let’s first talk about where we were.

Previously, your semi-permanent character upgrades were achieved through a rank system. Each run you earned XP based on how far into the adventure you progressed. Every few runs, you would rise to the next rank, granting you an infusion choice and—at certain milestones—an ability point or a Perk or Artifact unlock, up to Rank 10.

That meant there were 10 individual points of progression in the game. Once you made it to Rank 10, with the exception of some minor build choices, you would make your choice and never really go back. Many of the choices you could make were complementary only down one column or another. Although it was fun while you worked your way through the ranks, the system provided only a few minor “spikes” with very little change in between.

In this new version of the metagame, we focussed on giving you a sense of constant improvement and opportunity to upgrade or alter your build in subtle but powerful ways. We wanted to let you min-max or be as versatile as you want.

Welcome to the Sun Disc, a powerful monument built atop the arcane nexus that sits deep below the Citadel of the Sun. It harnesses celestial energy into life-giving magic, nourishing the land and ensuring that the province of Solaire is always verdant and prosperous.

The Sun Disc is where you meet Queen Ancilla, the benevolent ruler of Solaire and the greatest ally to MythForce. Using the power of the Sun Disc, she can help you grow in strength by harnessing magical gems known as Star Shards. Each of the Star Shards represent a core aptitude for the hero: rubies represent combat skill, sapphires defense, emeralds action resources, and topazes the power to use special abilities. You can find Star Shards throughout your adventures in the Cursed Lands. When you bring them back to the Citadel, you can place them in sockets representing the stars in your hero’s personal constellation.

Each hero has a unique constellation: Victoria the lion, Rico the raven, Maggie the owl, and Hawkins the scorpion. At each point in the constellation, a socket represents an aspect of the hero’s power, like physical or magical power. Each combination augments a different one of your attributes like physical defense, ability cooldown, or attack speed. These choices allow you to craft your character’s base stats into a build that supports your preferred play style.

Sockets are limited, and the distribution of socket types differs between each hero, so each character has unique potential suited to their personality. But the decision of which Shards to place in each socket means you still have fine control over exactly how the build complements your own skill.

Once you’ve placed Star Shards in all of your sockets, though, that’s only the first step on your journey. As you adventure, both through the quest to defeat Deadalus and through the many mythic tiers of difficulty, you will collect gems of increasing rarities that grant even greater improvements to your attributes. If you begin to find yourself with a surplus of one kind of gem, Queen Ancilla can help you use the power of the Sun Disc to fuse gems of lower rarities into higher, so it takes a very long time to end up with a currency you can’t use anymore.

We can’t wait to get these new systems into your hands. There’s still more to do before it’ll be “ready for prime time,” but we’re confident you’ll have a blast with it. The Sun Disc is just the first of several systems in our metagame designed to give you agency in how you grow in power while playing MythForce.

I’ll be focusing on weapons in the next blog, so stay tuned!