Development update for Martyr - a letter from our Producer

17

Dear Inquisitors,

As many of you already know, Martyr has been scheduled to release on May 11. We have to give you some good and bad news regarding this announcement so you will be able to clearly see the progress made within the game in the upcoming two months.

Since May 11 is pretty close, you will not have to wait an awful lot until you can get your hands on the final and polished game that you have been supporting all along, so we'd ask for just a little more patience until then.

As per our usual style, let's begin with the bad news. 

Until the release, Martyr will not have any more live Steam updates.

The reason behind this is that the public (Steam) and the developer (internal) builds of the game have been starting to get separated quite long ago. This means that since we are working on a great number of things at the same time, numerous features will be (or already are) more or less ready at the same time, and we are assembling the pieces of the puzzle with such speed that makes preparing frequent public Steam releases impossible. By the time a Steam build would go through a beta testing-release phase, it would change by a great deal internally - and now we are unable to keep the separate bits of the game on separate coding branches, because that would disallow us to actually close up the game and polish/fine tune it.

This was a hard spot for us where we had to make a decision - and it was quite obvious from the get-go that there is no really good decision in this situation, since you guys were a tremendous help during Early Access and the Founding, and we did not want to leave our supporters without content during this last bit of development. However, we do not want to risk building public releases as although we have enough time to finish the game until the deadline, but we do not have the time to pour resources in preparing Steam builds that will become outdated by the second they are released. Of course, we still have tons of work to do, and many of us are already pulling 80+ hour weeks, as it usually goes during crunch time.

The good news is that until its release, Inquisitor - Martyr will undergo numerous beneficial changes based on your feedback: 

  • Monster and Skill Rebalance
  • New unit system (including the boss system displayed in our latest video)
  • Redesigned and rebalanced loot and leveling
  • The rest of the campaign with more cutscenes and videos
  • Leveling and endgame builds of classes and subclasses
  • Loads of artifact effecs and traits
  • Numerous new terrain types
  • New units
  • Vehicular combat


What's even more cool is that many of these things (that are not at all in the current live Steam build) are already at a high state of completion internally and these features are undergoing testing as we speak. We will post a detailed description of these upcoming features soon so you guys will know what to expect at the release and afterwards.

And one more thing - our communication team will go into overdrive for these two months, documenting development during crunch time, so you guys will receive tons of information about what goes on in the office and in the Caligari Sector.

So, to summarize: just a little bit more patience guys, as we have less than two months until release. Of course, we can not stress enough how much you guys are helping us during development, so thank you for each and every comment, critique, and insight that you guys have made to make this game a hell of a lot better.

We really hope that your feedback will help us in releasing an awesome game on May 11.

The Emperor Protects,

Zoltán Pozsonyi
Producer

This post was modified 6 years 146 days ago by Morzan
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Development update for Martyr - a letter from our Producer
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6 years 187 days ago
At least I´m looking forward to this game. No doubt about that. One thing though which i find a bit disturbing even maybe, is that Official Release is 11th of May. But in Retail Stores like Gamestop and Gamezone they say and do hope for 22nd and 25th of May.

So what is actually the case here is that it becomes very diffused. Makes me go: When IS the Official Release of this game? Why do Neocore say 11th and Gamestop and Gamezone say 22nd and even 25th of May?

Everywhere it is the 11th. Which I do indeed believe it to be. Then why does Gamestop and Gamezone comes with release dates around 2 weeks laters? Is it really so that it will release as Digital Download on the 11th of May, but the stores won´t sell it until that much laters? Explain please. Getting confused here.

6 years 189 days ago
+3
Posted by Irrelewahnt 6 years 209 days ago
Nothing that wasn't expected already. I'm still not on the positive side of things. Your EA builds were internaly tested and if the finall release will have the same quality of testing we'll be fubar.

EA builds were internally tested by some staff. This was to get them ready to play on and stable. Not to get them 100% bug free. The reason the patches launched with bugs was often not due to the testing process. Many of these bugs were known when pushing patches live but the priority was to put them out quickly rather than have numerous delays. Once pushed live fixes on many occasions were implemented on the forthcoming version. You might not like it, but that's what happened. 


The final game however is being tested by a hired QA team. The focus on fixes, shifted completely to the current build they have.


Just saying there's notable difference between the situations and ample reason to discount the same results will happen.


This comment was edited 6 years 189 days ago by Airsick Hydra
6 years 189 days ago
Throst

 psyker weak? seriously? He can drop a boss in 2-3 seconds. So..

6 years 198 days ago
Posted by Arazel 6 years 208 days ago
I'm not going to lie, the road so far has been rocky but what did we expect from an EA.

I've been with you since day 1 (I think) and from where the game started in its jerky and glitch mess to where it is now I'm genuinely chuffed to see how far the game has come and really a looking forward to the games full release.

I'm even more stoked to hear about the loot re balancing and the addition of more enemies and proper made up to hear about the addition  of vehicular combat and all the other balancing and tweaks that are being made to the game.

Again cant wait for the full release.

Keep up the great work.


PS.


Happy as a pig in s**t to hear about the ORKS coming to the game sometime in the future.

BRING ON THE WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!

You misspelt WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!

6 years 198 days ago

Will the Inquisition's Ordos play any part in the game, or will the character be independent?

6 years 203 days ago
Will there be a character wipe when this game goes live on May 11th?
6 years 204 days ago
+2

As my old dad use to say; "Small tits are ridiculous ..." well thats not the point...

Overall good reasoning.

Overall good game.
Looking forward to see the final product.

6 years 204 days ago
I hope pvp be available. Blizzard show pvp arenas before release then ... cancel pvp after release and promise pvp as additional content after.  Its void promise.


BTW Nemesis ? Maybe special characters like Necrons Nightbringer :P.  Which languages be avalaible on release date ?


Regards, ASR.

6 years 207 days ago
+2
Irrelewahnt

I've been having the same fear for months.

Seeing the state of the various updates, I was hoping they would put the final release in beta testing before the end of the EA, in order to limit bugs.

Game at release will be a big unknown:

- will the new content be bugged and balanced?

- will the old content be bugged and balanced?

- will the content they stopped communicating about be present?

- will PvP be present?


I know they said they will increase the communication in the next month.

But the communication has not been that great in the last months. We've been without real news in Autumn while waiting for the November update. When it finally arrived, in January, the reply to know when the end of the content planned for the update would come, the answer was that an updated roadmap would arrive "soon". The roadmap never came. It's no longer needed but it's still a missed promise.

They need really need to step up on the communication, to show where they are going with the game.

6 years 208 days ago
+2
I'm not going to lie, the road so far has been rocky but what did we expect from an EA.

I've been with you since day 1 (I think) and from where the game started in its jerky and glitch mess to where it is now I'm genuinely chuffed to see how far the game has come and really a looking forward to the games full release.

I'm even more stoked to hear about the loot re balancing and the addition of more enemies and proper made up to hear about the addition  of vehicular combat and all the other balancing and tweaks that are being made to the game.

Again cant wait for the full release.

Keep up the great work.


PS.


Happy as a pig in s**t to hear about the ORKS coming to the game sometime in the future.

BRING ON THE WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!

6 years 209 days ago
-4
Nothing that wasn't expected already. I'm still not on the positive side of things. Your EA builds were internaly tested and if the finall release will have the same quality of testing we'll be fubar.
6 years 209 days ago
No bad news for me here, i'm happy that in a month this awesomeness will take flesh
6 years 209 days ago

I mean it makes sense why you can't do any more updates, so I'm not too bothered by it. I have plenty else to do in the meantime anyway. :P


  • Numerous new terrain types
  • New units

This is probably one of the big things I was worried about before, the current lack of variety in enemies and terrain types was making it a bit tedious, especially after a year, but I'm glad to hear more stuff will be coming!

This comment was edited 6 years 209 days ago by Allerka
6 years 209 days ago

During long periods of silence, Mighty Snakefist used chicken entrails as a proven future prediction method and have known. The decision is Wise and is Supported by Snakefist, fully. Information sharing, reduced in one period, is important - seeing some of new units or any screenshot with new stuff is a powerful teaser, raising positive atmosphere among the community - much more than one more crippled build could do (in fact, the whole question of advantages having it is debatable). 

Just, please, make the teasers coming - even in most rudimentary way - knowing something will be here soon is nearly as good as having it in reduced, unfinished form in EA.

Snakefist, for example, wants all those systems! Not 6, but locked ones and more! It's apparent that EA won't ever have it. It's apparent that EA won't have 2500+PL system or artifacts. Or two remain levels of crafting. But they can be shown in teasers!

From current standpoint, it looks as if they won't exists, and minimal effort of small teasers will assure players that they will, and that they will be awesome.

This comment was edited 6 years 209 days ago by SnakefistIfSo
6 years 209 days ago

This is perfectly understandable.

But i have three major problems for me:

First the pshyker is too weak !!!

Because it is currently unusable for the campaign!
In other Arpgs, the caster classes are in very weak in close combat but their spells are balance their weakness.

There is a weak close combat and only 3-4 of the warp skills that can be usefull.

The hit and run tactics can not be used because the negative warp strikes kill during retreat.

It might be that the warp heat bar might increase the amount of damage and armor as much as a percentage.

Example: 80% warp heat plus 80% damage for weapon and 80% armor.


Second is the quantity and variation of weapons.

I know we have not seen what's going to be in the final version, but there are not enough Dakka.

The skills of the weapons could be randomized as I read many forums that there is no joy in the loot.

For example, if you know the skills that belong to the guns, you are only looking at the PR rating and moving on.


Third is the balance!
Alpha has very serious balance problems.
You feel a little bit of a disagreement about what the developers want.
Sometimes too easy arcade gameplay sometimes has x-com threatening difficulties. (Same PWR. level!!!)
When the new impossible level i complete a mission with assassin character easylie. Then, on a normal level I died. XD

In totaly:
Somehow I do not feel like van helsing or diablo might be grim dawn. I feel like the devs wants to much it, but that's why there is no consistent picture.
Everything is a small one, with lots of gameplay modes, level system reform, but it's at the expendable of characters, skills and invertory.

Maybe already answers my problems:

  • Monster and Skill Rebalance
  • Redesigned and rebalanced loot and leveling
  • Leveling and endgame builds of classes and subclasses
  • Loads of artifact effecs and traits

I hope you Neocore!

This comment was edited 6 years 209 days ago by Throst
6 years 209 days ago
So...what is the bad news? The release date is important. Thats all. 
6 years 209 days ago
+1
will wait patiently :)