Hello! The day has finally arrived and The Big Update is here. Theres a bunch of stuff to get through and this post will just be covering the highlights. If youre the type of person who likes to know all the nitty gritty details, you can check out the patch notes here. Without further ado, heres whats new in The Big Update.

The Underlords Have Arrived

The Underlords (as in the folks we named the game after) have finally joined the fray after watching on the sidelines for months. Before every match youll choose an Underlord to lead your crew. Theyll fight alongside your heroes, fire off abilities, provide buffs, and grow stronger throughout each match. Each Underlord has their own set of unique Talents that can be picked as the match progresses these talents improve and unlock your abilities. Anessix and Hobgen have a total of 22 Talents each, and 11 are locked by default. Play games (bot games count) to unlock and discover the rest of the Talents available to you. For more information about Underlords, see our previous posts about the Underlords, Hobgen, and Anessix. Youll also be able to read about them in-game.

Duos Mode Battle with Your Buddies

With this update we are adding a new social game mode Duos. In this game mode youll party up with a friend and queue up with seven other teams of two (16 players total, if you were counting). You and your teammate will each be hiring and leveling your own crews, but now youll be able to help each other out by sending gold and heroes to each other. Watch out though, your health is also shared, as is your level. Battle is fought in pairs against other teams, and round damage is summed up. We are launching Duos with Casual matchmaking with plans to ship a Ranked Duos mode soon.

Freestyle Mode The Board is Your Test Lab

Weve also added a new mode were calling Freestyle. With Freestyle mode you can quickly set up and test different scenarios. Maybe you want to test out different theories for your own strategies, or maybe you want to put a new hero through its paces to learn what they do and how they fight in a battle. Or if youre like us you just want to see who would win between 32 Tomatoes and 32 Potatoes (Potatoes by a mile).

New Heroes for Hire, and New Alliances to Form

Insects, Healers, Brute, and Champion Alliances can now be formed, and favorite Heroes like Faceless Void, Io, Broodmother and Legion Commander are now for hire in the shop. In total, 12 Heroes have been added to the roster, filling out the new Alliances and padding a few of the existing ones. The team has also made a host of balance and gameplay updates to the rest of the Underlords roster, so head over to the patch notes for details if youre curious.

Too Many Heroes? Introducing JAIL

You may be asking yourself Wow, thats a ton of new heroes. How am I ever going to get anyone to Rank 3 in a match? We hear you, and the local law enforcement of White Spire also hear you. A random group of 8-12 heroes will now be detained in The Rookery for a day, and this group will update every day. To see whos in jail, and what theyre in there for, weve added jail buttons to the dashboard, the game-start panel, and the Shop. Not to worry though even though these heroes are in jail, all Alliances can still be fully completed.

New UI. So Fresh, So Clean

Meanwhile, the team has been overhauling our PC and Mobile user interfaces. From the new Dashboard (lovingly referred to internally as the Beautiful Corner), to the new notification message system (all yo-able of course), to the new full-featured in-game PC UI - weve worked hard to give the whole experience an upgrade. This is all in addition to the new interfaces to help you communicate with your Duos partner, set up experiments in Freestyle mode, pick Talents for your new Underlord, and all of the other new features that have been added in this Big Update.

A Note About Ranks

When this update rolls out, ranked play will be disabled for a few hours as we watch to make sure things are stable. Once we set ranked live, player ranks will be compressed a bit as part of the new update. Try to beat your previous record, or be the first to climb back to Lord of Whitespire. And thats all! Again, if youre someone who likes seeing all the nuts and bolts check out the full Patch Notes here.

[ 2019-10-24 18:46:37 CET ] [ Original post ]