This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer. Hi there! Preparations are almost done with our Hardmode update, dubbed affectionately as The End Times. Hope you are as excited about it as we are! Last week, I called for some beta testers to play our initial attempt at Hardmode, to figure out how they felt about the whole thing. We got a few people through Discord, we added our own internal players and some of Versus Evil Heralds - our most vocal supporters in social media. Im always pleased to discuss game design and balancing with our players, and this event was quite productive already. Heres some of our takeaways: Presentation - Curses and Blessings: we introduced the Curses and Blessings screen when you clicked on the Hardmode banner at difficulty selection. This was deemed a bit odd: I already selected a difficulty mode, so whats with these customization tools? How do I just play Hardmode? was the overall feeling. We took that as a bad sign and changed how it's presented. Now, when choosing Hardmode, youll be presented with a second choice: Regular, or Hardmode+, which DOES feature the Curses and Blessings screen, as seen on our previous blog posts. We hope that clarifies it. Dire Wyverns Ambushes: if you played our game, youll know what Im talking about. Wyvern has this capacity of jumping behind your squishy characters to take a bite out of them. If your encounter started up with the enemies taking the first turn, that means you already have quite a problem on your hands! The issue came when Dire Wyvern did the same thing. The extra damage plus his Opportunist passive meant that he could melt down your characters before you could take a single action! Bad design! The simplest solution (which we also applied to regular Wyvern) was to add a starting cooldown to the skill, so it only comes into play around the second turn. While this helps, we also took a look at the map and made some adjustments for fairness. With so many maps, not all can be winners, eh? Keep an eye out for unfair situations, and let us know! Rewards when Abandoning a Run: This one is a bit fuzzy. As you know, Curses and Blessings require Essence to work, and we are going to reward players for playing Hardmode - the more zones you clear, the more Essence you gain. Now, something happened with one of our Discord players: after beating Behemoth in Albion, he ended up abandoning a run in Marca Hispanica. He was quite surprised to find out that, under our initial rule, youd only gain Essences after you lost a run! Abandoning, we reasoned, shouldnt be rewarded. Well, we talked it through a bit and decided to just let it be, for the sake of avoiding frustration: now, you earn the Essences even if you abandoned the run. Other Tweaks: we still made time to make some tweaks here and there. Rolands Horn is getting another iteration, Wilfred and Safir got some small buffs, Bleeding now has larger stack sizes, that sort of thing. Were also investigating some larger changes to the Supplies system, which well focus on after Hardmode is live. Keep an eye out for blog posts on that! And thats it for now! As were finishing up the biggest systems in the game and approaching a full release, feedback is quite important to polish up abilities and clarify UX. Thank you so much for the support so far. We still want to do another week of testing before we show you the final result, so we appreciate the patience, and if you havent, join our Discord server and watch The Hand of Merlin happen before your very eyes! Mat