Hi all, It's Robert again - but now, I've put on my "game designer" hat and tackled the Final Boss! (To help out our other game designer who is, of course, knee-deep in the mucky innards of Endless Mode.) In any case, we had heard feedback that the battle of Jerusalem felt a little lackluster. We had also heard from some players that they didn't feel much of a pull to do another run after having beaten the game once or twice. So, we sought to change that. We set out to accomplish these two things: 1) Make the final battle feel more epic, and more engaging. To achieve this, the mechanics of the final battle are now quite different. Of course, all the recognizable elements are still there: there are still Pylons, and you still have to use the Holy Grail to strip the Pylons of their immortality, and you still feed the Grail mana by killing Abominations that keep pouring in. But this is where the similarities end! Before, each Pylon was relatively easy to kill, and while they came in ten different flavors, their differences did not really require you to change up your approach. Other than that, the boss itself was just a background entity which did not participate in battle directly. But the new, redux'd battle will have you face off against the eldritch monstrosity head on! The fight itself has 3 main phases. The first phase is a single Mega-Pylon: a massive, living structure, with a lot of Health/Armor and tons of damage potential. There are two variants, and both have unique reaction abilities that you cannot ignore. One will prepare a ray attack against the attacker each time it's hit, meaning you have to be careful with your action points or you'll get stuck in the blast zone and ripped apart. The other will spawn a temporary cover underneath the attacker, knocking them back, and then prepare a nova-style blast, damaging anyone not in cover. Again, care must be taken! But - both of these powerful attacks will also damage other Abominations, meaning you can make these Mega-Pylons work for you through careful positioning. And you will need to do this, as the wave spawning is relentless. But remember, every kill gets you a point of mana, which lets you power up the Grail and wreak holy havoc with it. :) The second phase is another of these Mega-Pylons (the variant you didn't see in Phase 1). These first two phases are really there to teach you the mechanics and not overwhelm you, while also giving you a chance to deal some damage and/or break immortality on the Pylons, before finally, the Boss itself emerges... And then you face off against all three at the same time! Without going into too much detail about what exactly the Boss does, let's just say it should make the battlefield feel dynamic with ever-shifting covers, while also drawing power from any Pylons left alive. Make sure to read those tooltips! ;)
2) Make winning a run feel more rewarding. As for this point: well, if the final battle itself feels more engaging, that's certainly rewarding in and of itself. But, we wanted to do even better! So, we're adding special rewards that you can gain by defeating the final boss: new skills and relics that you can unlock and add to the random pool! So completing a run successfully means you have new toys to play with in the following runs. Yes, this means we'll also be adding new abilities to complement and augment the skills you can already learn through ranking up. These won't just be variations of the same abilities; we've coded in some new mechanics, too. And the design principle between these additions has been one particular pillar of design: teamwork. Or in other words: more synergies between classes! But more on that topic in a later blog post. So there you have it. Pretty big changes are coming up! Let us know what you think about these on our Discord server or here on Steam. Robert