Stoneshard - Final Preparations

Ink Stains Games share their progress, new features and their future plans as Stoneshard is about to release City of Gold.

Devlog: Final Preparations

Hello everyone!

The City of Gold update is soon to be released: the approximate time is 21:00 MSK, November 18th. Right now is a good moment to give a summary of the progress we've made, talk about the update's new features and what will be added to the game until the end of the year, and also discuss our plans for the future development of Stoneshard.

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What's next?

We plan to release a series of patches and small updates over the course of December and January to polish the existing content and add some new stuff. This will mostly affect Brynn: we want to introduce interiors to every house and add at least half a dozen extra buildings. In February you can also expect a small surprise on the second anniversary of the game's Early Access release - but more about it later…

After we finish all that, we'll start working on the Rags to Riches update, which will flesh out the global map and introduce two new Ability Trees to the game - Armor and one of the magic schools (we'll share the details later).

Wizard's Fate, the update coming after Rags to Riches, will almost be entirely dedicated to magic - other than new magic schools, Wands, and Magic Mastery, we'll also implement new systems that will make playing as a sorcerer not as easy and serve as a foundation for the full-fledged character generator. […]

More information.

I have this and played very little as I await release.

The Steam reviews have been trolled because of the delay, apparently, so they're not reliable. I quickly looked but I haven't found any recent review or first impressions.

I'm keen on this one, have been for quite a while, yet still waiting until it's actually fully released and patched a few dozen times.

Didn't realize this was still in EA all this time. For some reason I thought it had been released awhile ago.

This is an interesting game. It's tough-as-nails and I say this as somebody who grew up on Wizardry, Bard's Tale and the like. It's sitting in my wishlist and I will probably grab it as soon as I get bored with the current crop of games I'm playing. (I should say, it was tough-as-nails to me when I played the free Prologue demo they have out. YMMV. Hell, MMMV now.)

It's a roguelike, and apparently most of the negative reviews are people just stating that the development on the game is slow.

Development is amazingly slow, considering they've had the mechanics in place for a couple years.
It's definitely a roguelike's roguelike. I was copying save files to dodge the permadeath.

My main gripe with roguelikes is that you see the early game a hundred times, the mid-game 5 or 6 times, and the end-game once, or zero times. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, since I assume the developers put some effort into that endgame only a handful of players get to see.

I personally don't understand the appeal of roquelikes. I get that lots of people enjoy them but I just don't - and I've tried quite a few over the years. Dying/failing repeatedly via permadeath (or whatever mechanic) as part of the core game loop simply isn't fun for me. A large part of that is what screeg pointed out - a feeling of increased repetition. I know, most game designs are built on some degree of repetition - and I've loved many games who rely heavily on that… but those often mask that via a sense of player progress that I find roguelikes undermine.

Anyway, Stoneshard is a game I like the look of and I kind of enjoyed the original demo - but not certain I'll try it again with the emphasis on roguelike. If you don't mind roguelike mechanics then it looks like a pretty cool game.

Originally Posted by screeg
Development is amazingly slow, considering they've had the mechanics in place for a couple years.
It's definitely a roguelike's roguelike. I was copying save files to dodge the permadeath.

My main gripe with roguelikes is that you see the early game a hundred times, the mid-game 5 or 6 times, and the end-game once, or zero times. This doesn't make a lot of sense to me, since I assume the developers put some effort into that endgame only a handful of players get to see.

Its called front loading.
First 1/3rd of games are better than remainder combined. Happens in a large percent of releases.

My mistake, EA is not finished just yet. They're releasing a big update, not the final game.

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?
"We expect to release the game in late 2022 / 2023 approximately."

So that says to me at least a minimum of another year, or perhaps a bit longer.

Originally Posted by Carnifex
So that says to me at least a minimum of another year, or perhaps a bit longer.

Yeah I would say you're probably not too far off. Though I believe their development has been fairly steady if not particularly fast. I have tried a new character class with every update and so far I've had a lot of fun though I haven't tried the newest update yet.

You think with all the games I have in my backlog that I would give this a pass until it's finished but there's just something about the gameplay Loop that just makes me come back every time they do an update.