Counter Spell
Update v1.2.15
-Equipping a Staff in your primary weapon slot now increases Arcane Bolt, Healing Bolt, Lightning Bolt, Frostbolt, Inferno, & Arcane Barrage damage
-Grenades, Wildfire, and Mines now scale with their user's Power stat. Base damage decreased slightly.
-Instant Traps: Now require something to set them off
-Arcane Barrage: Now fires more often. Overall dps remains the same. Spread is more balanced.
-Conviction: Now only lasts for 10 seconds. (Down from 15)
-Holyball: Now does reduced damage against players in PvP, self-heal delay increased from 0.50s to 0.75s
-Lightning Vortex: Now fires in three directions, but less frequently
-Conjure Food: If inventory is full you will now eat the item or drop it if health is at max
-Master Arcanist now affects Arcane Barrage. Effect reduced from 25% to 20%
-Increased Spider hitbox radius slightly
-Adjusted Mimic hitbox position
-Reduced the move speed of Ghosts
-Increased the minimum range that a Spider will use its Web ability
-Fixed bug where map editor windows were not capturing mouse clicks
Update v1.2.14
-New Priest talent Holyball
-New Rogue talent Instant Traps
-New Shaman talent Lightning Vortex
-New Warlock talent Emberball
-New Mage talent Arcane Barrage
-New Warrior talent Conviction
-Optimized spell and item network bandwidth usage
-Lifestealing Arrows will no longer fire when you are at max health
-Fixed bug where bouncing bullets would fall through classic terrain
Check this forum post for a guide on using the new map editor.
Update v1.2.13
-Raised the level cap to 30
-Bridge zone is now level 26
-Desert zone is now level 28
-Made it so the game remembers the realm you last selected when starting
-Fixed bug where Station and Beach could not be used in network games
-Fixed bug where you could slowly move forward if frozen while crouched
-Fixed bug where graphics device lost would cause dynamic objects to get reset
Update v1.2.12
-Removed incomplete quests from Reforged realm to help prevent confusion
-Fixed bug where Spitfire Arrow was active even when the talent was not selected
Update v1.2.11
-When starting the game for the first time you will now see a window asking you to select the Classic or Reforged realm
-You can still change realms at any time from the Realms menu
-You can still access the old Classic build as a beta branch
-Fixed bug where arrows would not always function properly in network games
-Spitfire Arrow is now a toggle-able passive that affects your arrows
-Spitfire Arrow should now do correct damage
-Spawning NPCs should be much less likely to launch into the air
-Earth Elemental ambient grinding sound now properly attenuates over distance
-Corrected sun lighting in classic workshop maps
Reforged Update v1.2.10
-Raised the level cap to 26
-Fixed bug where NPCs could see the player in the dark
-Fixed bug where starting with no existing saves would cause a crash
-Fixed bug where classic style stairs could not be climbed without jumping
(You must select Reforged from the Counter Spell properties beta tab to receive this update.)
Reforged Update v1.2.9
-Optimized NPC cpu performance
-Removed Spyglass requirement to use scope (Hotkey: R)
-Fixed bug with NPC pathfinding on terrain in Classic realm
(You must select Reforged from the Counter Spell properties beta tab to receive this update.)
Reforged Update v1.2.8
-Added new UI font and improved text rendering
-Improved baked lighting calculations
-Optimized projectile collision detection
-Gold is now visible the inventory window
(You must select Reforged from the Counter Spell properties beta tab to receive this update.)
The future of Counter Spell.
Hello everyone!
Hugin here, I figured that it was time to talk a bit about the road-map ahead of us.
This post was prompted by a simple question on our forums: “What is Reforged?” This question made us realize that we’ve mostly been talking about Reforged directly to the players who join us whenever we are hosting testing-events, and that we should make sure that this info is also available to anyone else who is curious about the future of CS.
So, what is Counter Spell Reforged really?
Well to answer that I’ll start with a little bit of history about how Counter Spell was made. The original CS was actually created by a single developer, Alendis. Who designed, coded and created the artwork for the whole thing on his own. Primarily a coder he kept improving and updating CS together with the community, the current open-world iteration is actually quite different from the original version where each zone was an individual map that you completed one at a time. Just check out this video from back in 2013:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEgf82CzbG8
Late 2015 Alendis started looking for ways to overhaul some elements of the visuals, he contacted an artist that he had worked with on another project back in 2010, and this is where I get involved. I gave CS a try and was instantly on-board, I’ve wanted to make a game like this for a long time. We started talking about improving not just the visuals but just about every other aspect of the game. So, with a rewritten story, improved mechanics and a new overall design Reforged can probably best be described as a reboot of sorts.
Over the last year and a half we’ve been laying the foundation for Reforged, most of the work has been behind the scenes kind of technical stuff where we worked out all the asset-pipelines needed for the new game and we’ve especially put a lot of effort into making the new map-editor efficient and easy to use. Now we are finally getting to a point where we got most of the systems in place and soon we will be entirely focused on filling Reforged with new content and we can’t wait to see what you guys come up with once you get the new map-editor into your hands.
TL;DR, Dev-team doubled in size, decided to make a fancy reboot.
So, what are we actually doing / planning for CS-Reforged? (Keep in mind that very little of this is set in stone, we are constantly tweaking and changing things as we implement and test them with the community)
General Design
As we’ve been playing Counter Spell together with the community over the years we’ve found that you all have many different play-styles and motivations when engaging with the game.
Some of you are explorers, searching for hidden doors and treasure, reading every dusty old tome, experimenting with spells and artifacts. Others are fighters, constantly looking for a challenge, usually found in a survival match under a large pile of mobs. The builders want to create and share their own maps and challenges and of course there are a couple of jittery loot-junkies farming chests somewhere.
Now the underlying design philosophy behind Reforged is to improve all of these areas while providing an environment where players of all sorts can meet, cooperate and challenge each-other. To that end we are working on a scaling difficulty system that should allow everyone to find that sweet-spot in terms of challenge and availability.
Say two people coop the campaign together. The first person is just here to explore and have a good time, don't really care about tinkering with gauges and finding optimal builds. The second person wants to face down some stiff opposition, fight their way to victory or go out in a blaze of glory. Both still want to experience the campaign together as a team. So, person one is playing on one of the lower difficulties, can take more hits, dishes out more damage, suffers less or no HP-bar degradation and is overall playing within a wider margin. Player two is on a higher difficulty setting and really has to pay attention to the details, speccing and gearing correctly etc. They’ve chosen to host a game with “Balanced XP” settings, meaning that the XP pool is shared equally between the two. The XP generated by each player is however based on the difficulty so player one is adding about 50% of standard XP to the pool, player two providing 150%, so it evens out at 100% each. Meaning that they are leveling at the same time, progressing together and clearing the game together, each having a good time on their own terms.
The World
The Reforged in-game realm in the current version of the Beta is roughly the same size as the Classic world in terms of surface:
Though this is actually just a small part of the new world, we chose to limit the Beta to this zone as it provides us with a good testing ground where we can gradually implement and try out new features with the community. Once we’ve completed this area we will start adding the rest of the zones one by one.
Story / Quests
The story in Reforged share the same basic premise as Classic, you are sent to an island befallen by some sort of magical calamity. However, without spoiling anything, the nature of that calamity is more intricate this time, and it ties directly into the game-play in several ways.
As for the more technical side of things, well in Classic there are a couple of objectives in each zone, clearly listed in the quest log. You can tackle them in any order and you get a few bits of lore here and there. In Reforged we are implementing an updated quest and dialogue system that allows the player to interact with NPCs in a more meaningful way, allowing you to make choices that affect how the world changes and the story progresses. The quest-log will be integrated more closely into an updated world-map screen where you can keep track of your progress through the world’s main and side-quests as well as activities and exploration.
Quest hubs
In Classic you could find a lone vendor and guard taking shelter here and there throughout the world, in Reforged we are creating larger, more populated quest-hubs. These will offer safe-zones where you can go to interact with NPCs, learn about the world, pick-up quests and manage your character, crafting and gear. The Grinning Boar is the first of these hubs, while currently rather sparsely populated by classic vendor clones we are working on the first batch of proper NPCs and quest-lines right now.
Dungeons
We are also working on proper dungeons, located around the world these enclosed areas will offer more focused coop or single-player environments where the players go to challenge themselves, many of these will also be tied into the story and offer unique boss-battles with better loot drops. You’ll be able to run them at different difficulty settings with increasing risk/reward systems. In general these are designed to be viable even in the end-game, at higher difficulties they should provide a challenge even for a max-leveled and fully geared party of players
Boss Battles
The boss battles in Classic were always a bit too fast and unstructured, for Reforged we are working on more elaborate encounters that scale based on difficulty and the number of players in the party. What does that mean practically? A couple of the key areas that we are focusing on are the boss abilities, locations and minions.
Let’s take one of the first new bosses as an example, the “Crypt keeper”. This undead custodian of the old-city graveyard will try to hinder the players’ movements within his graveyard by creating barriers from tombstones so that his pack of undead mutts can swarm his target while he throws projectiles from afar. Ranged players who use gravestones for cover will soon realize that these covers are not as solid or helpful as they’d like. If someone gets too close for his liking he can punt his attackers away using his long shovel before putting up a defensive barrier and summoning more minions to deal with the players while he recuperates. As the fight progresses and his health starts dropping he’ll get more and more desperate, leading to shorter cool-downs on his abilities and some last minute gambit skills that we won’t spoil here. His stats and cool-downs will also scale depending on the number of players as well as their individual difficulty settings.
Builds, Skill-Tree
We’ve already talked a bit about the updated skill-tree on the forums, the short gist of it is that we are pushing for customization and player choice.
You’ll still choose a starting class but instead of being locked into that class as in CS-Classic, now all the classes will be represented in one giant skill-tree where you can unlock your way to all sorts of class-mash-ups. We are also adding special ultimate abilities that operate on a separate bar which is charged through different mechanics depending on your builds. For example, one players Ult might be charged by dealing DPS, another through healing damage, a third from taking damage.
The goal is to create a system flexible enough that each player can tailor their build to their own style of playing.
The Forge
The new map-editor, this thing deserves an entire post of its own:
Enemy Abilities and Behaviors.
Similarly to the new bosses we want the regular mobs to pose unique challenges and giving each a unique set of abilities and skills also helps to make the overall game-play more interesting. You’ve already seen a couple of the overhauled critters by now, the spiders trap their pray with web before leaping in for the kill, the mimics bite, throw and blast you with short range attacks, when they get hurt they retreat to set up another ambush. The piranhas leap out of the water and pull unsuspecting pray that walk too near the shoreline into the water.
The goal is to make each mob unique and challenging so that when different combinations group up on you they’ll force you to adapt your strategy. At the moment the Beta realm is just filled with random spawns of all enemy-types but as we keep adding and refining the different mobs we will start to theme the areas more heavily.
More to come
There is plenty more to talk about like gear, crafting, character customization and so on but this will have to do for now, as always we appreciate any feedback!
It’s about time to wrap this wall of text up, here’s a peek at the world-map:
Reforged Update v1.2.7
-Fixed bug with Oracle model lighting
-Fixed bug with terrain texture scaling
(You must select Reforged from the Counter Spell properties beta tab to receive this update.)