Phantom Abyss
Hotfix is now live!
Thank you for all your feedback and support during the launch of Phantom Abyss!
With the help of the community we've been able to address and fix the various issues listed below:
- Fixed an issue where players would find a lot of empty temples
- Fixed some temples that had inaccessible doorways
- Fixed an issue where darts wouldn't reveal invisible floors
- Fixed an issue were a switch behind a coin door wasn't whippable
- Fixed an issue where rift boulders were bouncy
- Fixed an issue where players would not show up on the leaderboard if they were not in the top 20
- Fixed a crash when loading a level
- Fixed a rare gameAnalytics crash
- Fixed a crash when the game was loading a dungeon on high-end pcs
- Fixed distorted audio and memory leaks
- Fixed the rolling visual re-enabling if rolling while in slow-mo
- Fixed a message appearing about the server being unresponsive
- Fixed player stats timestamps not being applied correctly
- Fixed temporary powers not working correctly
- Fixed incorrect collision on masked defiler illusions
- Fixed some bottomless pits to correctly respawn the player
- Fixed respawning players who fall out of the world
- Fixed respawning and getting stuck in collision
Thank you all so much for playing Phantom Abyss, it really means a lot to us!
Phantom Abyss 1.0 is Available Now!
Phantom Abyss exited early access TODAY! And here is everything you need to know about it!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/989440/Phantom_Abyss/
Adventure mode has been completely overhauled
<*>Players now have a choice of a series of different temples to play.
<*> Each adventure mode temple has a specific whip, relic, and series of challenges attached to it.
<*> Players can increase the challenge of an adventure mode temple to increase the rewards you unlock.
Classic mode is now called Abyss Mode
<*> Abyss mode is the true Phantom Abyss experience.
<*> Progress through all 4 areas of the game. (Ruins, Caverns, Inferno, Rift)
<*> An extra challenge is added each floor.
<*> 1 Relic, located at the end of the Rift.
<*> Only 1 person will ever beat a specific temple.
<*> Many relics to find - each hidden in increasingly difficult Abyss Mode Temples.
<*> Curses have been removed from whips.
<*> Whips are unlocked by playing adventure mode.
<*> Whip skins are unlocked via opt-in challenges
Torn-apart landscape The Rift is an area slowly being torn apart by the abyss. It features large areas filled with floating debris, whirlpools, and corruption spreading through the walls.
New rift traps:
<*> Lasers: Moving, rotating and cycling deadly lasers.
<*> Grapple nodes: Floating nodes that you can grapple-whip continuously without needing to land.
<*> Many new rooms
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An upgrade well that provides permanent upgrades can be found in the HUB and in the first floor of temples.
<*> Upgrades are purchased with keys. Rarer keys = better upgrades.
Dash forwards in the direction you’re facing, including up or down!
- Players are able to add extra challenges to their temple.
- Doing so will make rarer keys more likely to find, and unlock additional whip skins.
The HUB has been dramatically condensed.
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The portal is much faster to get to, and the HUB now focuses around 4 pillars.
<*> Each pillar represents one of the 4 zones in the game (ruins, caverns, inferno, and rift.)
The Crowbar
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Power: Shockwave
<*> Wherever you whip creates a shockwave, interacting (and disabling) anything it touches.
The Snake
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Power: Time Slow
<*> Bound to a button - activate to slow time for several seconds.
Lunar Whip
- Power: Super Dash
- Dash is upgraded to be…super.
A lot of whip powers have been swapped around or added.
- Powers available at end-of-floor shrines are now always other whip powers.
- Heals have been moved to blessing shrines - which are only found in hidden nooks and crannies.
Well, we just removed it...
No more loading the HUB to replay the game. Hit retry directly after you die!
But that's not all!
The transition of Phantom Abyss from Early Access is followed by the launch of the Official Soundtrack. Get it at 10% off, with additional 10% added through the Phantom Abyss Deluxe Bundle.
https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/38166/Phantom_Abyss_Deluxe/
Version 1.0 arrives on January 25
It's time for Phantom Abyss to transition out of Early Access and into 1.0 later this month, on January 25. The past couple of years have been a great experience for us, and we are very grateful for all the love and support you have shown us during EA. We couldn't have reached this point without your invaluable feedback.
The 1.0 launch will deliver a completely overhauled Adventure Mode, giving you a choice of temples to explore, each with a specific whip, relic, and series of challenges to overcome. We will also be introducing the new and improved core experience with Abyss Mode, previously called Classic Mode, which challenges players to enter a temple and progress through all four areas within and collect the relic at the end. Only one person will ever complete each temple, so time (and skill) are of the essence.
Finally, Phantom Abyss 1.0 will introduce some whip changes. Whips will no longer carry curses and will be unlocked by playing Adventure Mode, while whip skins will be rewarded through player op-in challenges.
-Team WIBY
UPDATE: Upcoming new content and changes
In our last update we had said our plans are to release the next area the Rift, as well as an ending to the game. These plans haven’t changed - however we’ve also decided to add and change A LOT more.
A summary of these changes were shown of on a recent Twitch stream which you can watch a replay of here: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1786727754
New Core Ability: Dash
Dash forwards in the direction you’re facing, including up or down!
Short cooldown
The Rift (4th area)
Torn-apart landscape
The Rift is an area slowly being torn apart by the abyss. It features large areas filled with floating debris, whirlpools, and corruption spreading through the walls.
Lasers: Moving, rotating and cycling deadly lasers.
Grapple nodes: Floating nodes that you can grapple-whip continuously without needing to land.
Challenges
Adventure mode has been changed to be a series of challenges. Each challenge REQUIRES you to use a specific whip. Beating the challenge will unlock that whip to be used in other modes. It will also progress to breaking a chain and unlocking the next area.
Players can also unlock whip skins by increasing the difficulty via optional curses (see curses)
Curse Revamp
Curses have been removed from whips.
They instead will be modifiers that players can turn on/off.
Turning on curses will increase the chance of what keys you find to purchase upgrades with.
Whip skin can also be unlocked by playing with a high curse level.
Upgrade Well
An upgrade well that provides permanent upgrades can be found in the HUB and in the first floor of temples.
Upgrades are purchased with keys. Rarer keys = better upgrades.
Updated HUB
The HUB has been dramatically condensed.
The portal is much faster to get to, and the HUB now focuses around 4 pillars. Each pillar represents one of the 4 zones in the game (ruins, caverns, inferno, and rift.)
Each pillar has the whips associated with that region, and the pillar lights up as players collect relics from that region. Collecting 3 relics from a region breaks the associated chain attached to Altec, and unlocks the next region.
New Whips
The Crowbar
Power: Shockwave
Wherever you whip creates a shockwave, interacting (and disabling) anything it touches.
The Snake
Power: Time Slow
Bound to a button - activate to slow time for several seconds.
Lunar Whip
Power: Super Dash
Dash is upgraded to be…super.
Whip and shrine powers adjusted
A lot of whip powers have been swapped around or added. Powers available at end-of-floor shrines are now always other whip powers.
Heals have been moved to blessing shrines - which are only found in hidden nooks and crannies.
Rank system adjusted
Rank system is still in place - however it no longer determines what temples you play. Players can gain/lose ranks by winning/losing in temples - and the difficulty of a temple determines how it affects your rank.
Retry added to death screen
No more loading the HUB to replay the game. Hit retry directly after you die!
Final cutscene for freeing Altec
Lots of bug fixes
We’ll be showing off a lot more of this content - including the Rift, in our next Twitch stream next month. Stay tuned for more details to come. Thanks everyone!
Team WIBY
Various small fixes
Hello Adventurers!
We have a bunch of fixes and quality of life improvements incoming in this patch.
Accessibility features
Added the option to customise looking up and down and turning, including speed and sensitivity customization
Add mouse and keyboard support on Xbox Series consoles
Actions requiring button holds can now be changed to toggle instead of hold (Sprint and Wings)
Can now change the default movement mode from Walk to Sprint for keyboard users.
Improve visibility of input key names on keyboard button displays in UI.
Improved visibility of inputs displayed on Powers and Abilities
Temple improvements
Fixed dead-ends in some temples
Improved trap generation
Adjusted early-game difficulty for Adventure mode
Adjusted Daily Mode difficulty
Fixed Z-fighting and holes in the geometry
Character improvements
Updated and optimised Phantom models, materials and textures.
Fixed Phantoms to display correct materials.
General bug fixes and improvements
- Fixed clearance rate not showing correctly in Daily Mode.
- Achievements "Abyssal" and "Binding" are now fixed. will automatically repair achievements when updating to the latest game client
- Added an emergency key combination to manually force a sync of achievements (Ctrl+Shift+Y on keyboard or RB+LB+Y on the Main Menu)
- Improved interaction with light crystal stands in dark rooms and the light it casts.
- Improved Orb key pick up interaction
- Stopped mine traps from entering Relic rooms.
- Improved interaction with Lava. Player no longer continuously takes damage after touching lava while travelling through it by grapple.
- Improved hints in the loading screen to be relevant to the current game mode
- Fixed disconnection handling on the main menu
- Removed infinite Whip Again bug
- Made it more difficult to hack leaderboard entries.
The Phantom Abyss Adventure Update is Live!
Hello adventurers!
The latest update has landed for your favorite Temple plundering game, complete with a treasure trove of new content.
The update introduces new game modes, such as Classic Mode and Adventure Mode, as well as a new Explorer Rank feature allowing you to earn reputation from completing temples or lose it if you die. Another new addition is the Daily Temple, allowing you unlimited tries for that day's temple. The Daily Temple run unlocks upon reaching the Adventurer level 1.
Check out the full changelog below.
Adventure Update Changelog
- Classic Mode - The mode players are used to. Unlocks when the player reaches the rank “Adventurer 1”
- Adventure Mode - Get a temple based on your “rank”
- Wide variety of temple types. Temples range from short & easy to long & near-impossible. Temples matched to players based on their “explorer rank”
- Explorer rank - Earn reputation from completing temples. Lose rep by dying. Earn reputation to increase your rank. Higher rank = harder temple pool.
- Progress story - Story progresses as players find relics and complete temples in Adventure mode.
- Daily Temple - Unlimited tries. New temple every 24 hours. Leaderboards for overall best performance. Unlocks when the player reaches Adventurer 1
New Content
- New Rooms
- New Trap layouts
- New temple visuals
- New pots
Story Progression
- Collecting relics will break the chains of “Altec”, a giant statue in the HUB.
- There are 3 chains total to be broken. The requirements for each chain are as follows:
- Chain 1: 1st Ruins relic, 3rd ruins relic, 5th ruins relic
- Chain 2: 1st Caverns relic, 3rd caverns relic, 5th caverns relic
- Chain 3: 1st Inferno relic, 3rd caverns relic, 5th caverns relic
Power Shrines & unlocking whips
- New Power Shrines and whip unlocks
- Claiming a relic unlocks a new whip that players can use.
- Additionally, each whip has a unique power than also then becomes available at a “power shrine”
- Powers from a power shrine cost keys
- For example, if you own the lightning and Ice whip, you can attain their powers mid-run from a power shrine
Updated tutorials
- Updated level
- Improved to be closer to a real temple
- The old tutorial has been removed.
Codex
- Tutorial popups used in relevant places to better explain something the first time the player encounters it.
- After you read a popup, it can then be found in the “codex”.
BETA TEST - Adventure Update (August 2022)
We really want to encourage you to give this beta a try and let us know what you think! This dev team is very receptive to your feedback and ideas, and if there are things you like or dislike, or wish were different, now would be the time to make that known, during this beta period. The devs are open to dialogue on the Discord beta channels, and a lot of fruitful discussion arises from these conversations. It is all an effort to make the game better for everyone.
Please sign up here! Things get underway very soon. And thanks for being part of this amazing community!
https://devolver.typeform.com/to/CSqEWHSF
(NOTE: if you get a response on the form mentioning Feb 22 as the start date, please ignore--that is from the previous beta. You will be registered for the current beta, tentatively beginning August 15)
Phantom Abyss Revised Roadmap for 2022
Power system has been changed (again)
The following blessings have had power costs removed:
- Double Jump
- Wings
- HoverSlide
- Whip again
The ONLY blessings that cost power are now:
- Soul Armor (costs 1 power)
- Banishing Whip (costs 1 power)
Default starting power is now set to 2.
Wings are now able to be bound in the options menu (default is same as jump)
Added a "temple options" section, where players can choose to enable/disable "phantom traps"
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We appreciate the passion the community has shown us in what they like and don't like. We will always strive to make this the best game it can be.
Our intention on creating a global power system was to give us room to create more powerful moves/abilities without breaking the game. We appreciate this system being used on movement abilities was ultimately more negative than intended, as by attaching a resource to them - the result was players not wanting to use them at all.
At the end of the day we want players to be using powers and having fun. So please, run free and enjoy!
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Our current plan is to leave the game in this state while we work on the next big update. We will be posting our updated roadmap with more details shortly.
For a peek into our thoughts and what we're working on next, you can check out the latest Twitch stream vod here https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1442645195?t=0h28m57s
Next update discussion starts around 29:00 and goes for about 10mins.
We do streams every 2 weeks with a different member from the team.
Please feel free to drop by our discord. https://discord.gg/ccZUSJX77W
We try to get through every question posted in the QnA channel on our discord every fortnight.
We also have an "upvote" system in our ideas channel to get great visibility on what the community thinks is a good (or bad) idea overall.
Thank you all, we will be in touch soon to discuss roadmap plans!
Ben
Power Patch - and a bigger discussion on the status of the game
There’s been many thoughts and opinions thrown our way on the “power” update.
At the end of the day, we’re making this game for all of you, and it’s clear to us that many are upset about several changes in this update.
We’ve just released a patch with the following changes:
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Power draining blessings (Hover Slide and Wings) functionality has changed.
Before: Hold to hover. Bar segment(s) drain. On release it will continue to drain the last used segment.
Now: Hold to hover. Bar segment(s) drain. On release will REFILL the last segment used.
This means it’s now possible to hold wings in short bursts and it will never consume a power segment.
Additionally, Wings are now activated with the button, rather than .
This makes activating wings much more intentional, and no longer forces you to do an unintentional double jump or vice versa.
Power costs removed from the following blessings:
Chance to avoid damage
Crouch Jump
Fall Heal
Power costs reduced to 1 for the following blessings:
Double Jump
Whip again
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We understand some of you would rather we remove the power system entirely, as it has reduced how powerful you can become throughout the course of a temple.
The intention behind the power system is the opposite, shown by the 3 new blessings added this update (Banishing guardians, invulnerability, and whipping again)
We understand with double jump specifically, players are upset with only being able to use the ability a few times per floor. We get it. Double jumping is fun, and is also a skillful move when used well.
We ultimately made the decision to keep double jump as part of the power system because we feel players are able to entirely skip too much content presented to them with the ability. This speaks more to our failure on the trap layouts - and a more ideal solution would be including more hazards in the top half of a room to allow double jumping to still be a thoughtful decision rather than automatic decision.
We will be monitoring how the above changes go for now. We’re not afraid to admit when we’re wrong, and ultimately we want you to have fun.
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On top of these changes, we’d like to address point by point various issues players have been mentioning.
What’s going on with the road map?
We’ve spent a lot of time talking about what’s next. Being an Early Access title - (and especially one that relies on other players to play the game for the full experience) we’ve learned a lot over the past few months and am excited to share what we have in store next. We’ll be sharing these plans soon, and we hope they will both excite and reassure everyone on where we plan on taking the game.
We’re also excited to share these plans with the community and get your thoughts as well. What’s important to you is important to us.
Some players don’t like the phantom traps, nor do they like phantoms interacting with things like switches
The most common reason that we’re seeing for this is players won’t get to fully complete the temple themselves and that it’s been made easier by other people.
One idea we have for this is adding an option to turn phantom traps on or off. It’d be relatively simple to add, and no skin off our backs if that’s how you want to play. Please leave a comment if you want this.
To talk about the greater point however and why it was added in the first place - ultimately this is a game about phantoms, and that was one of the many areas where we wanted to push that aspect of the game. As a sneak peek for our greater plans being released shortly - we have new modes of play in the works. One of these modes will greatly increase the types of temples available - Ranging from easy to very hard and a system to give you a temple matching your skill level.
We hope that when matched with a temple that’s appropriate to your skill level - any traps that get phantom’d, or any phantoms hitting switches/opening doors are very welcome.
And for those of you who would still want to play a full temple start to finish when no phantoms impacting your run - we also plan on adding private temples for just you to play (as well as anyone else you explicitly invite)
Some players don’t like the power system
It’s completely fair to say we dropped the ball on this one - especially with how certain blessings were handled by the power system. To give more context, there are plans to give players more powerful abilities and upgrades. One example is we’d like players to be able to whip any trap to disable it. Using a global resource such as power felt like a nice solution to keep the power creep we have planned in check without trivializing the content.
Making the system felt like a good first step as we move towards the content planned on that front, and we hope the latest patch addresses your major issues with the system.
1 Heart start and essence in general
Some players don’t like starting with 1 health - especially if the temple they are given has few phantoms in it.
In general, the total number of phantoms per temple isn’t hitting the ideal number we would like to see. A weird problem this game has is it only takes 1 person to beat a temple, and then it’s closed forever along with all its phantoms. One thing we’re discussing is going as far as to keep temples open even if someone has finished it. The advantage of this it will allow us to get a lot more data on temples, and allow us to filter “easy” or “difficult” temples to match players skill levels, as well as have a more balanced experience with a healthy amount of phantoms each run. The downside is it heavily goes against what we have always seen the game as - which is a game where there can only be one winner. This is not a decision we take lightly and we’ve love the community to weigh in on what your thoughts on this topic are.
For now, given players need to find 3 essence to return to the old starting health (1 essence for the 2nd heart, 2 more essence for the third heart) at this stage we’re going to continue with the game starting on 1 health. This is something we are going to monitor closely, and this may change in the future.
Some of the new rooms - particularly ones that slow you down can be a bit annoying
Agreed. Some of the rooms in caverns/inferno in particular could do with some improvements to be more fun. We will improve them.
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Finally, I want to say thank you to everyone that's playing the game. I feel like I've let you down and I don't want it to happen again. Please respond with all thoughts, good and bad you may have on absolutely everything to do with the game.
Upcoming Phantom Abyss events to discuss further are:
Twitch Streams with a dev every other Thursday at 5:30pm PST https://www.twitch.tv/devolverdigital
Next one is in 11 hours at time of this post
Also keep and eye out for our updated roadmap. We will be posting this in a few days.
Thank you all.