Since Rend’s first public-facing Alpha, players have been asking for a version of the game that more closely resembles classic survival titles. In parallel with Rend’s Early Access roadmap features for Fall-Winter, the team has been hard at work preparing a factionless game mode for Rend. We’ve debuted the new PvP mode, Classic, on the Public Test Realm (PTR) and are harvesting player feedback to make it ready for the live servers. Read on to learn more about the new game modes coming to Rend.
REND'S NEW GAME MODES: CLASSIC (PVP) & EXPLORATION (PVE)
We’re excited to introduce two new game modes for Rend that allow for open-ended gameplay without pre-established factions or shielded strongholds: Classic and Exploration. In both modes, players will each begin on their own as a survivor of Ragnarok and be able to weave their own story as they encounter other players, deciding for themselves whether to remain solitary or work collaboratively. Unlike the original game mode, now called Faction War, Ascension through spirit collection will not be a win condition and Reckonings will not occur in Classic and Exploration, promoting uninterrupted experiences on persistent 60-player servers.
In Classic, players will be able to battle for supremacy by sieging each others’ bases, waging PvP wars, capturing Control Points, and collecting player bounties. Exploration will be a purely PvE experience without the ability to attack other players or their bases: play at your own pace without other players intervening. While both modes allow players to band together in clans, all progression (such as research) is per-character and there will be no reputation system. Also, Classic and Exploration will still have harvestable spirits that reward XP and Spirit Residue but Yggdrasil’s spirit totals will remain unchanged. The Faction War game mode will mostly remain the same but will incorporate some of the gameplay improvements introduced with Classic and Exploration.
---
Read more at https://www.rendgame.com/news/article/rend-roadmap-survival-game-modes
Introducing Our Newest Frostkeeper
Frostkeep Studios continues to grow: join us in welcoming our nineteenth team member, Chris Thomas!
Chris Thomas, Principal Software Engineer
Chris Thomas has worked with Co-Founders Jeremy, Solomon, and Mat for the past 10 years at both Blizzard Entertainment and Carbine Studios. He most recently served as the Technical Director on Wildstar and other unannounced projects at NCSoft. He joins us as an expert in MMO architecture, gameplay and technical strategy, solidifying the core of our engineering team. Chris has been avidly playing MMOs for over 20 years, bringing with him a wealth of first hand experience which he is excited to draw upon as our new Principal Software Engineer on Rend.
Read more at https://www.rendgame.com/news/article/introducing-our-newest-frostkeeper
Rend Early Access Patch 5.1: Patch Notes
Patch 5.1 introduces gameplay improvements and bug fixes reported by the community and reflected on the Community Issues board. It also marks Rend's transition to Unreal Engine 4.20.
General
Updated Rend to Unreal Engine 4.20 from 4.19.
Adjusted faction stronghold lighting to improve performance.
Further improved player movement smoothing algorithm from Patch 5.
Favorited servers are now stored account-wide rather than client-side.
Vaults can no longer be placed in faction strongholds.
Balance
Assassin
Swapped +0.5% headshot damage for +1% accuracy per point spent.
Shaman
Swapped +1% accuracy for +0.5% mount speed per point spent.
Removed the increased PvP damage passively gained from all weapon skill perks.
Passive increases granted from weapon skill perks now only deal additional damage to creatures.
Increased Spirit Tool melee attack damage:
Tier 1: 5 damage
Tier 2: 7 damage
Tier 3: 8 damage
Tier 4: 10 damage
Decreased siege sledge damage at higher tiers:
Enchanted Crumblestone Sledge: from 3 to 2
Cragstone Battering Sledge: from 7 to 3
Granite Battering Sledge: from 12 to 4.5
Aesirok Battering Sledge: from 18 to 6
Decreased repeater damage by 25%.
Increased crossbow damage to creatures by 10%.
Added a delay after a structure takes damage during which it cannot be repaired.
Removed the Bloody Backpack and Rancid Stench debuffs from the game.
Creatures
Added effects to Stagswood that impacts dynamically-spawning creatures.
Prowltooth
Increased perception range.
Increased aware duration.
Banshee (Large)
Increased perception range.
Now has a ranged attack.
Banshee (Small)
Reduced perception range.
Now instantly aggros its targets.
Ursa
Drastically increased aware duration.
Now approaches its target during its aware state.
Duskcrawler
Uses its ranged attack more often.
Territorial Draak
Now has a reliable ranged attack.
Improved the Hammerskull and Warg movement animations.
Many of the Rocs found in the Highlands are now larger and possibly meaner.
Yxen in the Highlands have found new food sources and grown to even larger sizes.
Roc and Yxen cubs in the Highlands now have new movement behaviors.
Arachnix has a new idle animation.
Pets
Pets will no longer pass through enemy faction stronghold shields.
Interface
Adjusted formatting for weapon tooltip damage and attacks per second.
Attack speed now displays as "Attacks per Second" meaning bigger numbers are better, because we like bigger numbers.
Improved the damage taken indicators, including a new HUD directional damage indicator.
Added indicators for confirming hits and critical hits while attacking.
Water in waterskins now displays as a whole number.
Adjusted the buff display interface (buff tooltips now use the standard tooltip system).
Audio
Added bow pullback and nocking sounds to indicate when you are able to fire.
Added bomb fuse and explosion sounds.
Added UI sounds for confirming hits and critical hits while attacking.
Added Spirit World ambience soundtrack.
Bug Fixes
Clipping of the weapon is now checked before allowing it to hit a target, such as clipping a faction stronghold shield.
Placeables can no longer be placed out of line of sight, such as being blocked by faction stronghold shields.
Taming Crystals can no longer target or affect other players.
Removed recipe references to pyresilk and bront heads as neither currently drop.
Headshots on players should no longer display dirt impact visual effects.
Matched hair color swatches to how they’re rendered in-game.
Hearthfur Boots and Hearthfur Pants now correctly require Divine Heavy Leather instead of Heavy Leather.
Empty spell slots will no longer display empty mouseover tooltips.
Control Point reward chests will now correctly display the owner’s name.
Fixed typo in Adventure's Lodge skill tree.
Fixed typo with Per Level Skills displaying the wrong bonuses.
Fixed typos in Keybinding menu.
Fixed typo in Shattering Shot (Warlord) description.
Fixed an issue that was causing Last Stand (Warlord) to take a very long time to trigger after it had triggered once.
Fixed an issue that was preventing barricades from dealing damage to players.
Fixed Roc and Yxen knockback, hitboxes, and range in the Highlands.
While the team works on bringing new features and gameplay improvements to Rend over the next weeks, you can help us by translating "ascension", "saga", and more than 30,000 other words into one of seven initial languages! A popular practice among indie titles like Rend, we're looking to our international audience of gamers worldwide for expertise in Rend and bilingual fluency with languages spoken where the survival genre has the broadest reach. We'll be using a localization management platform called Crowdin that has helped a number of games on Steam reach broader audiences through crowdsourced translations of game strings (lines of text).
We'll be kicking things off with the following languages: Chinese, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
Read more at https://www.rendgame.com/news/article/localize-rend-using-crowdin
Rend Community Issues Board Launched
We have launched the Rend Community Issues board on Trello! Supplementing our other official communication channels, this board will serve as an at-a-glance view of our progress investigating and fixing top gameplay bugs and balance issues reported by you, the Rend community. We've populated the board with the current issues being discussed by players as well as a few the development team has been working on.
We'll add new issues and update existing ones as they progress through internal development, crediting threads posted by players that helped us identify and resolve them.
First and foremost, we’d like to express our thanks to the Rend community: you have helped bring the game to where it is today. It’s been quite a whirlwind year for Rend between kicking off our Alpha in early Spring to launching our Early Access on Steam only two months ago! It's hard to believe that just two years ago, Rend was a concept project by a trio of developers. We're now 18 staff members strong and just recently deployed our fifth major Early Access game update for Rend along with a number of interim patches and hotfixes (on a near weekly basis!) thanks to your valuable feedback and participation. Since day one, we have always said we're making the game for you - the players - and we're excited to share more about how it will be evolving over the next few months with our Fall-Winter Early Access roadmap.
A NEW CONTENT CADENCE DESIGNED FOR LARGER RELEASES
As a small independent developer, it’s vital that we plan out our team’s bandwidth wisely given the finite resources we have available. We have found during this initial phase of Early Access that a weekly patch deployment is resulting in smaller patches and taking focus away from quality content that requires more time to design, test, and implement. After hearing more about what’s most important to the player community, we are shifting to a patch cadence of every 3-4 weeks that will ultimately lead to larger, more significant releases for Rend.
This change in timing will allow us to make impactful updates to Rend’s core gameplay influenced by our community’s constructive critiques and our own player experiences in sagas. Once these adjustments are in place, we can demonstrate the additional game modes we have in development: we’ll introduce them on some of our existing official servers. Rest assured that we’ll continue to deploy hotfixes as needed, the next of which is planned for this week and applies ready-to-deploy bug fixes related to Master quality weapons.
OUR ROADMAP FOR FALL AND WINTER 2018
Much like the Alpha roadmap we published this past summer, this feature list provides an overview of what is coming to Rend in the weeks leading up to mid-December.
Comprehensive Combat Improvements - Tightens up the gunplay to bring it in line with modern shooters.
- Enhances the aesthetics of combat, making it feel more impactful.
- Updates all creatures with new abilities and behaviors to make interacting with them more interesting in and out of combat.
- Adjusts all biomes to feel more robust and challenging.
Streamlined Features - Overhauls game aspects such as crafting, storage, and much more with the intent of making Rend more accessible.
- Introduces a new way for players to store and share resources intended for faction progression: the stronghold warehouse.
- Adds account-level settings, allowing players’ Ascension Points to no longer be bound to individual official servers.
Legendary Artifacts - Introduces epic items from Norse mythology, including unique weapons and armor, that can shift the balance of power within a saga.
Dynamic Siege Combat - Makes raiding faction strongholds a more engaging experience.
- Adds new siege weapons and tools such as catapults and personnel flingers.
- Additional siege gameplay including bomb counterplay and delay timer for repairing damaged structures, and damage feedback from Divinity Stones.
- Communicates faction progress towards win conditions more prominently.via Yggdrasil.
Refined Social Mechanics - Shifts decision-making power from Elders to the faction through permission requests and voting.
- Applies force-fields that repel enemy players to faction stronghold doorways, mitigating griefing.
- Allows players on a faction to form parties and play more cooperatively in PvE and PvP combat.
Each of these abbreviated topics will be matched with deep-dive feature articles written by the developers who worked on them when introduced in a game update. With game development being a fluid process, consider this roadmap a living document that serves as an overview of what’s planned for Rend, but isn’t final or set in stone: the features may change or shift order before reaching live servers.
In parallel with this roadmap, we’re in the process of updating Rend from Unreal Engine 4.19 to 4.20 to be able to take advantage of the engine's latest improvements such as smarter actor replication (more efficient servers) in future game updates. A Rend mod kit is also being worked on but our focus is primarily on producing and implementing the important gameplay improvements listed above. Game additions such as biomes and creatures are similarly being held until these improvements are in the game to allow players an opportunity to provide feedback independent of new content.
TRACK YOUR (LEAST) FAVORITE BUGS ON TRELLO
We’ll also be launching the Rend Community Issues Trello board next week, supplementing our other official communication channels. This board will serve as an at-a-glance view of our progress investigating and fixing top gameplay bugs and balance issues reported by you, the Rend community. We'll populate the board with new issues and update existing ones as they progress through internal development, crediting threads posted by players that helped us identify and resolve them. On that topic, be sure to continue sharing your Rend feedback with us on the forums, Discord, Reddit, and Steam and to follow Rend on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and (soon) Twitch for the latest game updates!
The team is just getting started with what's in store for Rend. Between the new Fall-Winter Early Access roadmap and Rend Community Issues board, we look forward to keeping you up to date on developments through the rest of 2018 and beyond. Again, we cannot thank our community enough for their diligence and dedication. From all of us at Frostkeep Studios, we're glad you're with us on Rend's journey to launch.
Patch 5 introduces important changes to creature taming and movement along with other bug fixes reported by the Rend community. The extra week of development on Patch 5 was due to us working in parallel on making the leap from Unreal Engine 4.19 to 4.20 to be able to take advantage of the engine's latest improvements in future game updates such as smarter actor replication (more efficient servers). This also marks a shift in our patch deploy cadence from smaller yet more rapid changelists to less frequent yet larger patches with more significant game changes.
We're also preparing to publish our Early Access roadmap with what's coming to Rend. The roadmap will detail major gameplay changes in broad categories that we intend to introduce by December. When deployed in a patch (or leading up to it), we'll post a write-up about the change and the developer rationale for it. In addition, a player-facing Community Issues board is being populated to feature commonly-encountered bugs and balance issues and their state of being resolved. We're aiming to publish both late next week, likely on Thursday.
Patch 5 is scheduled to deploy on Tuesday, September 25.
General
Removed Flesh Wounds debuff. Creatures that previously applied Flesh Wounds now have a lower chance to apply Deep Wounds.
Added camera shake when firing weapons.
Smoothed character model movement when changing directions rapidly.
Queued research is now processed as a single action instead of individually.
Improved visual effects in Myrkfen, Dreadveil, and Roots of Yggdrasil.
Added repair values for Hearthfur Armor, Divinite Armor, War Leather Armor, Makeshift weapons, and critically-crafted weapons.
Crude Metal Candelabra now stacks to 10.
Standard Issue Arrow now adds 0.5 damage (previously it had none, generating a blank tooltip).
Balance
All creature taming progress will now decay at a rate of 1% of the required tame value for that creature per second, effectively requiring taming tools that match the tier of the target creature.
The Warlord per rank passive bonus no longer grants Combat Regeneration. Instead, it heals you for 0.5% of your Max Health per rank on PvE or PvP kills.
Warlord's Resolve talent no longer grants Combat Regeneration. Instead, it grants Health Regeneration.
Marathon Runner (Pathfinder) no longer increases Mounted Sprint Speed.
Reduced the delay of center Control Points to 2 weeks (down from 4).
Interface
Silhouettes of friendly Faction members will now draw through terrain and structures.
Faction members who have negative faction reputation, are outcast, or have taken a recent aggressive action now have red-tinted nameplates.
Reagents in recipe tooltips are now colored to match their item quality.
Creatures
Prowlfang
Now begins to approach its target after exhausting its aware state duration, instead of immediately aggroing.
Yxen
Increased aware state duration.
No longer has an aggro range. It can still aggro after exhausting its aware state duration.
Ursa
Now approaches its target during its aware state.
Increased aware state duration before triggering aggro state.
Edited creature model appearance.
Frabbit
Reduced the chance to uncover a metal resource node when burrowing.
Stag
Slightly increased movement speed.
Slightly decreased sprint speed.
Arachnix
Added arachnix footstep sound effects.
Draak
Territorial Draak now uses its headbutt ability.
Territorial Draak now aggros significantly faster on seeing a target.
Reduced the likelihood of flying Rockjaws, Yxen, and Glutts.
Fixed some issues that could cause creatures to teleport.
Creature AI now better handles changing threat targets.
Creature models adjusted to appear less glossy/wet and glow less at night.
Bug Fixes
Fixed an issue that was preventing certain spells from dealing damage as intended.
Strict Rationing (Warlord) now correctly reduces hydration drain rate (was doubling up on energy drain rate).
Dismounting in a building should no longer cause the mount to appear on top of the building.
Arbalests now show the correct tool tip for damage.
Warlord’s Resolve (Warlord) and Assassin’s Resolve (Assassin) talents now correctly persist through logout.
Assassin's Resolve (Assassin) talent no longer modifies your jump height or fall damage reduction.
Coldfire Torch now has the correct tooltip.
Crude Metal Candelabra is now spelled correctly.
Divinite Armor can now be repaired.
Riding Harnesses now require the correct crafting prerequisites.
Arcane Spirit Crystal and Runescribed Spirit Crystal no longer have typos in their tooltips.
War Leather Armor can now be crafted.
Fixed an animation issue that would cause creatures to over-rotate.
Elixir of Warming recipe renamed to Elixir of Warmth.
Greater Elixir of Warming recipe renamed to Greater Elixir of Warmth.
New Faces at Frostkeep Studios
While our news has been focused on Rend's development since entering Early Access, we're also excited to share that the Frostkeep Studios team is expanding! Meet the three new faces who you'll see at our convention booths and on our upcoming livestreams.
Nathan Hillen, Executive Producer
Nathan first met a number of Frostkeep staff while working at Carbine Studios where he assembled and ran the Analytics Team, designed the Wildstar Free-To-Play Conversion, and worked closely with NCSoft on building out platform infrastructure. He was most recently at Blizzard Entertainment as a Lead Program Manager doing both production and design for Battle.net and helped launch several pieces of core server tech for the platform. He championed the creation of a new Partner Success group focused on partner integrations with Blizzard which would become key in the formation of Overwatch League and its Twitch integrations. Nathan has now rejoined his past colleagues as Frostkeep's new Executive Producer on Rend.
Liem Nguyen, Character Artist
Liem began his career creating immersive 3D environments for Mindshow, an interactive VR platform and Emmy finalist for Outstanding Innovation in Interactive Media. As he progressed in his career, he began freelancing 3D characters for various clients such as Escape VR. After being introduced to Rend and the talented Frostkeep Studios team, he instantly knew he had to be part of the development of Rend. He's now is a proud member of Frostkeep as a character artist.
Mark Khalil, Environment and VFX Artist
Mark initially collaborated with Frostkeep staff while at Carbine Studios as a 3D artist on Wildstar where he first focused on painterly environment modeling, vehicle designs, and character textures. Gaining proficiency and experience with 3ds Max, ZBrush, Maya, and other software, he most recently was at Riot Games as Senior Environment Artist on League of Legends where he worked on champion spell and skin visuals as well as Summoner's Rift map features. Mark joins Frostkeep as an Environment Artist who also produces many of the visual effects in Rend.
Please join us in welcoming our newest team members!
Players in the same clan will not incur a faction reputation penalty for attacking each other.
Players can now open the inventory of another player of the same faction if the target player is hostile.
A faction member with a negative faction reputation, who recently exceeded their faction container use score, or recently damaged another player is considered hostile.
Creatures
Wargs now flank players and will move more naturally in combat.
This is a proof of concept for how other creatures will flank in an upcoming patch.
Many creature attacks now have a camera shake effect.
Added visual impact effects to all basic creature abilities.
Balance
Decreased Repeater PvE damage by 20%.
Hearthfur Armor recipes now require Divinite crafting materials.
Cragrock Blaster no longer requires 10 Spirit Residue to craft.
Reduced player jump height.
Reduced movement speed per repeated jump after the first jump.
Damage shared with other structure pieces no longer reduces the damage taken by the targeted structure piece.
Interface
Added an option to hide the helmet on your character.
Ascension
Importing a favorite pet will now replace any previously imported favorite pet.
Reckoning
Server uptime must now be at least 2 hours before a Reckoning can occur.
This will protect faction bases if a server restart occurs just before a Reckoning is scheduled to begin.
Bug Fixes
Fixed tooltips for Otherworldly Flora (Botany Perk), Trapped Souls (Stonecutting Perk), and Speaker for the Dead (Mysticism Perk) to reflect that they no longer increase your Spirit Capacity.
Fixed an edge case line-of-sight issue sometimes causing turrets not to fire at players
Draught of Swiftness, Elixir of the Fish, and Elixir of Greater Armor recipes now give the correct items on critical crafting.
Potion of Sustenance, Potion of Greater Sustenance, and Aegisilk Pants recipes now grant the correct item when crafted.
Sharp Stone Spike now correctly requires experience in Wood Spikes (instead of Wood Bolts).
Rend Early Access Patch 4: Patch Notes
Patch 4 introduces the Bounty System and a broad range of weapon balance changes.
Balance
Removed the restriction that the current action animation must finish before the player can sprint again (note that this only applies to sprinting).
Redesigned Warlord Mastery: When you deal damage, your armor is increased by 100% of that amount. This temporary armor decays by 40% per second.
Bows
Increased zoom while in Aim Down Sight mode.
Significantly increased Sniper Bow Aim Down Sight zoom.
Significantly decreased Sniper Bow damage.
Slightly increased Sniper bow arrow drop ratio.
Crossbows
Increased zoom and accuracy while in Aim Down Sight mode (considerably easier to hit at range now).
Decreased movement penalty from .8 to .95.
Repeaters
Greatly increased PvP damage.
Greatly increased rate of fire from .27 to .09.
Decreased effective range from 40 to 30 meters.
Greatly increased clip sizes.
Added new firing sound.
Blasters
Greatly increased PvP damage.
Slightly decreased effective range.
Greatly increased firing speed.
Greatly increased reload speed.
Decreased movement penalty from .8 to .95.
PvP
Bounty System
Players start with a bounty value based on the number of PvP deaths within the same bounty period of 20 hours. The bounty value decreases with PvP deaths and reaches 0 after 10 PvP deaths.
A player’s bounty value increases through activity. Combat increases bounty value faster than non-combat activities.
Killing a player with a high bounty increases the spirits and XP rewarded
Killing a player with no bounty results in no XP, no rep gain, and no spirit spawns
Repeated kills of a single player by a specific attacking player within the same bounty period causes reduced XP and reputation gains with no XP granted after 3 kills.
Added XP gain for PvP kills.
Added reputation gain for PvP combat.
Creatures
Adjusted AI to reduce chance to flee.
Reduced damage aura from Divinity Stone to the Lost.
Made Reckoning AI more interested in things closer to its height.
Changed Lost to randomly pick targets and limited its sight cone to make it see walls more often.
Reduced distance and cooldown of the Lost's Scream ability.
World
Moved the portals closer to the faction bases.
Pets
Added properly-tiered resources to mount resurrection costs.
Higher-tier pets are now considerably more difficult to resurrect, making high-rating low-tier pets considerably more useful.
Faction
Added Faction Memo and Message of the Day, editable by faction elders.
Removed reputation gain from leveling up.
Spirit Stables will now spawn the Taming Tools workshop inside the stables instead of next to it, freeing up some precious space for more elaborate base designs.
A player's reputation is set back to 0 when outcast.
Base Building
You can no longer overlay wall foundations on normal foundations.
Research required for structure upgrades is now based on the player doing the upgrade rather than the faction of the structure being upgraded.
Reckoning
Reckoning level will now be based on faction strength rather than solely on current saga duration.
Interface
Added display of Ascension Points earned during the current saga.
Adjusted size and distance scaling of player nameplates.
Nameplates of players in your clan will display their names in green.
War Observation bonus now has a mouseover tooltip.
Mouse will be visible by default when the respawn menu comes up.
Visuals
Add Foliage Quality slider to video options.
Updated visuals for Divinity Seeds and Clan Divinity Seeds.
Made torches beefier and increased particle size to match.
Added camera shakes and hit impact effects for most creature abilities.
Bug Fixes
Reputation gains and losses will now properly occur when done to or from pets.
If an inventory is over capacity (such as the stash due to research changes), it will no longer drop the items at the players feet at login.
Inventory slots on inventory objects that are over capacity will be inaccessible and appear grayed out.
The client and server should now properly agree on which direction doors are opened.
Creatures will no longer flee the same direction.
All sounds effects should now be properly affected by the sound effects slider in the options panel.
The PvP portion of the Reckoning will no longer be entirely black.
Fixed Cyclopean Broodmother not being mountable.
Fixed spider wall walking.
Fixed pets that didn't have icons: all pets should now be selectable and resurrectable.
Fixed auras that cause damage to properly tick the damage.
Fixed siege damage caused by creatures to be properly calculated (they were scaling out of control).
Fixed AI so that Lost will again attack the base tree causing spirits to be released.
