Greetings!
It has been a few months since our last Battlegrounds development update, but that doesn’t mean the team hasn’t been hard at work!
Today we have some exciting updates to share about the game mode and our next major milestone.
- We plan to release our 2nd Battleground instance this quarter: Titans of the North!
- The new battleground will include an all-new creature type, a new reward system for the game mode, and other quality of life improvements.
- We are releasing this as its own battleground, so you should not expect The Great Ranging to be going anywhere.
- In fact, The Great Ranging will be getting some improvements of its own! We’ll jump into these first.
Read on to learn more!
Something Old, Something New
Do you like Spiders? No? Well, maybe you won’t mind them quite as much after this…
Starting after April 6th, we will be making some long-awaited changes to the reward profiles for the Pale Spiders you can find in The Great Ranging. These are now a great source of Stamina and Dragon Lore in particular!
We’ll also be running background maintenance on the Battleground system at the same time, to clean out the cobwebs, so to speak.
We anticipate Battlegrounds will be unavailable between 10 AM – 3 PM EST, April 6th, 2022 while we undergo this work, so plan accordingly with your allegiance. You will receive a notice in your Message Center once you can jump back in again.
Let us know what you think of the new rewards! Will you and your team be farming more Pale Spiders after this change?
Your work is not done in the North…
When the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch organized the first Great Ranging expedition, he sought answers to troubling questions. What happens to the rangers that go missing north of the Wall? Why are the Wildings abandoning their villages, and what of this so-called king beyond the wall, Mance Rayder?
Much like that fabled expedition, we return from our foray into the unknown with the terrible knowledge of what lies ahead; Our work north of the wall is not done.
There are evil forces at work, and they’re raising even stronger creatures from the icy brink. You must ride north once more to thwart these all-new foes in:
We are excited to announce our 2nd major Battlegrounds milestone coming to Game of Thrones: Conquest!
If you are new to Battlegrounds, these are instanced & timed combat scenarios that you can take on as an allegiance. Our goals for this system were to build a competitive system, that allowed a wide range of players to contribute meaningfully to their Allegiance’s standing.
We also wanted to develop each Battleground in close communication with our players, and leave room to iterate based on your feedback.
As such, we release an array of tweaks and improvements after each kingdom preview and global launch. However, a big piece of the player experience we wanted to take a little more time to tackle was how we handle rewards- how you earn them, how your teamwork impacts that, and how we close the loop at the end of a Battleground session.
This ties directly into our goals of making Battlegrounds Built for All, Competitive and Rewarding.
Risk and Reward
For Titans of the North, we’ve built a whole new Reward System.
- Unlike The Great Ranging, random creature drops will not be the only source of rewards.
- Instead, players will earn points for participation to unlock reward tiers on top of creature drop rewards, similar to how our progressive events operate.
- This will also allow a better view of how much each individual is contributing (and the rewards for doing so.)
We will get into more detail about what this reward system will look like as we near our first player previews of Titans of the North in the coming months, so stay tuned!
Bigger Threats
In addition to new rewards, we also have some new enemies for you to face. These will be of an all-new creature type: Coordination.
Unlike every other enemy in the game, Player Power does not matter when facing off against a Coordination creature.
Taking these foes down is all about team work. You must have the numbers, and coordination, to successfully defeat one. As a result, you can expect that these enemies will also be Rally type PvE.
Our scouts are currently gathering more information about just what shape these undead titans will take, weaknesses, and strategy for defeating them. We’ll share the details of those reports next month… provided our scouts make it back in one piece!
More To Come
Thank you for sticking around to the end! We hope you enjoy this first look into what’s to come in Titans of the North.
Join us over in the #battlegrounds channel on Discord to let us know what you think, and ask any questions you’d like answered in our next development update. You might even run into Goose, our project owner for Battlegrounds, while you’re there!