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The Community Blog (An Invitation)

Pathfinder Adventures: What's Next?

Aarik D

Entry posted by Aarik D

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I want to thank you all for taking the time to read this. I usually prefer that other team members make posts because they can go into details on long awaited features. Instead, you get me who gets to share a bit of how timing affects what releases and when. I am even sometimes right!

 

On to it!

 

We have Deck 6 coming out very soon. We are trying to make sure that it comes out prior to any holiday breaks and we have some additional cards and features we are trying to come out with it as well.

 

For example, there will be some Store upgrades so that people can check out...

 

pa-screenshot-valeros-alt-1838x1034.png

Valeros! This WIP has a very armored alternate Valeros. One of eleven new Alts.

 

We are working on assigning dice on that screen too because the current implementation isn't as intuitive as we would like.

 

Some weekly and monthly challenges are incoming. The monthly's will have increasingly valuable staged rewards so that after you finish five you get a reward, then ten, fifteen, etc. Up until you hit the max, which we have at 25 right now. If you wanted to blaze through them all in a day or two, you can.

 

You might ask, "Flounder, we don't care about that stuff. What about Thessalonion Sins and my missing roles?!" and I would say, "Thessalonion Sins can eat a bag of... chips." We are diligently working on the issues people are experiencing in 5-4. It has been a chain reaction of events internally that have been holding off a fix. We fix one problem and another appears because of the fix. We fix that then a completely different issue arises.

 

As you know, there are a bunch of special cases in the card game that are a programmatic nightmare on our end but this is a high priority for us.

 

We have the Roles thing fixed internally so that if there is no reward to select it skips that whole sequence. That will be out on the next release we put out publicly. In the future, we will be doing audits of characters for missing rewards so that this issue will not be able to happen.

 

I am pretty sure that everyone noticed that the wait time from releasing decks 4 to 5 was much quicker than decks 3 to 4. We were trying to do too much at a time with what resources we had. The price we had to pay was strictly working on the deck/story content and hold off on Quest Mode content and Multiplayer.

 

The Pathfinder Adventures team is ten people strong (we were at eleven but George decided Canada was where he wanted to be instead of sunny California. Best wishes to him!) and three of them are dedicated to Quality Assurance. Trying to split up the resources by even one or two persons causes a huge loss of traction on the features we are working on.

 

Quest Mode is basically a whole new version of Pathfinder and it was killing QA because of all the new deck cards that were coming in. Any early adopters knows that Quest Mode had some really dark times and that was because we were trying to keep parity with Story Mode. Throw in a phone version of the game and it was a one way ticket to Bad Place Poopy Town.

 

So, Quest Mode will be revisited after Deck 6 and potentially before PC release. It might be changed into more campaigns that are considered in-between decks and even some post Deck 6 stories leading up to a possible expansion, or we might invest some serious amount of time to make it as good as we want it to be, OR it could just go bye-bye (the option we dread the most). Its TBD but we wanted to at least address the issue.

 

Multiplayer is in the same boat but is even more difficult than Quest Mode. We have that button poking us in the ribs every time we launch the game. "Coming Soon" is not really soon enough and we are going to remove that button until we decide if we can do the feature real justice. There was a short-lived (and not very funny) joke that we should fade out the button by 25% for every deck we released that didn't have multiplayer. I'm glad we didn't.

 

"Gee Flounder, you suck and are full of bad news!"

 

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"Back off or the banana gets it!"

 

Am not!

 

I am on a team full of very talented people and am continually impressed at the amount of work that has been done on the game. We are going to deliver more content and platforms and hopefully make you all pleased to have played another Obsidian game.

 

We've had some rough patches (literally) but please know that the Pathfinder Adventures team is focused on making the best game possible for you, our fans, our friends.

 

Thanks,

 

-F

 

P.S This was a placement setup picture for a Deck 4 pre-release post with hidden messages and everything.

pa-screenshot-banana-for-scale-1110x742.JPG

 

P.P.S. Would an Alt Goblin character named "Banana" or something satisfy your bundle needs?

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Dunesparrow

Hey There ⚡

 

Gee Flounder, you are full of news, Woooohooo!

 

 

Thanks for the blog; I’ve been really looking forward to some more info.

 

 

Based off the picture of Valeros, can you confirm that the Character alts are cosmetic only and are not different version of a character, such as from the Character Decks.

 

 

Will character alts be available for purchase separately, as a Bundle , in Chests or all of the above?

 

 

How many alternates will there be for each character?

 

 

Will the rewards we receive for challenges ever be something other than gold?

 

 

Is the PC release of Pathfinder Adventures the next big ticket piece of functionality after AD6?

 

 

If so, should we temper our expectations regarding new content (Skull and Shackles for example) to not be available until after the PC version is released?

 

 

Given the example of the wait time for deck 3-4 should we also expect that significant pieces of content (ADs, Base Sets, Additional versions of and new Characters) and functionality (Platform, Quest Mode, Multiplayer) being developed in parallel, is actually detrimental to the release of and quality of Pathfinder Adventures. Thus, when it is announced that a piece of content or functionality is next we can respond with this expectation in mind.

 

 

If multiplayer functionality can not be delivered for mobile devices will this be the same for PC?

 

 

What’s with the Banana anyway? Couldn’t we have an actual Goblin character like

Ranzak, Ekkie or Tup?

 

 

Thanks

 

 

Keep up the great work

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mccrispy

@Flounder: Re Quest Mode: I'd ask that whatever you do respects the fact that there are current players who prefer to play Story Mode without Treasure. Quest mode is where we play with the treasure that we have spent our gold/cash on. That requires separate characters for Story and Quest mode. For me, Quest mode should be the "playground mode" of PACG, where we get to try out all the odd combinations of location cards that we don't access during Story Mode (usually as a result of party numbers) - it's not about the story, it's about the craic.

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TheSoulflame

Thanks for the update!

One thing that wasn't mentioned though: multi-platform logins (iOS/Android).

Can we expect that this year maybe?

(waiting for it for over 2 months after I bought a new tablet :(. I haven't even played or seen AD4&5 yet since I can't bear to start over and lose my progress that I had on iOS)

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Hannibal_PJV

Definitely quest mode before PC version, if it will come at all. If you delete the quest mode, the thing is different, but if you Are going to ever release the Quest mode up to level 60 (70)? It has to be ready before you introduce it to the PC or you will be sliced to banana splits by Angry Steam players!

The quest more is real pain in the banana to program. One possibility would ofcourse be to put whole quest mode in the separate beta release or a beta option and you promise not to fix any bugs that player may/will find From the quest mode. And maybe add some new content to it later... not sure how that would work in reality?

 

But as it has been said above the quest mode has been the more interesting playground to do things differently. And I personally would like to see it released eventually. But if it is more trouble than a worth of it by development viewpoint it may have to axed. And after that the only way of allowing it to be played would be unsuported beta, with big warning letters. I would play it even then... IMHO.

 

Good Luck the AD6 project!

And don't go completely bananas, when we will find new bugs From it... ;)

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kurtalb1

I have to admit that the Quest Mode news is very disheartening.  I've played the game since day one and for hundreds of hours with the vast majority of playtime in Quest Mode.  I really hope that something can be worked out so that it can exist in some form.  

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Ethics Gradient

Anyone want to go on record concerning the blue post-it?

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Its too grainy to see the bottom left... but those appear to be the ASCII control codes for [Tab] and [Escape].

 

If that is actually a doodle of a stick figure escaping his bar tab, you win a giant pile of awesome.  Bravo!

 

\00100

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Flux Cobalt

I like the randomness of the quest mode as it is now.  It seems a bit to difficult for any of the level one characters but it could be me as I am fairly new to the game.  This happens to be one of my favorite games.  Thanks for a great game Obsidian.

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nsr

I just want to echo the hopes for continues quest mode. I came for the story mode and stayed due to quest mode.

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Flounder

Hey There ⚡

 

Gee Flounder, you are full of news, Woooohooo!

 

 

Thanks for the blog; I’ve been really looking forward to some more info.

 

 

Based off the picture of Valeros, can you confirm that the Character alts are cosmetic only and are not different version of a character, such as from the Character Decks.

-F: Not just cosmetic.  Stats and Power changes too.  They are basically a new character with a familiar face.

 

Will character alts be available for purchase separately, as a Bundle , in Chests or all of the above?

-F:  All the above for now.

 

How many alternates will there be for each character?

-F: We will go out with one per character (11).  There is the potential for more in the future.

 

Will the rewards we receive for challenges ever be something other than gold?

-F:  Yup.  Bigger challenges will reap bigger rewards outside of gold.

 

 

Is the PC release of Pathfinder Adventures the next big ticket piece of functionality after AD6?

-F:  Yes.

 

If so, should we temper our expectations regarding new content (Skull and Shackles for example) to not be available until after the PC version is released?

-F: Definitely temper the expectations.  We are still determining what is after PC.  

 

Given the example of the wait time for deck 3-4 should we also expect that significant pieces of content (ADs, Base Sets, Additional versions of and new Characters) and functionality (Platform, Quest Mode, Multiplayer) being developed in parallel, is actually detrimental to the release of and quality of Pathfinder Adventures. Thus, when it is announced that a piece of content or functionality is next we can respond with this expectation in mind.

-F: It would be nice to have a better staggered release from us.  We have some nice folks from other teams working on fixing our pipelines so we evaluate our releases better.

 

If multiplayer functionality can not be delivered for mobile devices will this be the same for PC?

-F: If we can manage one platform we can manage all, hypothetically.  PC won't likely be released with Multiplayer unless we can invest a decent amount of work and/or hold off on that release.

 

What’s with the Banana anyway? Couldn’t we have an actual Goblin character like

Ranzak, Ekkie or Tup?

-F:  A programmer mentioned taking a picture of the game with a banana for reference.  I didn't get the job but it has taken on a life of its own.  As for Goblins, we have some plans that might include them, new ones, or other things...

 

Thanks

-F: Our please

 

Keep up the great work

-F: And thank you!

 

-F: Are from me.

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squebler

I feel like multiplayer is being seriously undervalued. Pathfinder is best with friends.

 

That said, I haven't played much of the e-game. Maybe I'm an outlier. Maybe things work differently in the mobile (or PC) gaming market. But my friends and I have spent a lot of time playing the physical card game, and I keep coming back to the iOS game just to see if there's multiplayer yet. I'm a busy guy, like probably most guys, and I don't spend much time playing games, but Pathfinder CG is how I prefer to spend time with my friends.

 

I value the e-game for three main reasons. 1) With multiplayer, it would be easier to play with friends because we dont have to be in the same place. 2) It automates stuff. 3) It has great potential to grow in ways that the card game can't, or are prohibitively expensive.

 

I know it's probably an understatement to say that multiplayer is hard to make and support. But from my perspective, it looks like its worth it.

 

So that's just my 2 cents - I know I have a limited view on things, and I might be way off, but I'm really hoping I'm right and things go my way!

 

In any case, it's still a fun game, and I'm grateful for the continued hard work and support.

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