New World Map, New Balance, New New — Guild Quest News

(If you don't want to wait for your game to update naturally, right-click on the game in your library, go to Properties, go to Local Files, and then click Verify Integrity of Game Files to force the update.)

This is a big one--some might even say it's a 'table flip'. Development of Guild Quest has been very game-jam-style, in retrospect. We move really fast getting features in with very quick timelines, which is great, but it also means we never get a chance to think over what we already have and address larger issues.

We've known we've had general pacing issues for a while, but kept putting it off because we 'didn't have the time'. We haven't properly dug into our progress analytics for a bit, and when we did it a few weeks ago it called out a very big flaw: people were moving to Ashfield instead of Westacre, and then hitting a wall, and then bouncing off the game forever. And it was a pretty drastic amount of people.

We want to try and get MORE people deeper into the islands so that spending the dev time to make more zones makes sense. Which means we had to set out on restructuring how the game progresses.

What started as a "We'll just remove some of the progress options" turned into "Actually the old map is a huge issue and gives no sense of progression and branching paths make no sense." Which created a whole HOST of knock-on effects.

We've heard for months that people felt really weird when they reached Bayport and defeated the first boss and path and...nothing happened. So we wanted to fix that too. Having dangling paths that lead nowhere is weird (THAT SAID, we still have some dangling paths until we make the bonus zones.)

We've heard people ask for more info in a zone for how much money and XP they're earning so we wanted to address that.

And then we started just diving into OTHER long-standing issues, like players talking about how annoying/boring rebuilding and prestiging is, so we wanted to address THAT too.

A New Map Screen!

A whole new world. (But same point of view, since it's still a 2D map.)

All the same islands, now redesigned into a more linear path that won't lead players into dead ends.

Almost all islands have new designs for their quest lines (especially since most of them aren't islands anymore).

A few islands have lost cities (but there are gems to compensate JUST IN CASE people had spent gems to gild those cities).

Bonus areas are NOT ready yet.

Balance Changes

A complete rebalance of...pretty much everything in every zone.

Max level caps for zones start ramping up dramatically so the further zone you reach, the higher you can level up the quests.

A fundamental change in how many quests we offer--no longer three options on nodes. Instead of giving options that don't matter, we wanted to give more clear choices like picking between an Adventure Quest or a Battle Quest.

Added new Special Quests! There are times when you'll be able to pick a Rally Point (where you can set how many guildians are required before they'll move on from the node) or a Heal Up quest (where guildians will be instantly healed when they walk onto the node).

Because of the change to quests, anyone who was using a quest option that is no longer valid will be missing quests on that node (apologies!). You'll miss out on any offline progress you had, and need to rebuild the quest.

Zone Changes

Rearranged some of the HUD info.

Added in Gold per/minute and XP per/minute into the HUD for each zone.

Prestige Changes

Changing prestige to largely be "Difficulty".

No longer wipe your island when you change your difficulty.

Changing difficulty will change the quests immediately.

One-time fee to unlock a new difficulty in a zone.

Changing a zone into a new difficulty will not respawn the bosses.

Lots of big changes!! Apologies to anyone who's angry about this, but we had to make some tough calls. Sadly only a fraction of the starting audience is making it to even the fifth zone right now, so we need to try and figure out how to get more people deeper into the game. We've also been hearing a lot of people mentioning these issues that we're (hopefully) addressing with this update. Scary changes, but hopefully for the better in the long run!

EDIT
Totally forgot that we had made some changes to cards weeks ago, but then had never launched the changes and ended up forgetting about them completely. Really sorry about that!

So we ended up nerfing Common cards, since they could get updated to ridiculous levels. Those values are now pulled down to hopefully more manageable levels. You might see some of your Common cards featuring lower values now.

We also upped the cost of cards when you go past level 10, so the amount of cards you need will keep increasing. THIS MIGHT MEAN that some of you who had upgraded a card will lose a level because you don't actually own enough cards for the new cost. Sorry about that! But it should also help to keep values from getting ludicrous too fast.

HOTFIX 3:20PM

There were various issues with cards not upgrading, or showing that they need to upgrade (even though they can't), and just general weirdness with cards and upgrading them. Those should be fixed with this update.

There was an overlapping quest and a boss with messed up drop stats and recharge rates in the bonus questline of Crgydogery.

Bumped level cap upto 700!

This announcement was written and published by the developers/publisher of Guild Quest on Steam; it is mirrored here unedited for readability, with full credit and a link to the original above. © the respective rights holders. Rights holder and want it removed? Email us — we take it down promptly.