The Devs did an AMA on Reddit today.
Cool tidbits I read:
There will be elite enemies scattered throughout the world that drop unique essence stones.
They were inspired by Horizon Zero Dawn. I can see this because the enemies you faces look like giant lobsters and snakes etc. Similar to the Horizon series but this looks way better melee wise.
The equipment consists of:
• Essence stones, which define active abilities, additional moves and buffs which unlock with the gain of momentum
• Idols, which define the method of healing in addition to the based healing charges all Idols have (e.g. heal on parry, heal on hit, etc.)
• 2 weapons (out of the 3 we have in the game) which define the combat moves available and also evolve with momentum
• The Armor, which defines your stats and have additional bonuses which can be unlocked if you meet certain requirements (e.g. slows enemies upon receiving damage if you X or more stones of this type equipped)
Upgrading armours give you Perk points which allow you to unlock various perks that are permanent on your avatar, no matter the armour (e.g. gain a burst of momentum at the start of each fight, or get a compass indicator when passing nearby an undiscovered chest, etc.)
Lastly, feedback from the early preview before they pushed the game back.
What struck us the most was the very different impressions of reviewers on the difficulty balancing: some found the game too difficult, some others found it well balanced and some finally found it a bit too easy (likely due to the preview build skipping parts of the normal flow, in which we taught players that the difficulty could be changed in the menu). It made us more confident creating stronger differences between our 3 difficulty levels, to provide an experience which speaks at the same time to our more hardcore audience and those who are maybe newer to or less frequently playing Action-RPGs.
We also did an iteration to quests to ensure they had more depth, we shuffled our rewards around to ensure the players feel more rewarded for exploring the world and we also slightly adjusted our enemy population to provide more enemy variety in early-game.
