Sidequesters! Hilariously, what has become a Sidequest for everyone has become a Mainquest for me.
Until now a fight in Sidequest was a single button. You pressed Fight, the numbers ran in the background, and you got a result. It was quick, but there wasn't much for you to actually do. In fact, largely the fights were trivialized due to gear being too overpowered for the lower levels that we were, but, that wasn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things because our leveling system on Out of Games is absurd to get through.
The November Update for Sidequest, which will be launching within the next few days, replaces everything with turn-based battles.
You meet a foe, you take turns, and every turn you do something different:
Use an ability you've unlocked.
Drink a potion.
Wrap a bandage around your wounds.
Eat some delicious food Pezman cooked up.
Or run away - you scared!
The goal with these updates is to make your class, your talents, and your gear matter. I want things to feel like steady progression when you get upgraded gear, or when you try out a different itemization strategy.
But, this means things are going to feel very different.
A Mistake
Sidequest has been in my mind for a very long time and maybe as a result of that some things are really thought out on a technical side of how things can work on the backend, but not so much with the actual user experience on the front end side of things. You're all alpha testers within my realm of madness.
Progression has been weird, and I reacted too quickly to feedback when I should have let things ride out. It was not my goal for everyone to reach the current max level professions so quickly. Warrior being the only class that was really open to everyone was an intentional choice while things were being worked on. I made the mistake of going hey look guys, there's Mages and Archers too... just good luck getting meaningful gear for them.
Well that didn't feel good, and rightfully so. I love playing caster characters in game and so when I'm given the option to play a caster, you bet I'm signing up for that! It had a huge advantage when playing the live version of Sidequest because I could feel the pain that everyone else who chose that route could feel too. So what did I do? I bumped up drop rates and I released the combat system which was not at all finished.
Combat was supposed to be the big focus of November. Well, that and farming alongside community projects. The pace at which people were able to click a button and get some materials started to increase and that's going to feel really weird in a few days because progression is going to massively slow down just due to the nature of having to actually fight your foes.
My vision has always been for a slower-paced game where people engage with some fun elements a few times during their day. Quick break at the desk? Go slap a boss. Cooking dinner and waiting for something to hit temps? Go slay a couple of monsters and craft something you've been looking forward to crafting.
In the matter of weeks, I've ruined the economy due to a knee-jerk reaction. There is no way for people to feel good in the short-term when things become harder come November. It's always easier to buff things than to nerf them. Nerfs to anything in a game never feels good.
A Promise
Bear with me: November is going to start rough in Sidequest. It is going to feel like a massive resource dump, it is going to feel like you are not able to progress through community goals as quickly as you want, and you will not be crafting as much as you are today. Your reaction may be to stockpile resources today. That's fine!
Part of this increase in difficult is in fact due to the truth that buffs feel good so starting out tough and making it a bit easier if it looks like it needs to be, that's a solid strategy. But, the larger part comes down to vision of the overall game and how much more we have to come.
Sidequest is effectively Early Access. It is unfinished. I promise to you we'll ultimately make this fun, there are just a ton of decisions that are going to be made along the way.
A Name
What's in a name? Sidequest to be has never been someone's main game that they're playing. A number of our players are treating it this way, and that's pretty cool and I think you should be allowed to, but that was definitely not the original intention.
Which puts me in a weird spot.
A Crossroads
With Sidequest being "something you do on the side", that makes a lot of sense for a website-based game. Hell, its a website-based game on a website with a billion other things going on so it makes even more sense as a thing to do on the side. Okay, not quite, but there is a ton.
The grandest part of my vision is Sidequest would be playable on the website, in a game world on the website, and then as a standalone game as well that would work on desktops and probably mobile. I knew balancing things was going to suck. The most basic example of this is mining. In order to find minerals in an online game, you have to go and walk around the map and typically be the first person to spot them. That means that assuming there are people always walking around, there is a certain number of minerals you can expect to be generating in the economy every hour. Well, in a world where we give everyone a button that says "Mine" and they spend a little bit of energy to get something (or sometimes nothing), there is a very clear time difference at play there.
My thought was the game world folks would get balanced by having less energy costs for the actions and then possibly slightly more ore dropping on a per node basis since you have to go out and find ore that has spawned. But also a thought in my mind was that it kind of balances itself out too because the RNG isn't there. If you know where to find 
Cobalt Ore, you can just go farm those nodes.
Combat similarly can be balanced by decreasing the amount of energy required during fights when you actually have to go and find the monsters... or do you? That's why combat is turn-based. It works in both the website and in-game with the exact same system. Website users can more quickly find a wider variety of monsters to slay, but in-game folks get a more immersive experience which I think is worth the trade-off of it being a little slower.
But the question that has been in my mind is, does the world need to exist? I really envisioned this glorious MMO. Maybe it wouldn't be massive, no, it almost certainly would not have a massive amount of players, but I really wanted to drop the game client on Steam as a free-to-play title and then the people on Steam would be playing with the people on our own embedded client who would be playing with the people who are just on the website. All these different interfaces for Sidequest, all of them coming together to fight cool bosses, to take on new events, and to build up something cool. Hell I've ever got a note written down that says Sidequest needs to have it's more graphical functions available via a page that looks like a spreadsheet so people can play in the middle of a meeting lol.
That's something I'm on the fence about because it greatly changes the way that Sidequest can exist on Out of Games if I decide to get rid of the client. The client has greatly fallen behind in features and, well, the entire world because I just don't have the time to build out the map right now.
I have co-operative dungeons and raids to finish. I have more world bosses to build out. The timetable we have with a month-long event on Out of Games is a bit insane in ways because if you have nothing to deliver at the end of 30 days, the next month is a bust. It's very lucky to have several things done or almost done for future pieces of content before the first month brought fishing onto the site because I have no idea how we'd be getting November done in time otherwise lol.
But yeah, that's just kinda where I'm at, at a crossroads with what Sidequest truly looks like. Maybe this does eventually become some kind of offshoot with a different name and different balancing in a truly in-game world and all it shares with what we have on Out of Games is a bunch of items, classes, and bosses. Or we do truly chase that dream of a bunch of ways to play all coming together. I wish these kind of decisions weren't so difficult!
I felt it was important to let folks know what I'm thinking about with this. I want other people to see the vision too so when stuff feels like it isn't quite right, you can remember that it isn't done.
A Combative Return
Fights take place on an element I'm calling "The Stage". Turns in this play aren't strictly a back and forth between you and an enemy though, Haste can bring your turns around sooner and some abilities when used can even push your enemy's next turn back. A mage with Chill on a Wolf? You sometimes will get the ability to get two spells off in a row before it can bite you.
Action Bars
The Stage features an Action Bar at the bottom with your 8 chosen abilities. On top of this is an accessory bar which allows you easy access to your inventory, the ability to "Wait" or "Flee", and quick use of quick slot items (9 + 0).
You can have more abilities than just 8 though, what's the deal with that? Intentional! Much like preparing up your spells in a tabletop campaign of your choice, you must choose which spells you are bringing into battle. Right now, there aren't a ton of spells to choose from so your bar is going to have almost all of them. But we will regularly add in new spells as we increase the number of levels available to everyone.
This makes it very intentional what you choose to bring. Maybe you want to ball out and just rip enemies hard with pure fire spells as a Mage, or you're the one who needs to bring some defensive and buff related abilities instead to aid a party. This allows the game to give you so many options to change up gameplay.
Roll the Dice
Every hit you land rolls two percentile dice for a critical strike, and you get to watch them land. Your crit chance is a band at the top of the die. With a 7% crit chance, anything from 94 to 100 is a crit for 1.5x damage.
A natural 100 is something else. It's a SUPER CRIT for 2.5x damage. Every player gets that same 1% chance. Monsters, currently, can never roll one against you though so for now, everyone is safe from the super crit.
There are a variety of cosmetics to unlock for your dice and they can be equipped via a new Dice Tab on your character page. Note that level 5 is not the requirement for these dice and is a in-development screenshot. This will actually be the reward for finishing a seasonal battle pass.
Multistrike
Multistrike Rating is a new stat on gear. After a hit lands, it rolls for an extra strike at half damage, and that strike rolls its own crit dice, so a super crit can land on it too. Every full 100% Multistrike is a guaranteed extra strike, up to 300%.
Know Your Limits
Each foe's level is shown in color, just as it was in Venture. Picking a fight above your level is allowed, and a foe in red asks "Fight anyway?" first. Here's what you're signing up for:
You miss more. Hit rating can fix this but the larger the gap in level between you and a foe, the more often your attacks miss.
You deal less. Your damage drops by 2% for every level the foe has above you.
They hit harder. Goes well above you in level can deal crushing blows.
No stalling. If a fight drags past round 25, every foe becomes Enraged and hits 15% harder each round after that. Turtling forever as a strategy doesn't work.
Boss Combat Changes
November's bosses drop the one-click swing as well. On a boss page you get two buttons for the same cost:
Battle opens your own turn-based fight against the boss, up to 8 rounds.
Automate plays the fight for you with the first four abilities on your bar, then plays it back so you can watch.
The boss still has one health bar shared by the whole community, and a strip over the stage shows it live, along with how many people are fighting right now and the big moments from their bouts. The debuffs you land on the boss are shared too. Sunder it or set it Burning, and everyone fighting it gets the benefit for about a minute per turn of the effect, with up to five copies from different players stacking.
This new approach to interactivity where buffs can be consumed and stacked in new ways gives us more intelligent choices to make against co-operative fights. If you want to min-max, you might want to "group up" with others at the same time and plan out your attacks.
Boss fights you take part in still grant drops, just expect more XP, more Gold, and more Loot than normal. Your first few attacks against a boss each day are free, and then you can optionally spend energy to keep on fighting them.
Battle Stew has been changed so instead of giving you a free attack against the boss, it now just gives you 50 energy, enough for a couple of more swings.
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