Dear Adventurers,
First and foremost, the Shining Beyond team would like to express our heartfelt gratitude to everyone who has participated in the OBT. We truly appreciate the players’ heartwarming excitement and response to the Shining Beyond Beta, and the feedback provided by the community has been most invaluable.
Since the start of the OBT, the team has been looking at all your feedback, suggestions and your concerns, adding them into our game development notes while we continue to work on improvements based on these notes in serious consideration.
Here is a sneak peek on some upcoming improvements that we are working on.
There is a large number of passionate players who have completed all Campaign Missions in all 3 difficulties and feel there is no longer any content left with Campaign Missions. Some might feel that the Campaign Missions are not challenging enough for them as the difficulty is too easy for their current team of Heroes.
The team is aware that the current progression system for Heroes is faster than the difficulty progression in Campaign Missions. However, we are also mindful that the majority of the player base (~85%) has not yet reached Legendary mode in Campaign. Keeping these players in mind, we will instead provide additional challenges for the hardcore players who have reached end-game.
We plan to:
Add Master mode to the Campaign Missions for players who have cleared Legendary mode
Campaign missions on Heroic, Legendary, and Master difficulties will introduce a hero debuff mechanic that reduces their Advanced Stats.
Give players rewards that are more attractive as they progress through Master mode
For players who have enjoyed our Shining Beyond Campaign Story and are hungry for more Story content, fret not, the team is looking into creating more Story content. We seek your patience as story writing can be a lengthy process.
We plan to:
Begin work on Season 2 of the Shining Beyond Story
Target to release Season 2 in Q1 2021. We will update the community closer to Season 2 release date.
We are aware that Arena can feel unfair and unplayable to players as the current Arena meta involves normal-attacking one-shots with the Arena matches being over in seconds. We’re looking into improving the balance between the effectiveness of attacks versus skills as well as the length of matches, particularly at the highest levels of the competition.
We plan to:
Dampen Heroes damage and healing output in Arena, so that Heroes will be doing a fraction of their normal / skills damages in relation to opponents’ HP.
Reduce the impact of Advanced Stats in Arena matches.
We are aware that the Tower of Oblivion and Tower of Trials are posing different challenges to early and end-game players. Early-game players find the Towers too challenging, whereas late-game players find the Towers too easy.
We will be rebalancing both Towers to be more forgiving to early-game players while also adding more levels so that late-game players will have even more rewards in-store for them.
The Tower of Trials was designed to allow players to test out class-specific teams and strategies in higher difficulty levels. As there is no story tied to the mode, the team will be looking at ways to increase the difficulty on higher floors in the Tower.
We plan to:
Increase the floor levels in Oblivion Tower
Increase the floor levels in Tower of Trials
All Towers will be reset to floor 1 for all players
Towers difficulties will introduce a hero debuff mechanic that reduces their Advanced Stats at higher floors
Guild Raids are undertuned at the moment, not giving elite players a proper challenge while also causing some players to miss out on their daily Guild Quests.
The initial design of the Guild Raid was that Raid 1 was designed for early-game players while Raid 2 was designed for mid-game players. However, this meant that is no challenge currently for late-game players who yearn for an enjoyable ‘neck-to-neck’ fight with a Raid Boss to match their current state of progression.
To better accommodate the spectrum from casual to hardcore we plan to:
A new mode – Training Ground
Requires a Training Key to enter
A Training Key is given daily, more Training Keys can be purchased using gold at the Shop
Training Ground Boss will not die, thus allowing players to test and tweak their squad comps and strategies for optimum result
Raid 1 & 2: Changes to Bosses and rebalanced with more health.
New Raid 3 with new Bosses and challenges for end-game players
Removal of the 3-day end date for Raids
Updating the Raid Shop
We are aware that there are a few issues with Hero Skills currently:
Some skills are overpowered when stacked with Skill Effect and Skill Crit
Using Hero Skills feels like a ‘penalty’ and not as satisfying to use as these Skills seems to deal less damage as compared to normal attacks
Skill casting time is taking too long as the skill wind-up and complete animations are taken into account when casting a skill
Certain combinations of skills allowing skills to do hundred of millions of damages
We are aware that the different unique Hero Skills is a major factor of what makes the battle system in Shining Beyond strategic and satisfying, and that Hero Skills in general should deal more damage or provide much more utility than normal attacks.
Powerful skills were designed with a casting time that is commensurate with the skill power and damage. This was to allow powerful skills a chance to be interrupted or countered, allowing us to design more interesting skills in the future. However, we recognize that players feel that they need to skip skill animations in order to have better control of timing and gameplay.
Hence, we plan to:
Pause all ally and monster actions when a Hero is performing a skill animation, up to the point where the Hero completes the animation and damage is dealt.
Players are able to tap and skip the animation
Game setting that allows players to skip skill animations
Reduce the Global Skill Cooldown mechanic to allow heroes to synchronize better between hero skills
Skill Critical and Skill Effectiveness will no longer affect Skill buffs
Auto-Repeat system for Event Dungeons
Equipped gear will no longer count as inventory space
Allow player to open a large number of Selectors at once
3 meal times instead of 2 and a longer duration to collect (8 hours instead of 2) for players to collect
Display monsters’ level appropriate to their stats
Allow players to add friends in the Guild list
Guild Leader / Vice Leader transfer system
Repeated Buff and Debuff icons will be disabled on 3D heroes in combat
Finally, we’ll like to explain the delay of our global launch to late November. The fact is, we believe so strongly that the improvements based on your feedback will unlock the game’s true potential that we simply cannot push ahead with the global launch without them.
Coupled with the time required for testing, bug fixes and a review by both iOS and Google to approve the app release launch, we believe late November is a reasonable target.
We are humbled by your support and enthusiasm for Shining Beyond, truly. Thank you for this opportunity to make the best IDLE Fantasy RPG experience possible for everyone. We hope you like this brief update. We still have a lot of work to do, but we will get there.
Please continue to follow us for the latest updates on our Development Blog.
Love,
Shining Beyond Team
