The Apeiron Dungeon Demo: Phase 2 Gameplay Informational and Season 1 Review
Hi! Hello! Salutations! And welcome to our Apeiron Season 1 Review and Demo Phase 2 Gameplay Informational preview! In this blog, we’re going to cover the epic beginnings of the Apeiron Guild Wars: Skydream Scramble Season 1 AND the Letrina Cup! Then we’ll cover all the goodies you can expect to see in the Phase 2 release of our Apeiron Dungeon Demo, currently scheduled to go live in April with early primeval testing beginning next week! Lots to talk about so off we go!
Apeiron Guild Wars: Season 1 Rundown and Letrina Cup
The Apeiron Guild Wars: Skydream Scramble (AGW) kicked off on February 15th 2023 as the FIRST Official Apeiron Guild Wars! We sent an open invitation to communities across the Metaverse to join, and they answered — we had over 80 web3 communities participating with more than 1000 players actively competing, spending over 3000 hours fighting through our dungeon!
So who came out on top? The winner of the AGW is PIF, who broke the 15’ barrier with a jaw dropping average time of 14’08’’! They’re walking away from Season 1 with the coveted Arcane Planet Set, a value of 10,000 USDC, and well-deserved. In 2nd came Apeiron stalwarts Guildfi with an impressive time of 15’09’’, taking the Mythic Planet Set for a value of 6,500 USDC. And sneaking into third we have 3Verse (fittingly), who pipped Leo Ventures at the post to take home the Elemental Planet Set, a value of 4,000 USDC. You can see the final standings on the leaderboard above. Big congrats to the top 10!
Running alongside the Guild Wars, the finals of the Letrina Cup — a special Apeiron Planet holder competition drawing from the top players from the Season 1 leaderboard — have also just concluded, and we wanted to give a quick shout out to the winner, USN! This guy put in a staggering 109 hours into the game and came up with his own unique strategies to clinch the inaugural Letrina Cup, making him the undoubted champion. Congratulations USN!
Now that Season 1 has finished, we’re looking ahead to Season 2. Let’s talk about the content we have planned — and boy is there a lot to talk about!
Artifacts: A New Way to Play
Artifacts are coming in Phase 2! Artifacts are unique rare items that provide passive bonuses. During the course of any given dungeon run, your Artifacts will push you to tailor your playstyle in a certain way so as to maximize their effectiveness, making each run distinct. And on top of that, some Artifacts come at different rarities, ranging from Common to Epic. The rarer the Artifact, the stronger the effect!
For example, you might get “The Warrior’s Cookpot”, which has the effect “When you play a Warrior skill card, you have a 40% chance to return a Warrior skill card from your discard pile to the top of your deck.” This can really let you combo off with Warrior skill cards, so you could run a Warrior-heavy Apostle team if you got this Artifact.
Conversely, you might get an Artifact like “The Pentahorn.” This Artifact gives you attack speed to all your units for every 5 mana in your mana pool, encouraging you to keep at least 5 mana at all times, so a test of your mana awareness. Notably, this Artifact combos with something like “The Spirit-Coral Tree”, which gives additional max mana, so you can gain even MORE attack speed!
Artifacts are going to add a huge amount of replayability into the game and are a major part of this update. But they’re just the beginning!
New Playable Avatar Classes: The Fury and the Fate
Phase 1 of the Demo introduced you to the Tempest Avatar Wisdom class. The Wisdom is a magic-focused Avatar class with a penchant for offensive-oriented spell-slinging. And while we’re sure you’ve enjoyed playing as the Tempest Wisdom, variety is the spice of life, and with this new release we’ve got not one but TWO new Avatar classes to choose from: the Tempest Fury and the Tempest Fate.
The Tempest Fury is a melee brawler Avatar class who wants to get up close and personal in combat. If you’re the type of player who wants to execute a very forward, aggressive kind of game plan, the Fury is just the Avatar you’re looking for.
On the other side we have the Tempest Fate, a commander-style Avatar class firing off shots from distance with its powerful ranged weaponry. For those looking to control the ebb and flow of battle with a range of different abilities, including buffs, debuffs, and summons, the Fate is an excellent choice.
And of course, each of these Avatar classes comes with its own skills, passives, and upgrade trees to let you customize it just as you’d like. Speaking of which…(segway!)
Apostles: Skilling and Fusing
Our dood Apostles are also getting some big changes! First, all 6 Apostle classes (Warrior, Mage, Hunter, Rogue, Priest, and Guardian) will be getting 5 new skills each — that’s 30 new skills total just for Apostles, more than double of what we have now! This means that instead of each Apostle having the same 3 skills every time, each unique Apostle will have a random selection of 3/8 from its class’ skill pool. This will make getting a new Apostle more interesting, since it could have an entirely different selection of skills to work with than what you’re used to.
On top of this, we’re adding in skill upgrading to Apostles! This works a little bit differently than with upgrading your Avatar’s skills. Here’s how it goes: when you want to upgrade an Apostle’s skill to make it stronger, you need to sacrifice another Apostle of the same type and with the same skill. They fuse together and…the skill gets upgraded, so its effects — such as damage, healing, shielding, etc. — will get improved.
So instead of having a bunch of un-leveled Apostles who you’re unlikely to ever use, each Apostle you get now presents a new strategic decision: do you keep the new Apostle and level it up so you have a stronger team with a wider selection of skills, or do you sacrifice your new Apostle to one of your existing Apostles in order to super-charge one skill in particular? Decisions, decisions!
A Room of One’s Own: Event Rooms, Campfire and Shop Improvements
And speaking of decisions, the Phase 2 update will also bring with it improvements to both Campfire and Shop rooms, as well as an entirely new room type: Event rooms!
Let’s talk about Event rooms first. Event rooms present the player with unique story scenarios to interact with: each one will come with choices that will deeply affect how the rest of your run — and beyond! — will play out. Some of these stories are random events that explore some of the out-of-combat challenges your Avatar and doods may face in the dungeon. Others are more character-focused, and may even have multiple parts to unlock…with plenty of rewards, of course!
Event rooms will add a ton of replayability to the game (alongside everything else) since there are many stories for you to unlock and experience. But you might not want to go to an Event room — you might be drawn to the newly improved Campfire or Shop rooms!
For the Campfire room, we’ve drastically changed what options are available. In Phase 2, you’ll have the following choices:
- Heal your Avatar AND Apostles (previously two options, now combined!)
- Choose a dead Apostle to revive (no longer random!)
- Level up an Apostle
So now, even if you don’t need to heal up, the Campfire offers the chance to level up an Apostle. Choose your favorite and really take them to the next level, or pick one that’s maybe fallen behind the curve and bring them up to speed!
For the Shop, we’re adding more Potions, new Consumable Items with a variety of effects, and also the option to sell Potions or even Artifacts you’ve collected to convert it into cold hard Soul Gems. Can always use more Soul Gems.
To Infinity and Beyond: Season 2 Leaderboards
In Season 1 of the Apeiron Dungeon Demo, we focused on speedrunning. Gotta go fast! For Season 2, we’re going to be changing it up a bit, and asking the question: how deep can you go? We’re calling it “Infinity Run.” The way it works is you’ll go through the 3 Depths, just as before, except after, you have the option to continue.
The game will soft reset — you’ll go back to Depth 1 with a new layout and have to make your way through the 3 Depths again, except you’ll keep everything you’ve gained in your last playthrough. And you can repeat this process — of going through 3 Depths, beating the boss, and doing it again — to infinity and beyond!
Except of course, it isn’t so simple. The deeper you go, the harder the fights get, so you best be ready. For the leaderboards, we’ll be seeing how many rooms you can make it through before collapsing in defeat. Note that if two players have the same number of rooms cleared, the player with the faster time will be ranked higher on the boards.
Now, we should note that there was some controversy towards the end of Season 1 as a player who registered as a Skyverse community participant ended up switching their entry to 3Verse very close to the end of the event. This caused some stir since the rules clearly state that a player can only be registered for one team. And while the player did not break the rules because they only ended up representing 3Verse, the fact their (very good) time ended up switching to 3Verse so late gave the team a late (and decisive) advantage in the race for third place.
Therefore, for future Guild Wars, we will be implementing the following rules in regards to switching teams:
- No player may switch teams in the last 24hrs of the competition. We will make sure to give ample warning ahead of time.
- Players who choose to switch teams must provide a new entry for their new team.
We hope that these rules will continue to improve the tournament experience for all participants.
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And that’s pretty much everything! But boy is it a lot. There’s so much stuff in Phase 2, we hope you’re excited! In the meantime,if you have any questions, roll on over to our Discord, where one of our awesome community doods will be sure to help you out. And also follow us on Twitter so you can keep up with exactly how YOU can start playing the newest version of the demo, absolutely free!
Before we sign off, we’d like to give a big thanks to our sponsors for adding to our Guild Wars prize pool: 3Verse for providing 42 Whitelist slots and 3 Free Mints; Hoshi Boshi with 3 NFTs; Derby Star with 3 NFTs; Degenheim with 3 NFTs; The Beacon with 5 Founding Characters; TCDAO with an Access Pass Free Mint for ALL participants; and finally Guildfi and Avocado DAO adding USDC. We’d also like to thank our partner GameFi.org for their support during the event, and last but not least thank EVERYONE for their contributions to our charity pool! We raised over $3000 for earthquake relief in Turkey and Syria, showing that gamers can make a difference.
As always, thanks for reading, godlings. We’ll see you next time~
About Apeiron
Apeiron is the world’s first NFT-based play-and-earn godgame. Apeiron will feature a unique card-based action-adventure combat system combined with god game simulation gameplay inspired by classic god games like Populous and Black & White. Players will be able to build up planets from above before descending to the ground as a powerful Avatar to solve the mysteries of the universe. Players will grow their planet to the point of developmental stagnation, then reset the planetary cycle via an Armageddon event to allow for even more advancement and thrilling late-game alliance level GvE and GvG activities. Apeiron will use a tri-token architecture, which means that there will be three separate tokens to navigate their ecosystem: a governance token, a play-to-earn token, and a premium alliance token.
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March 31st, 2023: This article was updated to add a small clarification about the “Warrior’s Cookpot” Artifact, changing “Warrior cards” to “Warrior skill cards.”
