Time’s End Blog for August 28, 2023

Published in

PlayBigTime

10 min readAug 28, 2023

Greetings, fellow Citizens of Epoch City!

Welcome to our second edition of Time’s End Blog, we have some exciting content that we’ve been working on to share with you!

First, let’s dive into a quick recap of what’s been happening lately at Big Time:

We released a sneak peek on how the Forge will look like in-game! (If you haven’t seen the Time Warden and Armory, check last month’s blog!)
We’ve introduced an exciting new enhancement that greatly simplifies exploration — presenting the expanded map!
Rentals are coming once preseason launches!
A mysterious place is waiting for you to explore it 👀

Development Updates

Nightmare dungeons

In patch 0.27 you’ll be able to face nightmare dungeons! These aren’t your ordinary challenges — the name says it all. Brace yourself for intensified difficulty that will push your skills to the limit! 🔥

Let’s explore how they were created:

Nightmare dungeons are more unrelenting, there are more enemies and they are more dangerous in general. There are also less “beneficial” random encounters such as resurrection shrines, rest areas, buff shrines … but on the flip side you will find more loot chests in order to compensate the players for the difficulty.

The inspiration behind creating nightmare dungeons was the community asking for more challenging dungeons and with higher enemy density. The new systems that we created for forest and desert biomes allow us to tweak difficulty/encounters and events without having to modify the map files. This allows us to tailor dungeons for specific groups of players in a much more efficient way than we could have in the past. The nightmare dungeons are the first step in that effort to offer a more customized experience to the player.

These dungeons are best to play with other players, since we really balanced them around group play. But as more players are added to the group they scale in the same fashion as a regular dungeon, the starting point of that scaling is just much higher.

Players can expect double loot at the end, much more chests to be found around the dungeon and all the extra goodness dropping from all the extra enemies, as it is intended to be a more challenging piece of gameplay for the experienced players to chew through.

In order to help find the right balance of difficulty, we had some of our most experienced, hardcore players on the Player Council run through them. Through testing and iteration we landed on what should be both a challenging and rewarding experience, but we are open to feedback from the community at large.Please let us know your thoughts on the balance once your party has experienced it!

Nightmare dungeons are an optional experience, if your character is not geared enough or you feel overwhelmed going into a nightmare dungeon then we would advise the players to dial it back and play some regular content and come back when their character is ready for the challenge. This content is squarely aimed at a more hardcore audience even if we are sure a slice of those players will still argue for something harder (we are open to feedback about a good name for a higher difficulty!)

Franklin’s Questline

In patch 0.27 we are introducing the first of many quest lines to come:

“A Temporal Anomaly”

This questline is our first foray into a more directed content that is meant to accompany the players as they level up. We are delivering the first 2 chapters with more to come in the future. It gives players a unique spin on familiar dungeons with content exclusive to the questline itself. It will introduce concepts and enemies that will later appear in regular adventures and will give a line of progression to higher levels in an engaging way.

Questlines also lay the architectural groundwork for MMOG-style bosses — bosses that have phases and custom attacks. While the Elemental Monitor was the first attempt at this, it was essentially hand-scripted. This new method allows the mobs to employ their normal utility-based selection of strategies and abilities. For instance, suppose the party damages the boss beyond the 50% health threshold; the boss may then decide that it is time to summon reinforcements and raise the stakes with a new attack.

We can’t wait for you to try them!

Team Member Spotlight

This time we want to introduce you to William Pare, Senior Technical Designer!

“Hi y’all! My name is William. I’m a temporary configuration of atoms emanated from exploding stars, bundled into a carbon-based life form capable of abstract thought, walking around on a fortunately watery rock that drifts in an ever expanding and fathomless empty space. I guess that might not be descriptive enough, so here’s a bit more detail.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was an avid and active metalhead. I played bass guitar in some bands:

I also worked as a stage technician for a bunch of concert halls and staging companies. We setup shows like the Montreal jazz festival and Cirque du soleil.

In 2005 I got started in the games industry as a QA tester. I joined Eidos Montréal in 2007 to help open up the studio and ramp up their quality assurance department.

In 2009 I got my first “break” when I joined the Thief 4 dev team. That’s when I started messing around with Unreal Engine and learned scripting through Kismet and Unreal Script at the time. It was Ayrald Anneron (to my left in the photo) who gave me a chance to join his team as a Technical Designer. Together, we’ve since worked on Thief 4, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Shadow of the Tomb Raider and another unannounced project. It was 14 years after first meeting Ayrald that I convinced him to join us at Big Time.

After 14 years at Eidos I decided that it was time to try something new. I had interviewed with a few big name studios but I was getting weary of the politics, corporate culture and huge dev teams with 4+ year game development cycles. The idea of working as part of a smaller team with a greater density of experience and independence was appealing to me, and there were many aspects of this job that offered an opportunity to expand my skill set. My interview at Big Time was very organic and we had some pretty interesting discussions. That’s ultimately what tipped the scales for me; I had a good feeling about working with the team.

I’m a Technical Designer, and that basically means I’m a design-oriented jack of all trades. I can tackle lots of various features relating to gameplay, level design ingredients, quests, AI, systems, etc, but don’t ask me to do any artistic work (just ask any member of the art team about my “art”…).

Regarding the challenges I face in my role, we are all really passionate about making the best game possible and that passion inevitably sparks spirited discussions. From a design perspective, it’s sometimes challenging to convince your colleagues that a feature should go in a particular direction or be implemented in a specific way. At the end of the day, what truly matters is that we all come together and reach a consensus on what’s ultimately best for the game.

From a technical perspective, there are some bugs whose sources are surprisingly taxing to decipher. It is usually some very obscure and complex race condition that only happens in the full packaged game (not in the editor). Those are fun.

Another challenge I face is going to bed with an idea for a new quest or gameplay, then waking up in the middle of the night with a solution on how to implement that feature. I don’t know how my girlfriend Laurence puts up with me. I have to be real quiet when I sneak out of bed and to my office. Which reminds me, I really need to get rid of my mechanical keyboard…

If I had to think about my favorite games, for me it’s more about gaming moments that are burned in my memory. To name a few:

When the dude who is my arch nemesis for the entire game joins my party if, when given the option, I choose NOT to fight him for some reason (Chrono Trigger)
When I kept restarting the game to make sure I got the wounded guy in front of the church because I needed to have the butcher quest (Diablo)
When, in a generic dungeon, down an inconspicuous pipe, I had to stand in the left corner, jump 3 times to reveal an invisible platform which revealed a new area with a casino that I couldn’t get into anyway because I didn’t have a membership. To get the membership I had to win 100 games of “look the other way” against the owner’s brother in Booster Tower (Mario RPG)
When my buddy invited me over to his place to show me “this new shareware he got in the mail”, which turned out to be a demo of Starcraft.
When I completely ignored the actual race and just destroyed all the cars, which took hours, which also happened to be a legit way of winning the race (Carmaggeddon)
When some dude’s face would randomly pop up during the game, for one second, yelling “toasty”, and I had to press DPAD DOWN + START (Mortal Kombat)
When you had to find the right greens to capture the right bird to breed it with another rare bird using a nut you stole from a monster, after having raced the birds for hours to have them climb to S class so you can produce another super rare bird that can reach hidden areas of the map to obtain rare magic to help you defeat seemingly gigantic undefeatable monsters (FF7)
Remember when LucasArts was around? And when Westwood Studios would have live actors play parts in their games? When FromSoftware invented a game genre where players were simply required to “get good” and games were allowed to be difficult again. How about that first time you sawed a Locust in half with a Lancer? Or when you met the Illusive Man? Remember restarting Bramble Blast a zillion times because of those stupid thorns?

Anyway, you get the idea. Games are awesome. Every single one of those moments influence my work on a daily basis.

My office wall can attest.

In Big Time, I choose to play Battlemancer all the way, and I must farm for some Shadowblade pants with Ninja Leap. That way I can Fireblast drone bugs and Ninja Leap in for a sword kill. The best of all worlds! I’ll just need a Fixer to heal me when I inevitably get demolished for being overly brazen (just ask my playtest colleagues).

Thank you so much for playing the game and for taking the time to share all your awesome feedback with us. I hope you like the new quests coming out as part of patch .27. I can’t wait to see all your feedback on discord. And if you have any ideas for objectives/quests, don’t hesitate to share them as well. Happy hunting!”

Sneak Peeks

We have some sneak peeks from the art team so you can see some of the animations, characters and VFX that are coming!
Keep in mind that these are a work in progress and not necessarily coming in the next patch!