It’s hard to believe, but we’re only a couple of weeks away from our worldwide launch on March 1st! And as that date gets closer, that also means the end of our Early Access era.
This week, we released an update to our Early Access players for final testing before the game officially releases next month. Originally, we wanted this patch to be available to all of our Early Access players, but since then, we’ve encountered a technical limitation at this stage that does not allow for this.
We apologize for this inconvenience and understand this is frustrating for many players to experience, especially for those whose access is affected. Rest assured, all players will be able to update to the latest version when the game officially launches on March 1st.
In light of this, we will be mailing every player a small gift to compensate for the temporary limited access, which will also be available at launch to those presently locked out. We understand this small token will not fix the immediate issue, but we hope you can look forward to the official launch in just a short while.
We’re incredibly grateful for all our Early Access players, being a part of Puzzle Quest 3’s early beginnings and providing all your feedback to help make this game what it is today! It means a lot to our small team that you are so passionate about this series, one that is so close to our hearts as well.
We can’t wait to see you in-game after the official launch and continue the journey ahead together.
Just to clarify, what does “locked out” mean here? I’ve not been able to install the update, but I’m still able to open the Early Access version and play, and I don’t see any specific impacted features. Maybe I’m just missing something.
I assume Kafka is referring to those Early Access players who for one reason or another had uninstalled the game just prior to the update being made available and were then not able to reinstall the game at all in its entirety, not just the update. I believe players like @Avenger are in this group, but they would have to confirm.
Correct that those who uninstalled are unable to download the game until we assume 1st March, unless there are any more surprises that push it back.
While I can no longer load it on Bluestacks, I do still have it on my phone. And after previous updates I learned to switch off auto update so I have the chance to see patch notes, and more importantly the undisclosed changes before choosing or being forced onto the latest version.
EDIT - now seems the ability to update to the new release is no longer possible in the store, so guess I’m keeping my goals for a couple weeks longer? What a mess.
There has been nothing said that would indicate that. The update has a reworking of goals (see the patch notes) so your progress there will be “lost” but you will then get credit for the equivalent progress in the new goals and the related gems (for many long time players it comes out to 20k+ gems). Any levels or items earned between now and March 1 should be unaffected.
It looks like the Skirmish and Dungeon goals from pre update are almost gone while there appears to be almost entirely new goals in the Battle category. Now there is also a collection category that provides a vitality boost.
Just confirming that all your progress from Early Access will be retained for the official game release.
Other than the Goals progress due to the rework of that system.
You can find the full details of the Goal system rework and what happens with your Goal progress here in the patch notes:
I disagree. As wtih most f2p designs, it is a slow progress, but it is not an energy game and spending money doesn’t immediately give you significant advantages; often it just greases the skids so to speak. If you don’t like f2p design, then you will always see these games as p2w. But what are you winning? the chance to have something faster that can be obtained through additional play over time. There are still many things that need to be improved but forcing you to spend money to play the game regularly is not really one of them.
1: They might fix that
2: There is never enough space ever, even if you have 1,000 slots you’ll still want more
3: Lootboxes have been monetized for how many years now? Nothing new.
There is a cash shop, so if your idea of P2W is that any payment gives you an advantage, then yes it’s P2W.
However there are a lot of limitations on it, so rather than P2W I’d say it’s more P2BALLS - Pay 2 Be A Little Less Shit.
A lot of this game is based around RNG, so whether you are using gems/crowns to speed up chests, buying a random item/spell/minion from the store, or materials to level and evolve items, they are all still based on the same random loot and RNG chances. You can pay real money for something that ends up being salvage-grade very easily, and the longer you’ve been playing, IMO, the higher the chance of it being an undesired roll.
To a new player the cash shop does have some advantages, not least because simply having a higher rarity item in a slot, regardless of set or colour, gives much more of a stat boost than any Common/Uncommon you may have found to that point. It will also give an advantage in early leagues of PVP where opponents are grouped by tournament progress rather than gear score.
There are some areas of the game design that feel like they were put there just to frustrate the player into spending money to get around it. But as Tresk pointed out there are other areas where we are all constrained by the same game design. There is no “pay your way out” of lack of storage, or competing with kingdom members for daily deals. Chests can be sped up, or an additional slot via VIP, but you still need to earn the chest to fill the slot first as there is no longer a route to buy chests on demand (old dungeon marks system).
No one can really give you a straight answer on these questions, because we don’t know. Changes to the in-game advancement system were made as recently as Friday and there may be more unannounced changes coming on Monday with the game’s launch.
Balance is a mixed bag. Somewhat easier in the early and mid-game, harder in the late-game especially after the class/gear rebalance.
The most significant P2W aspect of the game, as of right now, are acquisition of Glyphs. High level relics are still a pain, but were made significantly easier to obtain with the Eveline changes on Friday. There is still no remotely sustainable source of Glyph acquisition for players, which will become very apparent to everyone shortly after the crowds arrive on Monday to kick everyone off top spots on leaderboards.
As of the day before launch, Glyphs are only obtainable through the following ways"
1 random Glyph for 1700 Gems in the Bundle shop on Sundays only. (Not sustainable as there are still no passive sources of Gem income, there are only a finite number of Gems available in Story mode, and Daily Challenge Gems when rolled are too insignificant to matter).
1 random Glyph for 80 Diamond Marks in the Event shop, always available. The problem here is that Marks are now only obtainable through Events, which run on Sigils. Diamond Marks have a very low drop rate, which means that they can only be obtained in any real numbers through brute forcing massive numbers of Event runs. This is analogous to buying tiers in the event shops in GoW. On the other hand, shop tiers in PQ3 are vastly more expensive than their GoW equivalents and as mentioned in the previous bullet point there are no passive sources of Gem income to finance renewing shop tiers every third day.
Chest drops aren’t significant enough to warrant more than passing mention that they exist.
A couple of armor Glyphs exist in the VIP pass, but no other Glyph types.
Most here have speculated (myself included) that the unreleased Season mode might provide the missing pieces to this puzzle. Maybe, maybe not. But until then and we see all of the launch day changes, there’s no good answer to your questions one way or the other.
