Table of Contents
Welcome!
Hello! I'm Chris Dupuis, the Executive Producer for
Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms. In my role, I plan the release schedule and coordinate with our incredibly talented team throughout the various stages of production, from initial concept to final release. It's a genuine pleasure to finally be able to share the exciting updates our team has been tirelessly working on over the past few months.
2023 was a fantastic year for Idle Champions, and I want to thank our dedicated community for joining us on this adventure! We have a small team here at Codename, but we all work together towards the same goal of releasing fun and exciting content for you, our players. Last year:
- We launched 18 new Adventure & Variant updates, 17 Events & Champions, four Seasons, and four Celebration Events.
- We introduced and released four Emergence Events, starting with the Red Wizard Emergence around the release of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
- We featured two Idle Champions Presents in-game events and Dungeons & Dragons 5E actual play campaigns with our community of incredibly talented content creators, introducing everyone to new original Champions: Miria, Solaak, Thellora, and Jang Sao.
- The Idle Champions community came together to raise over $30,000 for some amazing charities, including One Tree Planted, Lambert House, Take This, and Extra Life.
- Last but certainly not least, we worked with many fantastic partners last year including Deerstalker Pictures, Penny Arcade, and Cryptic Studios/Gearbox Software. We'd also like to give an extra special shout out to Larian Studios, who helped us to bring characters from the award-winning Baldur's Gate 3 to Idle Champions!
2024 is shaping up to be another big year for the game. We'll celebrate the 7th anniversary of Idle Champions this September, but before we get there we've got some big updates planned. We've got a lot to discuss, so let's get started!
Pausing Seasons for Core System Updates
We introduced Seasons to Idle Champions in September of 2022. Since then, we've rolled out seven Seasons featuring 35 Champions. However, Seasons are very resource-intensive to design and develop, and even though we have been able to keep up a steady stream of Season content, the time we've had available to work on other major system updates has been minimal. With that in mind, we put Seasons development on pause following the release of
Season 7: The Rivals so that we could shift resources towards two major core system updates that we are very excited to finally be able to share with you now.
Without further ado, I'll let designers Peter Lee and Justin Stocks introduce you to
Collections & Guide Quests, and
Events 2.0.
Collections & Guide Quests
I’m Peter Lee, System Designer for Idle Champions. You may best know my work from my career at
Wizards of the Coast, where I worked on the development of the 5th Edition of
Dungeons & Dragons and on board games like
Lords of Waterdeep. I’ve been at Codename Entertainment since October 2021, where you’ve seen my hand in Champion designs and Adventure Variants. I've endeavored to make each new Champion feature an ability that makes them stand apart from the others, like
Dungeon Master's
Special Guest Star and
Karlach's ties to the Zariel Patron. Today, I’m here to talk about Collections and Guide Quests.
Our revisions to Collections and the introduction of Guide Quests have two goals:
- Help players to more effectively track their progress within Idle Champions.
- Guide players (especially new or returning players) through the vast and ever-growing content of Idle Champions.
To start things off, we’re greatly increasing the usefulness of the Collections dialog. The current implementation shows the Champions and Equipment you have collected, but there is a lot more to the game than that! The updated dialog will feature Familiars, Skins, Campaign progress, Patrons, and so much more. There will be progress bars to show your overall completion, filtering to make it easy to search your Collections, and requirements to unlock major features like Trials, Campaigns, and Patrons.
It can be daunting to know what to do next in Idle Champions, especially for newer players. Guide Quests help players to determine what they should do next. These will work similarly to how Quests worked with Seasons, however, Guide Quests do not expire, and you can complete them at your leisure! As you complete these Quests, you’ll unlock additional, more difficult quests which will continue showing your potential paths through the game.
Each time you complete a Guide Quest you will earn rewards. In many cases it will be Corrupted Gems, but you’ll also find various Gold Chests and even some Scales of Tiamat. For our experienced players, there will be a button that lets you claim all the rewards at once, so you won’t have to click through hundreds of completed quests when they go live.
We’ll periodically add additional Quests as new content goes live, and I’m excited to see how this helps players progress through the game!
Events 2.0
Hello, my name is Justin Stocks and I am the Lead Designer for Idle Champions. You can interact with me and my co-founder David Whittaker on our Dev Insights stream every Thursday at 2PM PT at
twitch.tv/CNEGames. I am here to talk about the next major system update for Idle Champions: Events 2.0.
The event system was the
first system we added to Idle Champions after we released the game in September 2017, and aside from some small tweaks, events have remained mostly unchanged. Events 2.0 is an evolution of this system, using everything we have learned over the past six and a half years.
Our goals with Events 2.0 are three-fold:
- Give players more choice over which Champions appear in events.
- Increase the depth of events with additional goals and rewards.
- Give more opportunities to update Champions outside of seasons.
So how did we approach each of these goals? Well, let me tell you.
Our first objective is to give players more choice over what Champions they recruit and gear up in events. This has become an increasingly important design task over the past couple of years, and even more so now that the number of unique Champions in the game has surpassed 100. Gearing up all of those old Champions is a daunting, time-consuming task! In Events 2.0, players will have the opportunity to customize their event by picking from a list of Champions associated with the event. There will be two Featured Champions in each event that everyone has access to, along with three other "flex slots" that allow players to customize the event to their liking. Flex slot Champions will include previously-retired Champions, going all the way back to year one superstars like Gromma, Strix, and Zorbu. This, combined with the ability to get more Gold Chests by completing the higher event tiers, should make it much easier to fully equip your entire roster of Champions.
Let's talk about goals and rewards next. In Events 2.0, after you finish all three variants, that Champion's event will upgrade to the next tier up. This allows you to replay the variants, each with a higher area requirement and another gold chest reward. Additionally, each completed tier will award a powerful buff for that Champion that will last during the event and continue for a period of time after the event ends. Finally, the highest tiers will award unique Feats and special consumable items. These tiers will reward players who have built powerful formations and geared up their Champions to meet the game's hardest challenges. If you don't quite have the power to beat them yet, don't worry! The next time you pick that same Champion in a future event, you'll be able to start from where you left off the last time and push for those high-tier rewards!
We mentioned that there will be two Featured Champions in each event, and this is related to our third objective. Not all Featured Champions will be new Champions -- some will be reworks of existing Champions! Most events will have one new Champion and one reworked Champion, but some could have two new Champions or even two reworked Champions, depending on what cool designs we've been cooking up.
Now, you might be thinking that having five event Champions to recruit and gear up in just 12 days is a bit much. You'd be right, but we are adjusting the cadence and length of events to account for this! Events in this new system will typically start on the first Wednesday of each month and last for three weeks. Time gate weekends and content releases will occur during the weeks between events. This will reduce the number of events per year from 17 to 12, but it will increase the number of Champions you can recruit and gear up during events from 51 to 60.
To cap this section, here's a quick summary of the changes from
Legacy Events to
Events 2.0:
| Legacy Events |
Events 2.0 |
| Recruit and gear up to three Champions per event (51 Champions per year)
| Recruit and gear up to FIVE Champions per event (60 Champions per year)
|
| Three set Champions per event (no player choice)
| TWO set Champions, then up to THREE additional player-picked Champions per event
|
| One new Champion per event
| TWO new or reworked Champions per event
|
| Up to three Gold Chests from variants (per Champion)
| Up to 12 Gold Chests from variants (per Champion)
|
| Max variant area requirement of 175 (not scaling based on progression)
| Max variant area starts at 175 and increases alongside event tier (scaling based on progression)
|
| Generally no unique rewards (ie. feats/skins/buffs)
| Cool unique rewards for the new/reworked Champions, and buffs for all Champions
|
| One event every three weeks (on average, but with confusing exceptions)
| One event per month (predictably starting on the first Wednesday)
|
| Events last 12 days
| Events last 21 days
|
What's Next?
Hey, it's Chris Dupuis again! Right now we're working to polish up both systems for their releases on February 28th (
Collections & Guide Quests) and March 6th (
Events 2.0). However, I'm sure you have a bunch of questions! Tune into
Dev Insights over the coming weeks with your questions about Collections & Guide Quests and Events 2.0. We also plan to roll out dedicated preview blogs for each system before their release – here’s what to expect over the coming weeks:
- Collections & Guide Quests Rollout:
- Collections & Guide Quests Preview Blog on Friday, February 23rd
- Collections & Guide Quests LIVE on Wednesday, February 28th
- Events 2.0 Rollout:
- Events 2.0 Preview Blog on Friday, March 1st
- Champion Spotlights for [REDACTED] and [REDACTED] on Monday, March 4th & Tuesday, March 5th
- Events 2.0 LIVE on Wednesday, March 6
Before we sign off, I want to share a heartfelt thank you to all of our players from our team here at Codename Entertainment. Thank you for reading through this blog, playing, and joining us on this fantastic adventure. We look forward to hearing your questions in the coming weeks, as well as your thoughts and feedback once we release these updates in the coming months!
