Table of Contents

• Events 2.0 Goals
• Event Changes
• Featured Champions
• Flex Slots
• Event Tiers & Rewards
• Quality of Life Updates
• What's Next?

Events 2.0 Goals

Events were the first system we added to Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, kicking things off with our first event, Highharvestide, on September 28, 2017. Ever since then, events have remained largely unchanged – until now!

In the Idle Champions: 2024 State of the Game we stated our high level goals for Events 2.0. Before diving into the Events 2.0 Preview Blog, we want to reiterate our goals:

1. Give players more choice over which Champions appear in events.
2. Increase the depth of events with additional goals and rewards.
3. Give more opportunities to update Champions outside of seasons.

Without further ado, let's talk about Events 2.0!

Note: Screenshots in this blog reflect a work in progress version of the Events 2.0 update. The finalized version may differ in layout or appearance.

Event Changes

Events 2.0 is a significant update to the events system in Idle Champions. Because players will now be able to unlock more Champions, content, and rewards through Events 2.0, we are increasing the duration of events from 12 days to 21 days. Events will typically begin on the first Wednesday of each month and run for three weeks. Content updates for Idle Champions will occur on the Wednesdays outside events.

Along with the Event duration change we are reducing the number of annual events, shifting from 17 annual events down to 12. Long term, we plan to retire the Midwinter, Greengrass, The Running, Midsummer, and Brightswords events. However, as we transition over to the new Event 2.0 schedule, there will be a Greengrass event in April 2024.

Finally, Champions whose events are no longer active will have new homes with other events. Those Champions will be available using Flex Slots during their new events along with other retired Champions from those events.

Featured Champions

Event 2.0 Events will have two Featured Champions. These Champions may be New Champions or Reworked Champions. Most events will have one New Champion and one Reworked Champion, however some may feature two New Champions, and some may feature two Reworked Champions.

All players will have free access to unlock and earn equipment for the same two Featured Champions each event. For our first Event 2.0 Event, Festival of Fools, all players will have access to the Reworked Champion, Dhadius the Scarlet, and the New Champion, The Dark Urge. Champion Spotlights for both of these Champions are coming early next week!

Dismantles will be offered for Reworked Champions for the duration of the event. However, the Dismantle period will end immediately if any Reworked Champion Chests are purchased using Event Tokens.

Flex Slots

In addition to the two Featured Champions for an event, everyone will have access to three Flex Slots. Flex Slots allow players to select additional Champions to unlock and earn equipment for during each Event 2.0 Event, choosing from a pool of retired Champions associated with the event. This pool of retired Champions includes the Champions from previous years of the event as well as some Champions whose events have been retired.

Events begin with one Flex Slot open with an additional Flex Slot opening during the second and third weeks of an Event 2.0 Event. Flex Slots that open during the second and third weeks of the event require 3 Time Gate Pieces to unlock. Between the two Featured Champions and the three Flex Slot Champions, players will be able to unlock and earn equipment for at least 60 Champions each year through Events 2.0.

There is also an extra Supporter Slot available during Event 2.0 Events. The Supporter Slot is an additional Flex Slot that can be unlocked as an additional bonus for making an in-game purchase of specially marked event-related DLC during an event.

Event Tiers & Rewards

Events 2.0 allows players to Tier Up events for individual Champions once all three of their event variants have been completed. This grants access to the next Event Tier and three additional event variants, which have increased difficulty and additional rewards.

There are currently four Event Tiers in total, increasing the number of Gold Champion Chests available from events for each Champion from three to 12. Completing Event Tiers also unlocks Event Buffs for associated Champions, which last for 60 days from the start of the event they unlock in. Some Event Tiers may also reward unique Feats and special consumable items. Not all Champions will initially launch with these additional rewards, however Featured Champions will always have them.

Event Tiers do not reset between events, so you can continue to progress through a Champion's Tiers during future events. Additionally, Event Buffs unlocked through Event Tiers will become active once again if you choose the Champion in a flex slot in a future event.

Quality of Life Updates

As part of the Events 2.0 update, we are also making several quality of life updates:

• Bounty Contracts used outside of events will award Event Tokens for the next event.
• Event adventures, variants, and free plays no longer cost Event Tokens to start.
• Event Tokens are now only used to purchase Event Chests directly (free plays no longer need to be grinded to obtain extra chests).
• Event Tokens left over once an event ends will automatically be converted to Champion chests.
• Retired Champions may come out of retirement.
• Event Boons are granted to players who purchase specially marked event-related DLC during an event. There are four tiers of Event Boons that offer buffs to Champion Damage, Gold Find, Champion Health, Click Damage, and Speed. These buffs increase with each tier of Event Boon. Additionally, the first purchase that grants an Event Boon will also unlock the Supporter Slot.

What's Next?

Barring any last-minute issues, Events 2.0 will go live on Wednesday, March 6, 2024. We're eager and excited to receive your feedback and make further improvements to this system based on how you're using it!

Table of Contents

• Welcome!
• Pausing Seasons for Core System Updates
• Collections & Guide Quests
• Events 2.0
• What's Next?

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:

1. Help players to more effectively track their progress within Idle Champions.
2. 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:

1. Give players more choice over which Champions appear in events.
2. Increase the depth of events with additional goals and rewards.
3. 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!

Well met, friends! It's-a-me, Justin Stocks, the Lead Designer for Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms. Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! Happy Lunar New Year! Welcome to our regularly scheduled (though thoroughly delayed) "year-end" blog for 2021. What a fast year! In this blog, we're going to take a quick look back at some of the highlights of the past year, and then glance forward (into the future!) to see what 2022 will have in store for us.

2021 Review

Everyone here at Codename continued to deal with the challenges of working during a global pandemic, but through it all, we managed to get most of what we were hoping to do done. Let's look at some of the things we released in Idle Champions in 2021:

• Bardic Inspiration Vol 1 & 2
• New Champions
• Trials of Mount Tiamat
• Modron/Multi-Party Fixes
• Idle Champions Presents
• Bug Fixes

Bardic Inspiration Vol 1 and 2

Music got a make-over in Idle Champions in 2021. If you haven't done it yet, click on the Jukebox feature in-game and rock out to the amazing music tracks composed by Jason Charles Miller and you, our awesome community. Bardic Inspiration Volume 1 and 2 were released in 2021 and were an instant hit. Want to help make the next generation of music for the game? Tune into our weekly Bardic Inspiration stream on our Twitch Channel.

New Champions

Unlike previous years with a measly seventeen or eighteen Champions added, the past year saw twenty new Champions added to the game, including seventeen event Champions and a record three Evergreen Champions. Let's take a look at some of the highlights:

• Hew Maan - A community favorite, while Hew Maan themself might swear they're human, they look an awful lot like three kobolds in a trenchcoat. This unique Champion has cemented themselves in many players' formations as a powerful speed option.
• Shaka - A powerful Champion who rewards players for solving his formation puzzle that changes on every run. This Champion arrived during the Running event and has seen high usage in many players' formations.
• Ellywick - Ellywick Tumblestrum was an exciting crossover Champion from Magic: The Gathering that we were honored to announce to the world in mid-2021. A daring Champion, they risk everything to draw from the Deck of Many Things every 50 areas.
• NERDS - An Evergreen only available through an exciting promotion involving some tasty candy. This was a fun Champion to design, but they aren't super impactful in players' formations (somewhat intentionally, due to their limited availability).
• Reya - The reward for a very challenging variant in the Descent Into Avernus, Reya Mantlemorn is integral to the story of Avernus, and while she may not be integral to many formations yet, her time may still come.
• Xerophon - Xerophon started out their design as a very different Champion, but the one thing they retained is their very wacky ability to transform. Players have had fun transforming Xerophon into all sorts of abnormal creatures. Find them in the Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign.

The Trials of Mount Tiamat

September saw the rollout of a major new feature for Idle Champions: The Trials of Mount Tiamat. This cooperative asynchronous multiplayer adventure is a first for Idle Champions in terms of starting to test the waters of multiplayer. While the system was relatively bug-free (at least compared to last year's Modron Automation/Multi-Party mode), the system is not perfect and there are still a number of issues that will need to be resolved in the future. Look for changes starting soon in 2022.

Modron/Multi-Party Fixes

The team made substantial progress this year at addressing some of the more impactful problems players were experiencing. Some of the biggest fixes included establishing instant recall of Champions from other parties and fixing a number of formation-loading issues, including an oft-requested fix for back-filling familiars when the originally saved familiar wasn't available. We also made numerous stability improvements behind the scenes. With these fixes in place and more on the horizon, we're hoping the end is nigh for the beta tag on this system.

Idle Champions Presents

Not to be overlooked, the last quarter of the year saw the release of season two of Idle Champions Presents, our very own table-top D&D game integrated with Idle Champions in such a way that you, our esteemed players, could influence the outcome of the game. It was a wild ride to be sure, as two completely separate teams battled through their own trials of Mount Tiamat in order to banish the dragon queen herself. I won't spoil the ending, but needless to say, things got Epic (and in-game, players were awash in free loot)!

Bug Fixes

Efforts were made to renew our focus on bug fixes throughout the year, with additional resources being brought in to help cut down the list. The team meets every monday to go over recent and highly upvoted reports in our online public Bug Tracker, and nearly every patch includes numerous fixes. These efforts will continue into 2022 as we try to strike that balance between creating new and interesting content and ensuring the game works smoothly for the vast majority of players.

Looking Forward - 2022 Preview

Right. So. That was 2021. Let's look into our crystal ball for 2022 and see what these next 12 11 months will (hopefully) bring:

• Additional Modron/Offline Progress Updates
• Updates to the Trials of Mount Tiamat
• Localization
• New Evergreen Champions
• New Stuff?

Additional Modron/Offline Progress Updates

First on our priority list for 2022 is getting Multi-party Offline Progress to a better place. While we made large improvements in 2021, there are still a number of obvious and oft-reported issues that we would like to nail down. Once these issues have been resolved, we are hoping to make some tweaks to the Modron pipe game to further reward fiddling and optimization of those exciting little components.

Depending on the success of these fixes and additions, we would like to be able to take the beta tag off of multi-party mode sometime in 2022. Fingers crossed!

Updates to the Trials of Mount Tiamat

Even though the feature was very well received, the Trials of Mount Tiamat needs some love. We have a large list of changes, ranging from small tweaks to complete rebalances, in the pipeline and will hopefully be dolling these changes out over time. We have already started, with a change of the campaign cooldown from 7 to 6 days in order to prevent or at least reduce drifting start times, so you can start a new campaign at roughly the same time every week. Additional changes to the campaign itself and the legendary items that are the fruits of your efforts are coming soon.

Localization

Localization will be a big focus for 2022, with translations for the game nearly ready in roughly half a dozen languages. With tens of thousands of strings and hundreds of thousands of words, this has been a huge endeavor for us. Stay tuned for more information about this in the coming weeks and months. Our hope is that this work (it has been a lot of work) will make the game accessible to tons of new players around the world.

New Evergreen Champions

In keeping with tradition, several new Evergreen Champions are planned for 2022, with the first coming sooner than you might expect. Evergreen Champions are generally awarded for completing challenging campaign adventure variants, so make sure you're up-to-date in all the permanent campaigns!

New Stuff?

New stuff is fun, so this year we're planning some new stuff. While I can't directly speak to the specifics of any of the systems yet, I can talk about some of the goals of the new stuff this year:

• Semi-regular rebalances of less popular/underpowered Champions
• Eliminate or mitigate some of the grind of patron challenges
• Add more longer-term goals (and progress bars) to the game
• Some ways for players to more directly compare their formation building expertise
• Offer more rewards for playing regularly (indirectly; not login bonuses)
• New community challenges to increase chatter and engagement
• Some other stuff that is only half-designed but will be really cool, we promise

Conclusion

After the never-ending slog that was 2021, we're hoping there's light at the end of the tunnel that is 2022. If not, at least there will be some cool new stuff in Idle Champions for us all to enjoy. We're very excited about our plans for 2022, and we hope you're excited too.

Hey everyone. I'm Justin Stocks, the Lead Game Designer for Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms. In the lead-up to our Third Anniversary Celebration, I wanted to take a few minutes to look back over everything we've accomplished in the last year...

Fall 2019

September 2019: Patron System (part of the Y2 anniversary)

We kicked off our third year with a bang, adding the Patron System, which allows players to replay variants and free plays with additional restrictions to earn unique rewards and powerful perks. While we started out with just two patrons and a handful of rewards, we have since expanded the system with a third patron (Strahd von Zarovich) and numerous additional rewards for purchase, such as familiars, skins, and sought-after modron component chests. We plan to continue to expand on the system with additional patrons, store items, and perks, including some new skins during the upcoming Anniversary Celebration!

October 2019: New Campaign (Descent Into Avernus)

October saw the release of our fourth permanent campaign: Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus. This fiendish campaign has been expanded upon multiple times over the year and will continue to get updates moving forward. This update also managed to sneak in an update to our in-game effects descriptions, helping players to better understand how their formation abilities interact with each other. Usually.

Winter 2020

New Year's Day 2020: New Evergreen Champion (Dragonbait)

The new year brought about another Evergreen Champion to join the ranks of Hitch, Drizzt, and Azaka. Dragonbait was a challenging unlock from a variant of the final adventure in the Tomb of Annihilation campaign, and while he is still trying to make a name for himself in a very competitive bench slot, he's nevertheless a highly sought-after saurial.

January 2020: Updated Time Gates & Offline Progress

The new year brought exciting new updates, many of which were included out in our Idle Champions in 2020 dev blog at the end of December last year. The first of which was an expanded Time Gate System. Gone were the days of gambling six time gate pieces and hoping you got a Champion that you liked. Now you could pick precisely the Champion you wanted to gear up or recruit, and the time gates themselves were made more lucrative, with up to three gold chests and numerous silver chests up for grabs. Players flocked to earn Mystra's favor and recruiting and gearing up missed event Champions became easier than ever before. And at the end of the month, Offline Progress arrived, allowing players to continue to progress during their adventures even while logged out!

Spring 2020

March 2020: Spring Extravaganza with Updated Formation Saves

The first of our 2020 seasonal events, the Spring Extravaganza, brought with it a week of free rewards, including an awesome Champion skin, but more importantly a revamped formation save system. Instead of being limited to only three formations per campaign, players could now save up to 50 formations with customizable names, and their formation saves now included familiar placements as well as Champions. Getting back up to speed after a reset had never been more convenient.

March 2020: Leaving Early Access on Steam

As a personal milestone for us at Codename, in March we also left early access on Steam. This was a big moment as it meant that Idle Champions had finally reached a point where we felt it was deserving of a full release, with features such as the Patron System really fleshing out the replayability of the existing content.

Summer 2020

July 2020: Summer Spectacular with Modron Automation & Multi-Party Play

The Summer Spectacular at the end of July was host to the game's largest evolution yet: Modron Automation & Multi-Party Play. These two new systems combined to add incredible new depth to the game. With two adventuring parties running at the same time players had to dust off several underutilized Champions to fill every slot, a trend which will continue as additional adventuring parties are made available over the next year or two.

With Modron Automation we started to put the "Idle" back "Idle Champions", letting players set up their adventuring parties to reset automatically, fill the formation automatically, and farm gems and favor to their heart's content. Finally, the Modron Components mini-game added some new strategy to the game for folks who couldn't get enough of the pipe mini-game in Bioshock or the latest Spiderman PS4 game.

August 2020: New Focus on Bugs & Performance

Modron Automation and Multi-Party Play was a big tech investment for us, and resulted in an unacceptable backlog of bugs and unoptimized code. In August we refocused our attention on bugs and performance with the addition of our public-facing bug report system. Through the month we managed to track down several memory leaks and patch them up, leading to a noticeable improvement in stability and performance. As no more major features (on the scale of Modron Automation) are planned for 2020, we will continue to iterate on these improvements and fix bugs as quickly as we can.

August 2020: Finished Waterdeep: Dragon Heist Campaign & New Evergreen Champion (Ulkoria)

Most recently we released the final adventures of the Waterdeep: Dragon Heist campaign and included alongside them our fifth Evergreen Champion: the reclusive mage, Ulkoria Stonemarrow. Ulkoria is a magic specialist who can do some incredibly powerful things for a full formation of spellcasters. While her full potential hasn't yet been released, future Champion releases will no doubt add to her repertoire and increase her play.

Third Anniversary & Beyond: The Future

So what does the future look like for Idle Champions? It's bright! While we don't plan to release any major features in the next few months, we do have a new campaign on the horizon. You can also expect us to continue with bug fixes and performance enhancements. We also intend to continue to iterate on the offline progress system, which runs your background parties during multi-party play and should result in speed improvements to everyone's progression, especially if your background party is farming gems.

Well met, Idle Champions! Welcome to another installment of our developer blog. I'm Justin, the lead designer on Idle Champions, and today I'll be revealing our high-level plans for Idle Champions in 2020. It's going to be a big year for the game, so buckle up and let's get to it!

A Year In Review

2019 has been a big year for Idle Champions. We released nearly 100 updates, taking us from v186 at the start of January to v279 at the end of the year. We added 17 new Champions to the game, including fan favorites like Spurt, Jim Darkmagic, and Artemis Entreri. We also added a new campaign, 16 new adventures, and numerous challenging variants. We did two big balance patches with the Core Champion Balance Update and the Year 1 Champion Balance Update (Part 1). We also added the Locked Chests & Combinations system to all platforms, unveiled Patrons, launched on the web, and reworked ultimate damage with the BUD system. Our roster of monsters has grown to over 1000 (including special monster variants), and players have redeemed more than 7 million free chest codes since release. Wow!

But this blog isn't really intended to look back. We're more interested in sharing what's coming up! So, without further ado...

Offline Progress

This is a big one. Early in 2020 we hope to roll out offline progress to all platforms. This will have its biggest effect on console and mobile platforms, where leaving the game open for days on end is a challenging prospect to say the least.

Offline progress will advance your formation through the game even when the game is closed. It will not be a full simulation, but will attempt to mimic online play as closely as possible, including stopping on bosses or areas that would wipe you, completing patron challenges, and farming gold at your wall. Our intent is that offline progress will not allow you to cheese challenging variants (like "Never Split The Party"), as it will take into account changes in the formation and the challenge levels of new areas as it progresses you along.

Offline progress is currently undergoing beta testing with a small group of volunteer players, and our goal is to have it tweaked and ready for prime time early in the new year. Based on feedback from our current testers, we're confident that this will make Idle Champions a much more enjoyable experience on both mobile and console platforms, as progression should feel much less punishing. It also feels really good on Steam or web platforms if you're forced to close the game for a longer period of time. Who doesn't like coming back to the game 300 areas later and with a bunch of gold and gems to spend?

Time Gate Rework

An update we often see requested is improvements to time gates. We've seen a lot of great suggestions over the past year, including increasing the number of available Champions, allowing players to re-roll the available Champions, and so forth. We've decided to go above and beyond those suggestions, though, and make time gates truly a feature you can use to recruit and gear up any Champion you want to over time.

Early in 2020 we'll be rolling out our new time gate system. Once it's live, you will be able to open a time gate for ANY Champion at ANY time. The cost will remain the same (6 time gate pieces), but rather than opening a gate and having a choice of 3 random Champions, you'll be able to choose from a list of all of the available Champions. No more rolling the dice.

Additionally, we'll be updating the actual content of each time gate. In addition to two basic adventures with ever-increasing area requirements, one of the Champion's original three event variants will be offered with each opened gate, allowing you to complete their event variant achievement even if their event is not active. This extra variant will award a gold Champion chest, bringing the total number of chests you can earn per gate up to 3. This also means that the only Champion achievement you won't be able to complete outside of an event is the one to beat certain area targets in free play.

One thing we aren't changing is the free time gate weekends. They will still only offer three random Champions for free, so you'll still be able to debate amongst the community which of the three is your best option, and/or which of the three is utterly trash. The difference now is that you can choose to just ignore those three free Champions and open a different gate for time gate pieces, removing a previous restriction on time gates that the old system had. The three Champions will remain free throughout the weekend if you want to open one of their gates later, but as soon as you've opened one of the three, the two others will go back to their normal price.

To help new players from being overwhelmed by all the Champion choices, we will be providing several sorting options for the list of Champions, including popularity, which will be determined by the number of time gates recently opened for a given Champion. This should help newer players get a glimpse of the current meta and make informed time gate choices.

We will also be removing the Time Gate Fragments premium pack from our in-game store when this update rolls out.

Year 4 Events

The time gate section is a good segue into our next topic: Year 4 events. There was a lot of discussion around our original implementation of Year 3 events, so we want to get ahead of that by letting you know our plans for Year 4 as far ahead of time as we can -- that's now!

One of the reasons we are opening up time gates to all Champions is because we feel events are right on the cusp of having too much content to complete in the available time. This was a significant concern for us at the beginning of year 3, and why we initially reduced the freely available champions to two during the first year 3 event. While we did relax this after player feedback, it still remained a concern. As such, starting in Year 4 only the three most recent event Champions for each event will be available in their respective events. For year 4, that will be Champions from years 2, 3, and 4. When we reach Year 5 events, only year 3, 4, and 5 Champions will be available, and so forth.

With time gates being expanded, players will still have an opportunity to recruit and gear up specific older Champions if they wish, now that the randomness of time gates has been removed. While we appreciate that some players would prefer all event Champions be available during their events, we feel that would simply be too overwhelming during events, particularly for newer casual players. For any year 1 Champions considered to be at the top of the meta, the revamped time gate system will allow players of all levels to recruit and gear them up in their own time without having to wait for an event to start or feel rushed during it.

"But wait," you say, "won't that leave you wanting to run Time Gates more often? Don't they distract from doing normal adventures, or doing patron challenges, or farming gems?"

That brings us to our next big feature...

Multiple Adventure Mode

By the time we finish our cycle of year 3 events, Idle Champions will be home to at least 67 unique Champions (and possibly 1 or 2 more). With only 10 slots available in any given formation, this presents us with a very real problem: 57 Champions sitting on the bench doing nothing. 57 Champions you have recruited, geared up, and learned to use, but have no use for. Our solution to this is to let you run multiple adventures at once, with a unique formation of Champions in each one.

We are still in the process of optimizing and building out this system, which will likely piggy-back on the offline progress system we are developing. The end goal is to allow you to make use of 20, 30, or even 40 of the Champions on your roster at once, so that you can take advantage of all that time spent recruiting and gearing them up.

Now, your first thought after hearing this might be the same as ours -- running twice as many adventures as once sounds like twice as much work. Won't this make the game more onerous? Well, that brings us to our last update of this blog...

Modron Automation

To go along with being able to run multiple adventures at once, we want to provide players with some utilities to make those additional adventures easier to run, and start to close the gap between normal players and those who enjoy scripting the game to play itself.

Modron Automation will allow you to set the game to play up to a certain area and then potentially reset and run it again. You'll be able to use this feature to run time gates, farm for gems or chests, complete patron challenges, etc, and you'll be able to use a different script on each adventure you're running with Multiple Adventure Mode.

Both Multiple Adventure mode and Modron Automation are still in early stages, so you shouldn't expect them too early in the new year, but they're important pillars of our plans for Idle Champions moving forward.

Closing Thoughts

Aside from these big picture items, we are of course still hard at work on new Champions, balance patches, soft cap increases, new blessings, and new adventures and variants. We have no plans to slow down in 2020 and we thank you for joining us for the ride!