Hey, everyone! VS Dave here.
Since the release of “A New Evil” in August, the Room-C folks have been busy preparing the next content update for you in The Hand of Merlin, and we’re happy to share that you won’t have to wait for it much longer!
The Hand of Merlin
Hard Mode & Metaprogression Are Coming!
Over the last few weeks, we’ve been releasing tidbits of information regarding what’s next, but in case you’ve missed it, here’s a quick recap to bring you up to speed.
One of the most common requests we receive from you all is to make the game harder. Well, we love a challenge, too, so get ready: Hard Mode is coming! But what exactly does that mean? It means your runs are about to get a serious dose of abomination wrath!
To distinguish Hard Mode from the current player experience, the first step was to add more complex resource management and, of course, make your enemies tougher. Check!
More specifically, you’ll be introduced to Dire Units, which are super-buffed versions of the abominations you already know and love. Meaner and nastier, expect these baddies to radically increase the challenge thanks to higher HP, more armor, less cooldowns, and unique passive abilities, just to name a few upgrades.
Don’t despair just yet, faithful wizards and warriors, because we’re also adding Metaprogression, which will help you grow stronger with each run! As you gain more and more Essence, you’ll need a place to spend it, which is where the new Blessings and Curses system will come in.
In Hard Mode, you’ll spend Essence in exchange for temporary benefits to your run. Blessings are positive benefits, such as increasing your maximum mana level or earning larger gold rewards. But there’s a catch… of course there is.
Spending Essence on only Blessings would make Hard Mode too easy, so to balance it out, you’ll also have to select Curses, which produce negative effects on your run, such as more Bandits or less gold.
Each benefit is assigned a Doom Value, and your Blessings and Curses must balance. Hate math? So do we, so allow us to simplify it: If the Blessings you select equal a Doom Value of 3, then you must also select Curses to go with it that equal a Doom Value of at least 3. MUWAH HA HA HA!
To spice up your combat scenarios run after run, we’re also adding alternate maps. Every current map “concept” will have four different versions: Default, Default Corrupted, Alternate, and Alternate Corrupted.
That’s not all… but we’re not ready to give up all our secrets just yet. Stay tuned for more info in the weeks to come!
We hope these additions will continue to add enjoyment to your overall experience with The Hand of Merlin, and we seriously can’t wait for you to try it all out and let us know what you think!
As always, if you have any content to share or questions for the team, please feel free to reach out via our socials. You can stay in touch with me and the rest of the Versus Evil team by joining our Discord and following us on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.
~ VS Dave
