Hey everyone,

A very belated Happy New Year, Lunar New Year, and welcome to our latest dev-blog update.

Last year, we were fortunate enough to conduct two playtests—each one larger in scope, scale, and community than the last. Our most recent playtest peaked at over100,000 downloads, generating a veritable mountain of player data and feedback for our team to analyze.

To everyone who joined us last year, we cannot thank you enough for your time both in-game and for completing the surveys we distributed throughout the playtests.

To start this year off, we wanted to take a moment not only to share our progress but also to openly discuss one of the biggest points of debate brought up by the community: Is RIFTSTORM truly a roguelite, an ARPG, or a straight-up looter shooter? It’s a question we’ve wrestled with internally as we continue to refine and develop our gameplay goals for RIFTSTORM.

Feedback from players during the last two playtest periods raised concerns about the expectations for a roguelite game versus the version of RIFTSTORM they experienced. After internal discussions, we realized that we had set erroneous expectations by emphasizing the roguelite aspect on our store page and in our marketing. For many die-hard roguelite fans, the RIFTSTORM we presented didn’t quite scratch that itch—especially when compared directly with the biggest names in the genre.

To help visualize our intent relative to market expectations, the table below outlines the “core” gaming expectations for the Roguelike, Roguelite, ARPG, and Looter-Shooter genres and compares them with both the current (Playtest) version of RIFTSTORM and our intended RIFTSTORM 1.0.

Please note that we pared down our data points to present a more concise list based on a subjective matrix developed by our design team. Some ranges and data points may differ from your views, and we welcome further discussion.

In essence, RIFTSTORM is best described as an ARPG–Looter-Shooter hybrid that draws heavy inspiration from the roguelite genre—especially in its procedural power-ups, maps, and encounter designs—to create a more emergent gameplay experience. Our biggest challenge thus far has been balancing our procedural core shooter experience with our intentionally crafted, cerebral meta layer built around a robust looter loop.

The overwhelming results from Playtest #3 helped narrow our focus even further with the introduction of our basic resource and crafting systems. These systems, along with raw player data, provided our design teams with insight into the loot-driven motivations of the majority of our players. When contrasted with typical roguelite expectations, our meta-progression system now combines a more rewarding loot-based gameplay loop with detailed, mechanic-level character customizations. When measured against the potential power creep of our in-mission power-ups and encounters, we have ultimately decided to skew our balance in favor of rewarding loot over a typical roguelite experience.

For our team, this fundamental question raised by the community has helped better frame the long-term vision for Riftstorm, and we are immensely grateful to everyone who brought it up. At the risk of delving into a full design paper, we’ll leave the discussion here for now and invite you to share your thoughts in the comments or directly with us on Discord or Steam Discussion.

As for what comes next—we’re happy to share that our teams are gearing up for a major beta release sometime this year. At the moment, we’re still working on systemic tweaks and updates to the old build while gradually shifting our focus to the major gameplay systems that we have yet to showcase in previous playtests. In our content pipeline, new characters and a new mythic species are entering production, and if all goes well, one of these topics might be the focus of our next dev-blog.

Cheers,
The Riftstorm Team

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