thomasmahler
@thomasmahler
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CEO | Creative Director @moongamestudios. Designer and Director of Ori and the Blind Forest, Ori and the Will of the Wisps and No Rest for the Wicked.
Vienna, Austria
Joined June 2008
In case you missed our #WickedInside showcase where we dove deeper into what @wickedgame is all about, here you go :). #WickedInside #arpg .
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To everyone whose been pestering me for years about why we didn't allow Moon Studios to get acquired by a big publisher. That's why. I've lived through the 90s and saw what happened when smaller studios got acquired by EA. Never again 🤣😂.
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I never retweeted anything from Elon before because I’m a game designer, but I very much agree with this statement. The problem with DEI isn’t in its principle, but in the way it’s being implemented. Years before DEI became a thing, we had Quentin Tarantino, a white director,.
DEI kills art.
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@alyssa_merc @xIngenue Hey Alyssa,. You're apparently a journalist from Kotaku - So I'm guessing you haven't worked in actual game development yet. Let me try to explain the thing you posted about, which I'm guessing was from that hitpiece from a few years back. Yes, I'm guilty of what's stated in.
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I’m still every now and then getting questions on whether we force DEI stuff into the games we’re making, so let me make it clear once and for all:. Absolutely Not. I find that entire approach perverted. I’m an artist, I would rather quit than have someone else tell me how we.
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@xIngenue I’m the director behind both Ori games and I don’t know who you are and how you were affiliated with Ori…?.
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@fufuwaydayo @alyssa_merc @xIngenue I don't know her and I prefer to be nice to strangers - she's working in the industry, so she ought to know how these processes work and I had a few minutes to spend 👍.
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@xIngenue That could explain it👍. I didn't want to cause you any trouble - I just saw you posting that you worked on Ori and I had no idea who you are. Since you're calling people names online, I thought it was important to inform people that you never actually worked for Moon Studios.
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I already know I might get myself into trouble once again by posting this, but I just replied to @MauriceWeber42, a German journalist who is affiliated with the German outlet 'Gamestar'. I do think it's especially important these days that we always remind ourselves to try to.
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To everyone at @ArkaneStudios and @TangoGameworks who just lost their jobs: @moongamestudios is always looking for rockstar devs that are hungry and passionate and would love to contribute to @wickedgame!. Feel free to send your resume to jobs@moongamestudios.com. If you're.
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I grew up in the 80s - even as a young boy back then, I always thought TV shows were low-effort trash. Because every show back then was trying to be as politically correct as possible. Every show was about happy families, always trying to paint a perfect picture, always being.
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I know some people always want me to join the console warring, but I strongly believe that @XboxP3 has the right approach. We decided a few years back not to make @wickedgame under Microsoft because back then we couldn’t have shipped it for PlayStation and Switch and since we.
New Xbox Interview with @gamertagradio | Phil Spencer . On Xbox first party games:. "We love our platform and our hardware but we're not going to put walls up where people can engage with the great games our studios are building(. )our games will show up in more places, no
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It is absolutely not a surprise to me that a lot of AAA studios have been struggling lately and my prediction is that it won’t really get better any time soon. I know it sounds absurd, but most of the games studios out there that hit it big were at one point just a small group.
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Not a week passes without some people asking us why we didn't sell Moon to a larger publisher, especially after Ori became a ginormous hit. This is why. We always wanted to make our own luck. Whether we rise or fall should be in our own hands, not based on shareholders!.
PlayStation-backed Deviation Games has closed. The studio, which was founded in 2020 by two experienced Call of Duty developers, didn’t get a chance to release its debut project.
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Cool, it's finally announced!. Who'd like to see No Rest for the Wicked on Switch 2? 👍.
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I’m 40 now and as I see new designers join the industry, I’m always a bit glad that I grew up when video games were simpler. With how complex games are these days, it’s more difficult for the brain to quickly pattern match what’s fun and what isn’t. That wasn’t true for 8 and.
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@imbratorX Witcher 3 came out 10 years ago and Witcher 4 isn’t made by the same people that made Witcher 3, so I think we have to be careful regarding optimism. People expect Bethesda to make the next Skyrim, but game development is all about the people behind the scenes. That team who.
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@PhiWeber @MauriceWeber42 I always try to! 👍 Feel free to call me out whenever I'm not true to my words. And I was right in the end, wasn't I?. It's commendable that you folks turned things around and I love you folks for that. But that doesn't excuse that you sold a full-price game while trying to.
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This looks really good! . It’s been some time since I’ve seen an interesting take like that from a AAA studio, intriguing angle 👍. But ultimately I hope a lot of effort is being put into combat mechanics. Witcher 3 was brilliant in terms of story, but I couldn’t play that game.
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@MadamSavvy How did Shakespeare write all these fascinating female characters then? It boggles the mind 😂.
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@NickEggleston25 Maybe you should play some of the games we made then 😂. I guarantee you they’re…
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If you work in the games industry in any capacity and you can admit to yourself that you 'hate gamers', please know 2 things:. 1) There are idiots in every group.2) Carefully read 1) again.
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Could someone explain to me how a Return to Office policy benefits your team if you're a software developer? 🤔. I understand that people can't work from home if they have to work at a factory, operating machines, etc., but after COVID happened, I was under the impression that.
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Here's the secret to making RPGs:. 1) Use weights instead of percentages. 2) Use multipliers on literally everything. You can thank me later 👍.
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It’s amazing to see so much excitement in the ARPG space! ❤️👍. When we started on No Rest for the Wicked, one of my main motivators was that I wanted us to redefine the ARPG genre after Diablo 3 became a bit of a disappointment. Then we were hoping that Diablo 4 wouldn’t try.
❗️ Path of Exile 2 Early Access Launch Day Thread ❗️. Today is the day! Follow this thread for updates on as we head into Early Access for Path of Exile 2. We'll also be adding information to the Live Updates thread on our website:.
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The idea that IP matters over all has always been an erroneous notion that I hope we can all accept as being profoundly wrong at some point. It certainly feels like the wave of acquisitions in recent years - not just by the games industry, but in general - has been driven by the.
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Does anybody else feel like we lost something when we went from actually meeting up with people to play Multiplayer games in front of a screen to Online Multiplayer?. Some of my fondest gaming memories are playing local multiplayer games with my brothers and my best friend. We.
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I know quite a few developers at AAA Studios that still think that they’re working at a place that’s ’too big to fail’. Nobody is too big to fail. It certainly looks like 2025 will be even worse for a lot of AAA studios. Brace yourselves.
Skyrocketing budgets of AAA projects and diminishing returns on live-service games have resulted in the loss of over 23,000 jobs in the industry in the last two years. This is just one reason why the AAA video game bubble has burst:
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Many years from now, when I’m done with Wicked, I’d love to work on games that are a bit more like toys that appeal to everybody. I have great respect for games like Chess, Tetris or the Rubik’s cube, games that are simpler and everlasting and don’t necessarily have to include a.
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Quite a few of us at Moon played Warcraft 3 as teenagers and were inspired to become game developers because of the scene in which Arthas murders his own father. I still vividly remember what an effect this scene had on me and I’m pretty sure for a lot of gamers this scene had.
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I've been in the industry long enough now to have seen how things unfold from both sides and I'm honestly not a fan of the outrage culture we've created these days. Hear me out for a second. I know it's of little comfort for people who have lost their jobs today, but I think.
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@xIngenue @manman68528469 I thought the post was pretty clear and concise. Btw, you're not in the credits on any Ori games, so unless you changed your name at some point. .
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@_Adam_Michel_ @MauriceWeber42 I think it nicely shows the way echo chambers work on social media. I’m not out to fight a war, just took the opportunity to highlight that there are extremes on both sides and both are dumb.
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Judging by the questions I'm getting, it looks like some people think that we'll release 1.0 and then we're done? 🤔. Folks, we're nowhere near done with No Rest for the Wicked. There is so much that we've already built that none of you even know about and we want to deliver this.
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@MauriceWeber42 Macht doch Sinn, Maurice. Ist halt jetzt die Gegenbewegung zu Cancel Culture und Co, weil mittlerweile alle die Nase voll von dem Schwachfug haben. Wuerde dir auch dazu raten, das Ganze ein bisschen differenzierter zu sehen, vor allem da du dich ja als Journalist profilierst,.
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We're not even a week into Early Access and it's already pretty clear that going with EA is one of the best decisions we could've made 👍❤️. I see some people are still irked about why games like Wicked, Hades 2, Larian's new game, etc. launch into Early Access even if the studio.
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Folks, I'm getting a lot of requests from people that want me to comment on the PoE2 endgame situation, but I don't feel like that's really for me to comment on. We made No Rest for the Wicked because we weren't happy in the first place with where ARPGs were going. To me it was.
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Ori was our 'Mario', this is our 'Zelda'. That was my thought when I first started prototyping our new project back in 2015. We then committed to Wisps, which allowed us to give this project more time in the oven so that we'd then be able to turn it into a full-blown ARPG.
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One last thought for tonight:. I’m a bit surprised that we haven’t even seen simple games yet that use AI in an innovative, groundbreaking way. There’s a mountain of low-hanging fruit there and I would have thought that by now we would’ve seen the first early, but interesting.
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Anyone here old enough to remember how insane it was to see Havok Physics in games for the first time?. It was all sorts of mind-blowing to see these demos back then. Then Half-Life 2 got its E3 demo where they showed off how they integrated Havok into the game and everybody’s.
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My 6 year old boy who will turn 7 soon just completed his 8th Zelda game last week!. Here’s the titles we completed together so far:. Link’s Awakening.A Link to the Past.Minish Cap.Ocarina of Time.Breath of the Wild.A Link Between Worlds.Tears of the Kindom.Echoes of Wisdom.
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And now it's a done deal - We decided to officially hire this designer. 20 years old, worked for 2 years on a project in Dreams and soon he'll be working as a Level Designer at Moon Studios!. Thanks to @mediamolecule for making it easier for young folks to become creatives!.
We’ll be interviewing a young designer who has only worked with ‘Dreams’ so far. It’s amazing that people can learn game development through play these days! . Would have loved to have these tools available when I was starting out :).
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Can’t wait to share more details! 👍❤️.
Wicked fans, . As promised last year - after a long time of not being able to share what we’ve been working on, we’re extremely excited to finally be able to reveal our next monumental Update for No Rest For The Wicked - The Breach. The amount of new features, added content,
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I've shared this before, but yes, the reason why every Moon Studios game starts with a rainstorm scene is because Zelda: A Link to the Past started with a rainstorm 😂🤣. I always saw it as a bit of an homage and a good luck charm! 👍🤣
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I know a lot of people live in fear that AI is going to take away their jobs even in the short term future. As a studio owner, I haven’t seen any actual evidence of this so far. I think what will happen with AI is the same thing that happens every time some revolutionary.
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We're launching into Early Access on April 18th. We invite everyone to become part of our journey so that we get data that allows us to bit by bit perfect Wicked. No Microtransactions and Battle Passes for sale. No 65$ Horse Skins. No Stash Tabs for sale either. If you wanna.
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Appreciate all the messages about wanting to support Moon!. Best way you can do that is by just buying Ori:. It's really good, I promise! 😂❤️.
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@RodFergusson I'd understand if someone like @davidbrevik would say that, but Rod, you didn't really have much to do with Diablo or ARPGs in general until you joined Blizzard, so it feels a bit off-putting to hear you trying to put a brand on a genre. All you should focus on is to make the.
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It seems like a few people are upset that the Elden Ring DLC has been nominated for the Game of the Year award at this years @thegameawards. Let me be clear: I’m 100% on board with this decision and told @geoffkeighley the same a few months ago. The industry is changing and.
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@elonmusk The problem is that stating your opinion as a journalist used to be frowned upon. Nobody cared about opinion pieces. A journalists job used to be to report facts and nothing else so that the public could make up their own mind. Then that changed and now every reporter thinks the.
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Hey YouTubers,. Do these clickbait titles still work so much better than more classy headlines?. I understand the notion of giving in if the numbers speak a clear message, but every time I look at YouTube and see videos like…. “…changed my life!’.“…and you won’t believe what.
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We recently joked that it’s a bit of a shame that we don’t have Loading Screens in Wicked because we could show hints… but now that I’m experiencing loading screens again… they’re just the worst. I’m happy we never made a game that had any loading screens in it! 👍.
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I've been working in the games industry for the better part of my life now. I started sincerely dabbling with Level Editors and CGI when I was around 15, 16 years old. All of that led me to study traditional sculpture, which then allowed me to work as a character artist for a.
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@martinsteiner75 @MauriceWeber42 Because he actually is a journalist and I am not?. It’s not as easy these days to back up claims like that since the people I know that are still affected legally aren’t allowed to speak up for themselves.
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Our next few weeks and months will be about turning a 58 into a 90 - CHALLENGE ACCEPTED! 😂🤣.
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I think it’s interesting that in recent years we’ve seen more and more YouTubers quit - sad, but interesting. I’m not a YouTuber, so I can only guess, but most of those that I’ve seen quitting clearly played a character, an exaggerated version of themselves, and I imagine at.
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Hey folks!. Wanted to give a bit of an update on what's been going on at Moon and how we're thinking about things right now 👍❤️. We've received quite a few questions regarding our new update cycle and since we're still at the start of our Early Access phase, we have a lot of.
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Just went over the list of improvements from our live build to our next update… hot damn, folks, brace yourselves! 👍😁. It’s a good time to be an ARPG fan. PoE2 will push their style forward and Wicked moves closer and closer to become the ARPG I always dreamed of! ❤️.
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I approve! 👍😂.
Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition is $4.99 on XBL Ori and the Will of the Wisps $9.89
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Incredibly proud of our @moongamestudios team!. We've added an entire rogue-lite mode to No Rest for the Wicked!. Hope you folks all enjoy it, there's a LOT more to come! ❤️👍.
THE CRUCIBLE IS NOW LIVE. Download - The Seneschal awaits! Experience a whole new Cerim Crucible & so much more!. Check our blog post for more -
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I see so many depressing takes from people who think that we're close to a videogame crash given the recent events in the industry. I really couldn't disagree more with this outlook. What I'm seeing is an industry that's in dire need to course correct because for too long the.
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Let me talk about innovation for a second:. This is a topic that's near and dear to my heart. I fondly remember when Apple was a company that just did insane stuff and would come out with some crazy product that tried to revolutionize an entire category every few years simply.
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Something for our Ori fans! ❤️👍.
Pre-orders for our Ori and the Will of the Wisps - Ori and Ku statue are NOW OPEN! Take advantage of our EARLY BIRD OFFER by placing your orders before 24th February 2025! Don’t miss out on this limited time offer!.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.And don’t
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Folks, I have a somewhat weird request! 👍. If you played and liked Wicked, I'd appreciate if you could leave a positive review on Steam so that more players can see that we're onto something here instead of getting scared off by the lower user score. I know a lot of people.
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Enjoyed watching this video. Nice to see people understanding what we went for and seeing how we progressed 👍.
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@MadamSavvy Thinking that only a woman can write an interesting female character is just. I don't like to speak that way online, but it's naive at best and ignorant at worst. If a male writer can write female characters such as Beatrice or Lady Macbeth, to me that's case closed.
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Just watched the latest @digitalfoundry Podcast where they discussed what upcoming consoles could do. Let me share some thoughts! 😀👍. I think a lot of non-developers are wondering where else we could go from here since 'just higher resolutions and more polygons' doesn't sound.
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Since I get spammed now from people who are confused about why we have mixed reviews on Steam when they hear great things about Wicked. let me try to break it down so I don't have to copy and paste anymore! 👍. 1) Localization came in extremely hot and we had an initial bug.
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Alright folks, let's discuss content updates and how we're going about this stuff! 👍. We initially had the entire first month after launch pegged as a 'fixes and patches' period since it was foreseeable that we'd need to fix bugs and react to the community a lot right after.
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My messages are full of people begging that we don’t turn Wicked into a ‘zoomer game’ during the endgame…. Folks, Wicked was never designed like that. We have an animation-commit combat system. Dark Souls and Monster Hunter don’t devolve into just zooming around levels and.
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I'm extremely excited about what we'll be doing next for No Rest for the Wicked! 😀👍. PS: Yes, we heard you loud and clear! 😂❤️.
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Every now and then when youngsters write me about how to get into the games industry, they kinda let it slip that one of the things that appeals to them is that they think if you work in games, you make a lot of money. The irony of all this is, it’s fine if money is A motivator,.
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I actually really like these!. Not sure I understand to this day why it was better to make shapes and colors flat and seemingly just use the same fonts across the board🤔.
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Our next project is going to be a make-or-break moment for Moon:. Either we manage to revolutionize the ARPG genre or we'll slowly fade away into the distance. While that should be scary, I LOVE the challenge! Diablo, PoE, etc.: We're coming for you, may the best one win! 😀.
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@JezCorden Does it matter? 🤔. I think the industry is at a point where it's pretty clear that the model the AAA industry has relied on for the last 20 or so years has probably run its course. COVID was a bit of a trap for all these platform holders and publishers. You suddenly had a huge.
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We're hard at work and as always, @delmontyb gives everyone a really nice TLDR here! 👍.
The Devs share new updates on the next major update for No Rest for the Wicked 🧵
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If Blind Forest would have flopped back then, we would’ve been bankrupt as a studio. But thank god it didn’t - we sold around 10m copies of Ori so far, which probably makes it the most successful Metroidvania series ever made. And it allowed me to buy this 😂😂😂
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I just came out of hours of Level Design and Systems Sync Calls 👍. We've been analyzing all feedback we've been getting and have been discussing major improvements across the board 😀. One thing I'd like people to understand is that our Early Access isn't at all a demo of a.
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I've been in bed for the last 2 days since I caught some nasty virus, but. happy this patch was finally released! 👍❤️. Please let us know how it affected your game! We have more and more crazy stuff coming up! 😀.
🛠️ Patch Notes - Early Access Patch 1. To celebrate our 2 Week Launch Anniversary of No Rest for the Wicked we are releasing our first Early Access *Patch*!. This patch brings significant CPU and GPU performance improvements (especially when it comes to traversal and “heavy”
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Oh, just to be clear:. The Steam Deck Verified Status was achieved with the upcoming Update of Wicked, so please stay tuned! 👍❤️.
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I’m always flattered when people point out how hard I work, but the truth is:. I think we’re all lazy at heart. And I think that also applies to the absolute most productive people out there. It’s probably an innate human strategy in order to only dispense energy on things that.
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Yes, folks, hotfix 7 is coming, but we’re making some bigger changes that need more testing! 👍❤️. We had a bit of instability with #5, so from now on we’ll decrease the pace a bit and do bigger, better tested batches! 👍.
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One of the things I’ve been thinking about for a while is how we should reward the various play styles that Wicked allows for in a more satisfying way 👍. I’ll pick one example: Finishing Moves. Right now our gibs system kicks in if you finish off an enemy by doing a rune or a.
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Had a few requests of people that wanted to see me play, so I thought it might be fun to do this here! 👍. I know some of you wanted to see me play Wicked and I might just do that when the next update is close to launching! ❤️
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A bit early to say, but it looks like we're off to a good start! . Thank you so much to everyone who's supporting us, love you folks! ❤️
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I’d just like to send a big THANK YOU! to @PrivateDivision who we’ve partnered with after we decided not to move forward with Microsoft for @wickedgame! 👍❤️. We always knew we wanted to make an ARPG people could access on every platform with us fully supporting Crossplay, etc.
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This pleases me greatly! 👍❤️. Since I'm a pipe-smoker myself, I always wanted to feature pipes within Wicked. These will be new off-hand items with their own unique runes. Take a puff to reduce your health a bit, but up your focus, etc. 😂
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What I enjoy the most about No Rest for the Wicked as a developer is that we can just keep making new games in a more efficient way than if we'd have to start from scratch! 👍❤️. I always thought it'd be fun to make a roguelike/lite at some point and now we just did! 👍. And.
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Our biggest hotfix yet! 👍❤️.
🛠️ Patch Notes - Early Access Hotfix 5. Today marks the *one week anniversary* of our Steam Early Access Launch and it warrants an extra beefy hotfix full of significant performance improvements, balance changes, stack size increases, 32:9 support, Quality of Life additions, 8
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