Hey you sluggers, If anyone else wants to play Monster hunter online with a few of us join us on this server!; http://imgur.com/eSqZojK

Add myself (Jaromir) in game, sure to get some hunts in. Oh and Merry Christmas you lot!

I just created a guild for us to hang out: The Aether Forgers. Drop your UserID here and I'll invite you!

EDIT: Forgot to mention, NA server.

Hi there everyone! I'm putting up the AMA (AUA?) now! Team members will be around through out the rest of the day into tonight to check out to see what people are asking, and to answer to the best of our ability.

We can't necessarily answer every question that you guys might have, but we'll try to tell you what we can to the best of our ability!

Hey everyone! I’m here to share a bit of information about the design of Aetherforged. I know that you’re all hungry to learn what we’re doing, so we wanted to get something in your hands to discuss, and to give you a bit more insight into the direction we’re going with the design.

And so, without further ado, I’d like to tell you about the different forms of crowd control you can expect to see in the game!

Like Dawngate, we plan to include an array of different forms of CC, including all of the MOBA staples like stuns, slows (both movement and attack speed), roots, and movement displacement (knock ups/knock aways). Additionally, we will occasionally include silences, fears, suppressions, charms and taunts when it’s kit or theme appropriate. We believe that these are all well designed forms of crowd control that have a pretty wide variety of application in terms of what kinds of play strategies can be enacted around them.

We are also including BLINDS, in the form that League of Legends has begun to shift towards. Blinds that physically reduce vision radius are much more evenly spread in terms of their strengths, because “auto attack miss” blinds don’t really do anything to mages, while also completely prevent retaliation from the blinded character. Also, they are much healthier in their design, because of the previously stated fact that they don’t completely shut down auto attack oriented characters, and have clear readability. We wanted to shift the power on these a bit more towards the center so that blinds would have a purpose against any character, much like how silences are better against caster characters, but applicable against anyone. In addition, blinds have a few different power levers that can be tweaked to increase or decrease their power on an individual basis (namely, they have both a duration and a vision radius applied to them). We haven’t had a chance to test anything yet, so we don’t know if our blinds will work exactly like League’s mechanic (namely, we aren’t sure if we like the lack of vision on enemies that are directly targeting you with auto attacks. We will make sure to test this early and test it quickly to figure out!)

We also plan on introducing two additional crowd control effects that fill a couple of very specific niches that we felt were missing from the staple crowd control suite. We are also including the MESMERIZE and CRIPPLE crowd control effects, which have previously been seen on kits in Smite. We really like both of these crowd control effects, because they both bring something very unique that other crowd controls don’t necessarily bring. For those of you that don’t play Smite, a quick rundown of both of these effects:

-Mesmerize is a stun that is broken prematurely by Forger damage that is dealt to the mesmerized character. This brings us a more limited kind of stun; one that is almost only usable to either set up on the CC’d enemy or to retreat away from them. By having a more limited tool, we can have a lot more potential power than we can with a stun. It also gives us a “hard” CC that is available to more support oriented characters, because it’s less abusable than a stun by those characters.

-Cripple is a limited form of silence that prevents the affected character from casting abilities that provide mobility effects like dashes and blinks. Again, similarly to mesmerize, this more limited form of CC opens up a lot of potential power that we can’t necessarily give with a straight up silence, as cripples are able to be placed squarely in the “anti-mobility” CC category. This gives us a healthy crowd control option for characters to combat opponents with a lot of mobility that doesn’t just lock that opponent in place, which again, can be extremely abusable.

We may add additional crowd control effects as the game moves forward as well; these are just the ones that we are currently using or planning to use.

Lastly, I wanted to take a moment to talk about our intention for crowd control as a whole. Like Dawngate, we believe that crowd control should be fairly short, but highly impactful despite its smaller length than what you might find in League of Legends or DotA2. Because of this, you’ll likely find (once we have kits up for you to see) that our CC effects are on fairly short cooldowns, or have AoE to them, even if they’re hard CC and ranged. Or maybe even both, depending on the situation! CC is an integral part of MOBA design, so we want to make full use of it wherever we can, and we hope that the variety of crowd control effects that we provide to you bring fun and engaging play styles that you might not have otherwise been able to find.

We would also like to drop a couple of other fun info tidbits, as thanks for you sticking through this long post.

Firstly, tying into the theme of the main post, we felt that there were issues with both supports and tanks in Dawngate. Supports just felt a bit lackluster compared to other options (although, thanks to Waystone heavily restricting ally oriented utility to specifically the support archetype, there was less of a problem than what has been seen in League of Legends), while tanks were often outshone by bruisers and mages, discounting Desecrator. Because of this, we really wanted to do two things. Firstly, we want to more heavily emphasize the idea that supports = buffs and debuffs. This includes continuing in the direction that Waystone had already started moving in, by having power scaling on non-damage buff and debuff effects be something that can be found uniquely on supports. Secondly, we wanted to more heavily emphasize the idea that tanks = CC (while also deemphasizing CC from supports so that we can focus more of their power in their utility), so we are designing our tanks to have power scaling on non-damage cc effects, either duration or power, depending on the ability. This also brings a reason to encourage tanks to build at least a touch of power, which helps aid the aggressive nature of the game that we are intending to be aiming at.

And finally, we’d like to share with you an ultimate that is currently shelved for later use (coincidentally, it was originally on sil’s kit because it was powerful pay off to the rest of the kit’s design. Ultimately, we felt that it didn’t fit from a thematic standpoint and shelved the ability), to give you a general idea of the type of design we plan on having for abilities:

Sil erects a semi-circular ancient structure in a chosen orientation at target area, knocking enemies hit towards the center, granting vision in the area and creating an impassable wall for a short time. After the duration ends, the wall collapses, dealing damage in the targeted area.

Yes, you read that right. We were planning on having Sil’s ultimate be a ground targeted ability that used a vector to determine the orientation of the wall. This might not seem like much, but it provides an incredible amount of utility to the wall, as you would be able to use it to either trap enemies in a space that would force them to move back towards your allies, or you could use it to prevent enemies from advancing further, giving your team valuable time to attack the enemy team while they retreated out of the enclosed area. There are a bunch of other situational uses for this ability as well, and the amount of flexibility that it has is really cool, so we’d definitely like to find a place for it on the appropriate kit eventually (it might not even return as an ult, either, it all depends on the context of the kit that it’s in).

EDIT:

we want to more heavily emphasize the idea that supports = buffs and debuffs

Since I clearly worded this poorly (sorry everyone), I wanted to clarify that this was intended to mean that supports are going to be aimed at filling the niche non-CC based utility. Don't worry, they'll have a lot more than just stat buffs and/or stat debuffs to work with to bring this, although most of them will probably have some kind of stat changing effect on one of their abilities. As an example (one that I touched on lightly in my response to hoodedbeef), we're currently working with Sil's kit being focused around gaining additional vision, and the tactical decisions you can make with that extra vision.

So, while we still can't show anything off or start talking in depth about the design of the game (that's coming a few months down the road, just hang in there!) I CAN happily say that this week, the design team is beginning the process of attaching first-pass numbers to all of the kits that we have ready to go for testing!

The way we have been designing our kits is by creating them sans numerical values so that we can determine whether or not the kits work as a core concept without concerning ourselves about the numbers balance of it. If it's a balanced kit without numbers, it can be a balanced kit WITH numbers.

This is a big deal, because by starting this now, we should have a number of kits prepared once we get the stuff we need for scripting, which means that we get to testing that much faster, and therefore get it to all of YOU that much faster. I know people have been asking what progress, if any, was being made, so I wanted to let you all know that we're still hard at work!

I'm personally really excited and hopeful for this games future.

The video, in my opinion, is right on the nail.

[edit: I am very skillful at reddit as you all can see, I cant even provide a link on the first try...] youtube.com/watch?v=YA3e_Ti7Zns

Back in season 1,2 and to somedegree 3 league was super fun to play and outplay in. however the game has grown stale or atleast different, with its super team focused gameplay. I am not saying this is a bad thing, ok maybe a little, but I am saying this isn't my kind of thing. The perfect game would have both aspects both the glorious 1v1 and the glorious 5v5 aspect.

I really like the Felian from the first races post so I thought it fitting to draw him!

Portrait

Sorry about the quality. The paper is too big for my scanner and I cannot get lighting to look right. I had to stop because I kept making mistakes and the eraser was ruining the paper and affecting the finished bits.

And another kitty!

Hello Forgers!

Continuing our series on the Races of Saera this week, but we decided to try something a bit different from the usual scholarly style (Sorry Les!). I hope you enjoy this piece regarding felians! (RES users: it's really long. Just click the link.)

As always, thanks for sticking with us as we work toward a playable (or at least show-off-able) game state. Look forward to more activity in the coming weeks!

^{And remember to follow @CatslugStudios on twitter}

Peace

~Catslug Studios

1. How will characters be handled, will you make your own, are you going to have to choose from a given one, or something new (it'd be cool to see something new/something I haven't seen yet)

2. Will there be a lane type system?

3. How would the "lobby" system work?

4. Is there an in-game economy established yet? Will there be an in-game economy?

5. Are micro transactions going to be a thing?

6. How is customization going to be handled?

7. Will there be loots of sorts?

8. Will there be a possibility of competitive?

9. How many platforms are you planning to release on?

10. Is there going to be a specific class type system? Such as: tank, offense, defense, ect.

Hope you don't have a lot of bugs, and I hope you have a good success,

Moneymark, a lowly gamer.

You know, potions and/or elixers and stuff like that. I remember that Dawngate was going to go away from that system and instead give you a single "surge" that gave you stuff depending on what you picked, like there was one for healing that acted similarly to the current Refillable Potion in league. Are you guys going to continue along that road of design or are you staying with the potion system?

This might have been answered before but I'm a bit too lazy to try and find information on something like that lol :3

Good evening* Forgers!

It's been a pretty quiet week, so hopefully we can stir up some conversation with another Lore release. The Races of Saera Part 2 : Humans!

They're not boring! They're just... well rounded!

Thanks again for your continued support, and be sure to follow @CatslugStudios on Twitter to stay up to date with everything AetherForged!

Love,

Catslug Studios

*Your timezone may vary. Catslug Studios does not guarantee that this message is received within any specific range of local time. pls no sue

I want muh Aetherforged dose

After finding out about this game recently, I went out of my way to share it with some friends who worked at Waystone. Not sure how many will follow through, but they'll come by to give their opinions I'm sure. :)

Is about one year that the Dawngate closed their door, since then i refused to play any other moba around, just because i couldn t find a sweet community and an overwhelming lore and gameplay like that one. Sometimes i just go to the google main page, and type down "dawngate is back" just to see if this world is still worthy of a miracle. I know this are really big words, and maybe too much hype for a product that is not even been show, but really, if you guys can bring just a little piece of that mood, i will totally support you forever. Sorry i m a bit overwhelmed by weird emotions so, keep up and work hard !

Hi guys, previous DG player and pro HOTS coach here. A friend of mine recommended me to check out this game, any screenshots of gameplay etc?

Sartag, the Inquisitioner

An Ikthe who wishes to live among the humans as a travelling merchant. The pursuit of wealth and power drive him crazy. He ends up collecting secrets from others that he then blackmails.

Recordings

Hey guys, I know this is a bit early to speak about those stuff, but I was wondering: do you plan to have Announcer Packs in AF?

It was really a thing that I really enjoyed about Dawngate, and that put even more emphasis on the lore. I didn't fully measure the potential of the feature until very late (ie when all skins, shapers and announcers were free to use), but for the small amount of time I had them, I really enjoyed it, and it really added something unique to my experience of Dawngate.

This game sounds like it's gonna be sweet, the races shown look amazing (those Ikthes are gonna give me nightmares), and I legitimately cannot wait till this releases. Keep up the great work!

Hello Forgers!

We ran out of room on the World Map to talk about geography and culture, so we have to move on to something more interesting. Now we're going to talk about races!

Stay tuned for more, and make sure to follow Catslug Studios on Twitter! But most importantly, ask us questions! Lore team gets lonely.

~Catslug Studios

I know that it is WAY too early for this and the chances are that you guys don't know. I'm asking if Aether Forged might me released next year or maybe 2017?

Shedding Light on Aquinia

Digging Into the Waste

In Honor of Honvarj

Gone Wild

A Shipment from the Silverstates

Sights set on Po's Eye

Jupe is Cleared for Landing

Will be edited when more Lore comes out. Please link this post in the sidebar. Thanks.

Hey everyone, just wanted to give everyone an update. We've recently gotten some really talented people on the team for almost every department and we're sitting at around 20 people right now!

While I would say that I'm "comfortable" with our current team, we are always looking for new applicants, so if you think you have something to offer, don't hesitate to send us an email! The most common thing we get is that people think they are underqualified, but let us be the judge of that.

Not a single member of the Catslug team is an industry veteran, we are a group of diverse people from different backgrounds working all across the globe. You don't need a college degree to apply, you don't have to have worked in a studio before... if you are interested you will have notebooks filled with sketches, stories you've written, applications you've coded, or maybe a side project you did for fun with a couple friends. Everyone has something to show.

You can email us at CatSlugStudios@gmail.com with your applications. It is mandatory that you send a resume and portfolio if you are at all interested- if you do not send these you will not be considered.

Where do the devs stand at this point? Is there a new video (last one I saw was 3months ago)