Annihilus: Souls of the Rift Going Live Friday, August 30th!
Souls of the Rift will be hitting live servers Friday, August 30th at 12:00pm (noon) EST!
I want to start out by thanking everyone who has been so amazingly patient with us throughout this whole development process. I feel like we did much more than any 2 man team should be able to do in the amount of time we've taken to make this patch happen, but I do realize it has been a VERY long wait. Starting on Friday, we will be putting our current version of Souls of the Rift up on the live servers for everyone to play. I feel like we should be very clear on what to expect.
The patch will not be perfect.
Full disclosure; there were many more things we wanted to get in before we released SotR to the public, but some are not quite ready yet. We kept completing what we wanted to get done, then we decided we wanted to push ourselves to get in just a little more, and that process kept repeating and repeating to the point we ended up we're at now, and quite frankly we are very exhausted and burnt out! We came to a crossroads, do we push it back another few months to take a break and finish everything on the list, or do we get SotR out to the world in its current form?
We made a decision as a team that what we have to offer now is more than enough to put out to the public and show them just how far Annihilus has come and sate most peoples' cravings for the update. There are some things that are not quite ready yet; these are Set Items, Runewords, multiple Endgame areas, and some Elite Uniques. Item wise there are already MANY more viable items than we have on the Legacy server, and with the addition of the Rift system we felt it could easily be any other mod's endgame alone, it was an easy call to put out what we have. I just wanted to be VERY clear that we are not calling this the final product and never updating again, we just want to be able to take a little break without feeling guilty for making you guys wait even longer while we rejuvenate. I fully expect after a week or two of rest we will have a content patch to push out already.
Here is what you CAN expect.
This patch is simply too big of a change to have your typical patch notes for. You can safely assume literally every item and skill has been modified in someway and there are more new mechanics and QoL changes than I can even remember to list. You will be much better off just jumping into the game and seeing for yourself, no expectation you have can meet the actual reality of the improvements we've made to the game. We have been working on the new wiki at http://annihilus.net/wiki to try and have a source of information to help you get through the basics, and to get an idea of the uniques you can come across throughout your progression. It will only take a minute to realize just how much unique items have evolved here at Annihilus!
Some major changes you will notice are the Crafting, Souls, and Rifts. These will absolutely be the core of Annihilus, you will come across Rift Energies almost instantly which can be used to modify items in various ways. If you forego the Crafting system you will not have a good time, so do not be afraid to use those Energies!
You will also discover certain Superunique Monsters drop their Soul as an object when they die, you can interact with these to absorb them into the Annihilus you start with in your inventory. You will want to gather as many souls as you can to continue to empower your character, and some Bosses will even drop a "Greater Soul" that you can socket into your Annihilus. These are often drastic build changers. Keep an eye out for screen shakes, as this often mean a Soul has dropped! The Annihilus cannot be moved from your inventory at all, it is bound to your character.
Lastly, my personal favorite, you will come across Unstable Rifts throughout the world that are completely random. Interacting with them will activate the Rift; spewing out monsters from all areas of Sanctuary, and sometimes even other Dimensions. The rift is on a time limit and the enemies can overwhelm you quickly, so be prepared before activating! You can expect better than average loot from these Rifts, and also some great experience.
Here is WHEN you CAN expect it.
The question on everyone's mind, when can you FINALLY play it? We will be putting SotR live on the server at 12:00pm (noon) EST on Friday, August 30th. I know our release dates have become a meme at this point, but again we are just 2 people working at an extraordinary rate to get this done so we can finally show our hard work to you guys and finally rest. We feel very confident in being able to deliver this to you by Friday. We originally planned to have it out a little earlier, but due to overwhelming requests we decided to plan it earlier in the day on a Friday.
Final Thoughts / Fair Warning
Again, full disclosure, we did not get to thoroughly test this patch as much as we would have liked. I want you all to please understand there will certainly be bugs and issues, potentially even some gamebreaking ones. This cannot be helped based on how quickly we've decided to push this out, so I would like you all to view this first Ladder season on SotR as almost like an Open Beta ladder. We fully intend to treat this as a full launch and a standard ladder season, we just ask that you be realistic with us. At the end of the day the most important thing to us was getting this to everyone as soon as possible before we finally collapse. We will do our best to fix any issues that are found ASAP, so please be sure you report them. I highly recommend joining our Discord server as this is where most of the community will interact, and is by far the easiest way to report issues or bugs to us.
The current characters and patch on Annihilus will be moved to another server and will be referred to as "Annihilus Legacy". We are keeping this up strictly as a courtesy for the few who may still want to play it, and it is sort of like a neat museum to show what we started from, but we will not be updating it or working on it at all from this point on.
We want to thank you all again for your extreme patience, and especially to those who continued to support the server even during the slowest moments in the server's history. It means a lot that you all look forward to our work so much that you put up with all of the missed deadlines and broken promises. We won't let you regret it!
