Small Tenebris expansion progress update - March 8, 2022

At present, planning for the Tenebris expansion's specifics has been completed, and work on maps has started. Content creation has only just started, but with less than 3 weeks since Legends Overload's release and the planning for Tenebris needing to be done first, there has been little time to get much done so far (literally just began work on creating content yesterday).

Rather than just leave it at that, I figure some trivia from the planning stage can be added to make this progress update a bit meatier:

• Tenebris is looking to be a good deal larger than Legends Overload so far. When Legends Overload was first planned out, I had expected it to be 25-30% of the size of the base game. Based on current planning for Tenebris, it is looking to be closer to 60-70% the size of the base game and Legends Overload combined. More details on the game's length will be confirmed as content is created (Legends Overload's actual play length was longer than expected, for example).

• The current plan is for the new world map in the Tenebris Story arc to be split into 3 smaller world maps, and the number of enterable locations on those world maps is currently planned to be about 70% the size of the base game/Legends Overload's world map locations.

• Naval Conquest will strictly be its own mode -- there was strong consideration about having Naval Conquest elements be added to the new story arc for Story Mode, but locking Story Mode content/rewards behind Naval tasks did not feel right, especially when those Naval Conquest battles would have been used in place of some dungeons/sidequests/rewards to provide a reason to have the player take on Naval tasks.

• It had been mentioned previously that the new 10th character will be heavily melee-based and stance-oriented (offensive and defensive stances). After current planning out of their abilities and weapons and so on, they will also be gaining additional focus on status ailments (Stagger/Stun/Knockdown/Knockback) and damage-over-time (which will not override Claire's Poison). Their stats will also end up being the 2nd highest overall, with Cook still being 1st.

• Every character will get access to a 9th weapon, which will have a strong benefit at a high cost (as opposed to the typically all-positive handling of the other 8 weapons).

• Each character will be able to gain 3 new passives in Tenebris, just as it was in Legends Overload. The 10th character will have 6 obtainable passives, to put them on par with the first 9 characters.

• Barklord will be able to gain a new ability, Wild Nova, and on gaining this ability will gain new customization options and a higher Daugmentor maximum.

• Optional endgame content is planned to once again consist of a superdungeon and 20 more Challenges. At present, the superdungeon is planned to have the ability for the player to add a benefit for their traversal of the dungeon at the cost of making certain monster types stronger, though this could change as the superdungeon is implemented.

If any of the above ends up changing, I will try and add that information in a future update.