Reforged - Our Biggest Update Yet

Title: Reforged - Our Biggest Update Yet

~200 pages of changes | 32 -> 64-bit client & server | 3 warring factions | 20+ years of tech, modernized

A quick note for those finding us here on Steam: Rise of Agon isn't playable through Steam just yet. The 64-bit Beta runs on our standalone client, with the Steam launch to follow. Check riseofagon.com and our Discord for the latest information in the meantime.

Greetings Agonians,

It's been quite a year for Agon, and this is the update where it all comes together. Before we get into everything new in Reforged, there's some news about where the game goes from here.

A New Chapter - The Reforged Server Is Closing

When we brought the Reforged server online early this year, we hoped it would pull people back to Agon. It did. Familiar names and new players logged in side by side, cities filled up, and the world felt dangerous and alive again in a way it hadn't for a long time. It's been a genuinely good run, and we're grateful to everyone who was part of it.

A lot has changed since then. The team has more than doubled, and we've put that to work on improvements across every part of the game. Reforged is where all of it comes together, and it's the step we've been building toward.

Taking that step means retiring the current Reforged server. Moving the game to a 64-bit client and server isn't something we can add onto the old build, so the Reforged server goes offline on September 16, and our focus moves fully to what comes next.

One thing we want to be upfront about: shutting down the 32-bit server and moving to the 64-bit version means a full fresh start. All characters and clans will be wiped. The only things that carry over are what's already applied to your account, such as game time, skins and custom titles. Everyone steps into the new era on even footing.

The 64-bit Beta goes live on September 30. It runs as a standalone client again, the same way you played at launch. Think of it as the last chapter before Steam: our chance to put the new build through its paces and get everything tested and as close to perfect as we can before it reaches a much bigger audience. Once we're confident it's where it needs to be, Reforged launches on Steam. That's the finish line we've been building toward.

We plan to keep the Beta server online until we're ready for that launch. Our estimate right now is four to six months, which would put Steam somewhere around March.

That's the backdrop. The rest of this update is what Reforged brings to the table.

The Islands - Starting Out on the Tutorial Islands

New characters now start on a set of tutorial islands instead of being dropped straight into the open world. Each island is built around a single style of play, from melee and archery to magic, gathering and crafting, so newer players can learn the fundamentals before the world starts fighting back. You get to try out combat, spellcasting and harvesting, make something from what you've gathered, and move on to the mainland once you feel ready rather than the moment you log in. Veterans rolling an alt can move through it quickly, and newcomers finally get the grounding Darkfall never really offered.

The islands double as a memorial. For years we've remembered community members we've lost by placing tombs around the world, and this time we wanted to go further. The NPCs who staff the islands, from the trainers to the merchants and everyone else you speak to while learning, carry the names of those players, so they stay a living part of the game rather than a headstone you ride past. If you've been around a while, you'll spot old friends, clanmates and the odd rival among them.

Headline System - The Race War

Three races, one map, and a side you're born into.

The Race War sorts every character onto one of three sides based on their race. Humans, Dwarves and Mirdain make up the Righteous Trinity, the Mahirim and Ork form the Savage Raiders, and the Alfar stand alone as the Scourge of Nagast. There's no sign-up involved, since your race decides where you belong. You only count as a member in good standing while you stay lawful, though; turn criminal and you fight for no one but yourself. Allegiance runs deep enough that lawful players cannot party across enemy lines, and the same restriction applies to clan alliances.

• Righteous Trinity - Human, Dwarf, Mirdain
• Savage Raiders - Mahirim, Ork
• Scourge of Nagast - Alfar

The three sides fight over territory, specifically faction cities that are held on behalf of an entire race and marked by War Glyphs. Any side can take one, but it's never a quick flip. A city is only vulnerable during scheduled windows. When a window opens, attackers first have to bring down its guard towers, and only after the last one falls does a countdown begin and the city's bind stone become attackable. While the stone is exposed, the game tracks each side's damage separately, and whichever faction has done the most when it dies takes the city. The finishing blow doesn't decide anything on its own; what settles ownership is total contribution across the fight. A capture clears the previous owners' binds, rebuilds the defenses for the new holder, and announces the change to the whole server.

Holding a city is where the reward comes in. While your side controls one, it earns Prosperity every time your faction harvests or kills monsters nearby, and that Prosperity gradually builds and upgrades the city's structures on its own. Those structures grant bonuses to your entire faction. That covers every member of your race wherever they happen to be, not only the players standing in the city, and it holds for as long as you keep the city. Lose it and you lose the bonuses with it. In practice, a gatherer feeding Prosperity into a city several regions from the fighting is helping to power the front line.

There's also a faction leaderboard on top of the territory war, tracking your kills against the enemy races by day, week, month and all time. It gives everyone a way to see how they're contributing, even when they aren't the one finishing off a bind stone.

Headline System - Territory Control

Agon is now divided into 124 territories, each anchored by a Rune Glyph. Capture the glyph and the land is yours, along with everything it produces. Here's how taking one works:

• Challenge with a Glyph Wand - Use a Glyph Wand on a Rune Glyph to challenge for it.
• 30 minutes to answer - The owner has 30 minutes to defend. Channeling at the glyph for 30 seconds cancels the challenge.
• Undefended glyphs flip - If nobody answers, the glyph changes hands and is immune for the next hour.
• Two kinds of ground - Wilderness glyphs are fought clan against clan. In racial lands they belong to your race alliance.

Holding territory is worth the trouble. Every glyph pays +5% PvE XP, loot, harvesting and resource yield across its territory, and connected territories form networks where the bonuses stack. Hold the glyph next to your city or hamlet and you can link the holding in, which adds 20% for a city or 10% for a hamlet to the whole network. Multiple linked holdings all stack, with no cap. Your allies share your bonuses while they're in your territory. On top of that, wilderness glyphs generate daily maintenance points that cover your clan's upkeep, so territory quite literally pays the rent.

Sieges now run through the glyphs. To siege a clan holding you first have to capture its connected glyph. No glyph, no siege. Declaring the siege locks that glyph for as long as it runs, so nobody can pull your siege rights out from under you mid-fight. And losing your city doesn't end the war: win its glyph back and you unlock the counter-siege.

The world map has a political overlay to keep track of it all. Every territory, its owner and its bonus show at a glance, contested glyphs display a live countdown from anywhere in the world, and borders and glyph names are always visible. Hover over a glyph and it lights up the holding it's connected to, so you can scout exactly what a glyph grants before you commit to taking it.

Territory - Node Vaults

Node Vaults run alongside the Race War, but on the clan side. Activity around a clan holding builds up into rewards that collect in the vault, and because those rewards can be contested, the more valuable corners of the map become places worth both gathering at and raiding. The upshot is that clans have a reason to fight over specific ground instead of spreading themselves thin across all of it.

The World - A World That Keeps Moving

Towns used to feel empty once you looked past the vendors. Now they're filled with citizens who wander about, go to work, react to you and follow their own daily routines, which makes a city feel like somewhere people actually live rather than a shopfront with a roof. Monster AI has come on as well. Enemies behave less predictably now, and dealing with them takes more than memorizing a single pattern.

The weather does its own thing on top of all that. Storms blow in across the sea, sandstorms sweep the deserts and snow piles up in the north, and a full lighting overhaul changes how each of them looks at different times of day. This is more than set dressing. Conditions like these affect how far you can see and how a fight or a long voyage plays out.

Headline System - Mastery

A goal for after your character is "finished".

Mastery gives you something to work toward in the stretch of the game that never really had a goal: the long run after your character is otherwise done. Your skills eventually hit their cap, but a Mastery keeps progressing. You pick one and keep developing it for as long as you keep hunting. It applies to PvE only and does nothing at all in PvP, so investing in it never affects the balance of a duel or a siege.

You equip one Mastery at a time and rank it up by killing monsters, with tougher enemies and deeper zones raising it faster. Each Mastery is a self-contained kit made up of five alterations that change how you fight, a party aura that benefits everyone hunting with you, and a capstone at the top. You can own several and swap between them at will, and since each keeps its own progress, trying out a second one never sets back the first.

Seven Masteries are planned, one for each style of combat:

• Deadeye - Archery
• Cutthroat - Knives & roguework
• Vanguard - Shield & tanking
• Berserker - Two-handed melee
• Elementalist - Magic
• Oracle - Healing
• Blightcaller - Debuffs & decay
• More to come - the framework is in place for the rest to follow.

Deadeye is the first to arrive fully finished, and it's a good example of how a Mastery plays. Its kit is front-loaded, so an archer has all of it in hand by the early ranks and spends the rest of the climb sharpening what's there:

• Bullseye - Every 8th arrow that lands on a monster crits for double damage, tracked per target. At higher ranks that improves to every 5th.
• Second Nature - Landing arrows steadily speeds up your draw by up to 20%, rising to 40% as the Mastery ranks up.
• Forgiving Aim - A miss only costs you a few hits from your streak rather than the whole thing, and eventually just one.
• Breach - Your Disabling Shot cracks a monster's resistance to the arrow type you used for 30 seconds. Every shot of that type afterwards hits harder, and it applies for your whole party.
• Quickdraw (capstone) - A 10-second burst of +60% draw speed on a cooldown. It drops the moment PvP touches you, in line with the PvE-only rule.

Deadeye also comes with a party aura that raises your group's ranged damage against monsters as the Mastery climbs, reaching +10% at the top.

Everyday Systems - The Rest of the Toolkit

Alongside the headline systems, we've gone back over the parts of the game you deal with constantly, including crafting, clans, holdings, inventory, quests, parties, chat, abilities, item tooltips and the HUD, and reworked them. A few of the changes you're likely to notice first:

• Clan tasks & city buffs - Goals a clan works toward together, with bonuses for holding up your end.
• Clearer quest markers - Less time spent guessing where a quest actually wants you to go.
• Better inventory & loot tools - Faster sorting, moving and looting when it counts.
• Party linking - Chain multiple parties together for large, coordinated groups.
• Customizable chat tabs - Split chat into tabs you arrange yourself instead of one firehose.
• Collectible monster pets - Track down and keep pets from creatures across Agon.
• Seamless reconnect - Drop and rejoin without losing your place.
• And plenty more - a large part of the 200 pages is made up of changes like these.

Under the Hood - Twenty-Year-Old Foundations, Rebuilt

Darkfall was first announced in 2001, and work on its engine and tools began in 2003. A great deal of what the game runs on is now over twenty years old, and Reforged is where we start addressing that properly instead of working around it.

Both the client and the server have moved from 32-bit to 64-bit. That removes the old memory ceiling the game kept running into and lets us do things the 32-bit build simply couldn't handle. The game is multithreaded now, so it spreads its work across your CPU rather than relying on a single core, and it makes far better use of modern graphics cards. Together those changes should give better and more consistent performance across a wider range of hardware. We've also moved the servers onto a current, fully supported operating system, which makes Agon much easier for us to host, maintain and build on going forward.

Art & Graphics - A New Coat of Paint, and New Tools to Paint With

At a glance, Reforged is a broad visual overhaul. Dynamic lighting and improved shadows change how the world is lit through the day, and there's new sky and cloud rendering, updated terrain, better water and the weather effects covered above. A set of modern options, among them anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, color grading and god rays, can be turned up or down to suit your machine.

The bigger story is behind the scenes, where we've rebuilt the art pipeline from the ground up. Parts of the old one still relied on software like 3ds Max 2008, so getting anything new into the game meant wrestling with tools two decades out of date, which was slow, awkward and often not worth the effort. Our artists now work in modern software, and that's what really opens the door to new mounts, emotes, higher-quality weapon and armor skins, improved character and creature animation, visual effects and environmental art. The visuals in this update are one thing, but the pipeline behind them is what will let us keep adding new content for years.

A few shots from the new 64-bit build:

The Road Ahead - Where This Goes

Reforged clears away much of what the old 2009-era client held us back on and gives us a technical and creative foundation to build on for years. Our aim is to modernize Darkfall while keeping the combat, the freedom, the risk and the large-scale sandbox that made it what it is. This is the first real step in that, with plenty more still to come.

There's far more in the changelog than we could fit here. We'll see you in Agon.

Important - Read Before the Beta: Store Items and the Move to 64-Bit

With the 64-bit Beta getting closer and a full wipe coming with it, here's a reminder on how store items carry over. In short, if something is still sitting in your inventory as an item, use it before the move.

Will not transfer (store items still in item form):

• Golden Tools
• Rare Containers
• Game Time Tokens
• Title Scrolls
• Skin Scrolls
• Any other unused store item in your bank or bags

Will transfer (anything already applied to your account):

• Game time already added to your account
• Titles already unlocked and applied
• Skins already unlocked and applied

A Game Time Token left in your bank won't make the move, but if you use it first, the game time it adds to your account will. Title and Skin scrolls work the same way: they have to be used and applied to your account to carry over.

Beta to Steam launch: once we're closer, we'll cover how store items are handled moving from the Beta to the Steam launch in a separate post, so it can be finalized on its own. Keep an eye on the announcements, as there will be another reminder or two before release.

Get Involved - Help Us Test 64-Bit

If you'd like to help get Rise of Agon ready for its Steam release, we'd be glad to have you testing the 64-bit build with us. Once you're accepted, you'll get the details on access, testing procedures and bug reporting. To apply, head to the tester application channel on our Discord.

Apply to become a 64-Bit Tester

Until the Steam launch, the game and the Beta run on our standalone client, so keep an eye on riseofagon.com and our Discord for news, downloads and everything leading up to release.

Sincerely,

- The Team at Toxic Rain Studios