Concerns about the direction of the game so far (Full Version)

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Bluu -> Concerns about the direction of the game so far (11/12/2025 7:56:17)

Heya! I've been having some concerns about the releases ever since the spectacular Book 3 finale released, and I wanted to make a thread to talk about it!

I do hope that I do not come off as too negative with this post, as I want my opinions and my criticism to be taken in a constructive light such that it may improve the quality of the game overall. I feel as though, ever since the release of the Book 3 Finale Epilogue, the game has sorely lacked a direction or tangible milestones to look forward to.

First off, I will express that I am personally extremely grateful for all the work being invested into rewriting Book 1 and Book 2. Book 1 being as nostalgic and cutely charming as it is, deserves to be in line with the overall quality of the game. Be this the pacing of the plot, the placement of the quests and their givers, the rewrites to the somewhat clunky, typo-laden dialogue, and the complete lack of music, being able to revisit stories from my childhood with the experiences of my adulthood is genuinely very heartwarming and dear to me. I appreciate all the work that has put into this.

Secondly, another thing I want to appreciate is that several features that were promised years ago were finally delivered through us in the form of the Eirn and Yashta guests as well as Archnalchemy. Despite these guests being characters I will never bring along in my journeys on my main, I will absolutely unlock them ASAP on my alts and use them for a bit of roleplay for the quests that allow it. And despite Archnalchemy being a rather minor and mostly negligible benefit, as a minmaxer, I will always appreciate more avenues to increase my potential in the game. I will, however, express that I would not appreciate Dragonfable being like a long-standing gacha game that has way too many avenues to boost your skills in battle by a marginal amount rather than having one defined combat system to fall back on. I think that Dragonfable has a very solid base and that, while Archnalchemy was great, I would not appreciate many more features of this style unless they have to do with food or consumables.

That being said, I do want to bring light to my issue with the way development is being handled right now - and that would be that there is currently no concrete goal that the dev team has set for themselves, to which to work towards. I completely understand the need for an interlude period after the completion of such a major arc, all the while many great releases were being worked on, but I do think that it's quite a shame that we have had no major project to look towards. I'm sure that the developers are tired of hearing Fleshweaver requests, but it has been a full decade since the class was announced. Several classes have been released and revamped since then. I think it's only very fair to push in requests for Fleshweaver during a period where releases are explicitly branded to be worldbuilding, revamps, or filler. This has been something that, and I hope I'm not mistaken when I say this, but it has been something that teh entire community has been excited for and anticipating for several years now. I can guarantee that several returning players look for news about Fleshweaver when they come back to the game's design notes. I think we deserve a reasonable timeframe for when the class will be released such that we may hold the devs accountable. It's been a very long wait and we'd love to finally have the class to fool around in the game with!

I will start with the releases I liked: Void Voyage, for its introduction to Yashta and Eirn as enemies you can face and guests you can take with you. Despite my friends thinking of it as rather middling, I personally really enjoyed that challenge and I think it's a very unique addition to the game, and the quests that the guests got to unlock them were genuinely very nice additions. Yashta's quest even had multiple paths you could take to accomplish the goal and two good cosmetics that you could obtain for it. Star Defenders is another release I loved for it being a challenging and unique fight, as controverisal as it was. Crane Master may be a bit overtuned and Sparkle Boy undertuned, and I understand people's concerns with the asset reuse, but I don't care because it led to the invention of a fight that I genuinely enjoyed playing through with several classes. Drakath (Champion of Chaos) isn't my favorite fight in the inn but I do enjoy the unique approach it took to a difficult fight and the great translation of the MMORPG AQW mechanics into a turn-based game. That could not have been easy to accomplish and I do respect the effort behind it. Archnalchemy, while only a marginal upgrade, is actually nice to have and opens up some cute strategies with classes like Paladin that direly lack DoTs or classes that appreciate having slightly more juiced up nukes.

My friend TFS hosted a poll recently and the results overwhelmingly showed, however, that the interest in the game from the part of endgame players was dropping. Out of the 16 voters, 56% have stopped playing the game due to boring releases and 38% were not inn minmaxers. I fear that this is a bad statistic. It's relevant to mention that my friends Harken and Coddiwomple, who were not part of the poll due to not being on the server on which it was conducted, still do play the game regularly and enjoy attempting every new fight with multiple classes or attempting old fights with revamped or bad classes. I feel as though this proves that the game has something to hold people's interest in, but that just isn't being meaningfully channeled.

It's been more than a year since The End of Magic Finale and, as I said earlier, I do appreciate the need for the developers to have a more chill interlude period. However, the quality of the releases has taken a hit since the previous year. Outside of particularly good inn releases, the rest of the releases have generally skewed to the negative side amongst the opinions of longstanding players. The Book 1 and Book 2 rewrites are great releases in my opinion, but alongside TFS, TheErosionSeeker, and Baron Dante, I feel like we are in the minority of players that look forward to such releases. In short, they do nothing to appeal to the longstanding playerbase that this game has miraculously managed to maintain. It's unfortunate and I 100% understand the need for these releases, but they should be intermittent between genuinely good or cool story releases. Apart from the Lorekeeper releases in Red Queen's Gambit and the continuation of the Dragesvard storyline, there hasn't been much to which to look forward plotwise.

There have of course been a few balance patches since then, and I do really respect the effort put into them. Balance patches are so important even for a single-player game like this and I appreciate Verlyrus for putting in the effort to try and make the entire game fair and balanced. Some of them have been huge misses like the Deathknight Healing Presence change, but that's bound to happen. However, it is important to note that such patches are not well-received by the more casual community of this game. I think that balance patches should be relegated to large inn releases because such content is obviously relegated to endgame minmaxxers.

As for inn releases, I think that most of us will agree when I say that we would appreciate more inn releases centered around iconic DF characters and battles. Most of us would love an Extreme Sepulchure/Valen battle. I understand the need to reuse assets from other parts of DF or other AE games but more GOOD fights based on original DF characters would be greatly appreciated. Unending Empires was considered one of the best releases in the game for a very good reason, and there are monsters like Brakenberry, Okuchi no Okami, and Corrupted Captain Davey, that have no representation in endgame content when genuine randos from games we didn't even know still existed get fully fledged inn fights for themselves. I appreciate the intent behind The Unleashed, Deimos Mortis, Swan Song Ex, etc, but like, most DF players don't actually play other AE games lmao

Also, the elephant in the room. Fleshweaver. A time like this is a perfect time for a project that has been teased over TEN YEARS to be released. In fact, there has been a lot of unrest about this topic, and of course, Dove, in all his helpfulness, came into the chat to STILL SAY that Fleshweaver would take two weeks to release if you had the time WHILE PEOPLE WERE CRASHING OUT ABOUT NOT HAVING IT YET. It's gotten to a point where our friend group has inside jokes about how lazy Dove is and how he does nothing for the game. I'm sorry, I hate participating in this kind of banter, but come on brother. I genuinely dislike Dove's intentions towards Fleshweaver so far. I feel live we've been given promises upon promises to look forward to and build hype towards, but it's always been hollow and empty. It's really gotten to a point where some of us don't even care whether the class is released anymore so that the only animator for the game can actually focus 100% of his energy on other stuff. I really really hate to say this. I want you to trust that I am not a vile person, despite what my own words and the opinions of others will say about me, but if Fleshweaver isn't released by mid 2026, I'm probably going to quit the game out of sheer disappointment.

This isn't even to mention how much of a workload the Fleshweaver promises have on the game's development. Expecting the overworked Verlyrus to write versions of quests with and without Aegis is ridiculous. Locking NPCs and dialogue behind a choice that can largely only be reverted and taken by DCs (after the first acceptance and reversion) is insane for how small the dev team is. The Proclamation should've made it obvious that this isn't feasible for a game of this size. Most other evil classes are relegated to non-canon DC stuff and I think it's actually better for the game to relegate FW to DCs as well, or at least to non-canonity. Players that like the class may indeed write their own headcanons of their journey down the dark path, but the class does not have to actually influence your gameplay because literal enTropy and Kathool Adept don't do it either, not to mention Chaosweaver, which is sold by the same vendor. Soulweaver being one of the only canonical classes to the player does absolutely not deserve to be deleted if one chooses to use Fleshweaver. It's a fantastic and lore-relevant class and it deserves a lot better than being some trade-off on an artificial weighing scale.

Furthermore, I feel as though some releases, like the recent EPL/AARGH release - mainly the AARGH aspect of it, although the EPL animations, the way Callum and I have discussed it on the other thread, are worth mentioning - genuinely detract from the game in quality. Me and others have expressed on that thread our opinions on that release and why it was subpar. And that was only the most offensive in a long line of rather bland releases.

We all know that DF is a lot better than what it has been during the past year and we want it to go back to the high high it was during early-mid 2024. It never will because the reigning popular discord server for the game is led by braindead morons but that's besides the point.

I hope I was halfway coherent with this post. I don't want it to be overly positive or negative, but being as drunk as I am typing this out, I can't guarantee much. I do hope that I got some relevant points across nevertheless, and I feel like this and my arguments towards my bughunter/tester friend expresses in full what I find lacking in the recent releases over the past year.

Profanity removed. Self-censored or otherwise, profanity is not allowed on the forums. ~Gingkage



TFS -> RE: Concerns about the direction of the game so far (11/12/2025 13:45:48)

I feel obliged to contribute to this thread so

For the past year or so I've seen this persistent sentiment of player disinterest in the small handful of DF communities that are still active, and was bored a couple weeks ago so I polled around and then discussed results with a few friends. Outside of the main Falcon's Nest discord chat (which is pretty averse to any serious discussion), players mentioned one or more of the following:
-Many players are disinterested with the lack of ongoing projects, as the main story ended over a year ago and something like a new class (perhaps Fleshweaver) is not actually being developed despite the lack of story content to deprioritize it.
-Endgame players specifically are disinterested with how recent Inn bosses have consistently been thematically uninspired, middle-of-the-road 3/5 difficulty, and offered a reward that's just a marginal upgrade to an existing item rather than something completely new to play with.
-Regular players who log in every single week are disinterested with / skip Book 1 revamps, as these don't have either new story content, or gameplay content that matters to regular players. A common response I saw was mention of Josh Strife Hayes.

Personally I kind of agree with the first two points, but strongly disagree with the third one. Any opinion I could possibly offer is probably covered somewhere in Bluu's post above, so I'll keep it brief. I'll send this link around so people can offer their thoughts ig



Verlyrus -> RE: Concerns about the direction of the game so far (11/12/2025 20:48:12)

We're already planning on moving the Book 1 revisits aside after hitting the Orb Saga, (for those wondering about a Necromancer rework/update, that will still happen eventually).
After that, we want to finish the Book 2 Reimagined project as soon as possible. Depending on how heavy the script writing for that ends up being for me, that could mean 2 weeks of Reimagined a month until that is complete, or 1 Week of Reimagined, 1 week for other projects.

I also want to say that due to very negative feedback whenever we shared Fleshweaver progress, we have not shared anymore. But it is being worked on. For example, with this month's AARGH release, Dove was able to focus on things other than the main release. We know players want us to prioritize it more and we are. But it's a bit of a catch 22 when we get criticized for sharing progress and then also for not.

Inn fights have settle dwhere they are due to a similar reason. Too easy of fights, and very few people are satisfied. Too hard/annoying and people are vocal about how they dislike it. Meaningful rewards are even harder to implement considering such things require programming budget.... which is usually spent on the fights themselves, or is taken from other weeks' or projects. That isnt to say that i dont think it would be cool to have more of that sort of thing, and in fact, i've been adding more and more support for cool things/effrcts behind the scenes for cool stuff, but the matter is time and brain budget to properly create, test, and balance these things on already coding/design/testing packed arena weeks.

Hopefully, once we've finished the Book 2 Reimagined project, we'll be able to have a "do projects" week that would get us this extra time and brain and creativity budget, but it also doesnt feel good not releasing someyhing every week, so we will have to see how it goes.

I hope that addresses the concerns.

Edit: addressing some of the concerns around fleshweaver's implmentation, a lot of the things that were said years ago were said before we had an established direction, and were said to "be exciting" or just be different/unique. In DragonFable's current direction, I think it should hopefully be clear that we would strive to both not take away fun or options from players, as well as not making even more work for ourselves.

As for things to look forward to, I have two major coding projects in the works, one which is coming out this week, and the other which will need me to create and hook up a UI to, but technically is working. Depending on how I am doing, since writing reimagined/revisit and coding arena stuff takes a lot out of me, I may finally be able to finalize Book 4's plans and begin script writing. (Characters, themes, and other documentation has been written already, and is still being updated when I can find thr time.) If you find yourself asking, "what have you been doing for a whole year, then?", the answer is DragonFable releases, every week.



Bluu -> RE: Concerns about the direction of the game so far (11/13/2025 1:01:23)

I appreciate the very quick response to this feedback thread. Thank you for that, Verlyrus. It's always been evident how much you care about the game but more so now that you care about the community as well.

quote:

-Endgame players specifically are disinterested with how recent Inn bosses have consistently been thematically uninspired, middle-of-the-road 3/5 difficulty, and offered a reward that's just a marginal upgrade to an existing item rather than something completely new to play with.
First off, I want to disagree with TFS' point here personally. As someone who has been around the inn's block, I personally really appreciate and enjoy such items being rewards from fights! Minmaxing this game is a lot of fun for me and Threads of the Lost was a great item to get to play with. I haven't beaten The Unleashed yet but the weapon you get from it also looks pretty good based on the forum entry.

quote:

I also want to say that due to very negative feedback whenever we shared Fleshweaver progress, we have not shared anymore. But it is being worked on. For example, with this month's AARGH release, Dove was able to focus on things other than the main release. We know players want us to prioritize it more and we are. But it's a bit of a catch 22 when we get criticized for sharing progress and then also for not.
I'm sorry to hear that - I hope you know that we as players aren't vengeful towards the developers because of this but I think you agree with me that Dove was genuinely terrible in the way he went around marketing the class as if it was already 75% finished. No hate to the man, I used to lowkey look up to him as a kid, but I disagree with many of his decisions there.

As for what you personally said about inn content (bit long to quote), I assure you that we do see the effort and the hard work that you put in, but the actual choices for the bosses in the inn are not the best. Many iconic DF characters like Sepulchure, Caitiff, Vaal, and Roirr had old and bad fights already, and many iconic new DF characters are not on the board. I think I speak for everyone when I say we would all prefer a duo, like say, Mazurek and Ruuma? Random DF characters with a common theme in knowing and disliking Khvorost and also loving the seas, over totally random AQ/AQW/ED characters because the overlap between players that play DF and other AE games is actually very small.

quote:

Edit: addressing some of the concerns around fleshweaver's implmentation, a lot of the things that were said years ago were said before we had an established direction, and were said to "be exciting" or just be different/unique. In DragonFable's current direction, I think it should hopefully be clear that we would strive to both not take away fun or options from players, as well as not making even more work for ourselves.
I'm glad to hear this. Soulweaver looked like it was a lot of effort for all the developers to revamp and reimagine. It would not do to have that be an option that could be permanently locked out from a character, should someone choose to go with Fleshweaver instead. I'm grateful that it is being acknowledged how absurd some of the promises were and weirdly enough? I am grateful that they are being called out openly as false.

I'm excited to see your new projects, man. And I'm sorry if I came off a bit harsh or strong, but I think you know how much I love this game and that I only make such posts because I want it to improve LOL



Verlyrus -> RE: Concerns about the direction of the game so far (11/13/2025 10:27:29)

Don't feel like you need to ever apologize for expressing criticism or frustration. I like to think I have a good feel of the community's "vibe", and it's definitely been feeling down for a bit, after peaking up from the summer and the Northlands story start. Exacerbated, in part, by some recent "cosmetic spam" updates, and relatively few changes to the Book 2 Reimagined, so I get it.

I have my own concerns, of course, as a result but I hope things will pick up once we're out of this small lull.



Maxtrigon -> RE: Concerns about the direction of the game so far (11/14/2025 14:10:19)

quote:

I also want to say that due to very negative feedback whenever we shared Fleshweaver progress, we have not shared anymore. But it is being worked on. For example, with this month's AARGH release, Dove was able to focus on things other than the main release. We know players want us to prioritize it more and we are. But it's a bit of a catch 22 when we get criticized for sharing progress and then also for not.


Hello! I'm not sure why this was worded as though you guys sharing Fleshweaver progress was ever the issue being criticized but at least from what I can recall from the one Discord server I was in during both times that I was present and engaging the conversation, the feedback was primarily directed towards the lack of information and the "hope-baiting" that Dove would engage in and joke about FW's release. While I understand that always having to hear about it, have it be a talking point, or even suggest that it take over other perhaps higher priority issues can be immensely frustrating, I would prefer that you didn't misrepresent the situation as it was rolling out. Yes the feedback was, at some points, overtly critical and while it was related to Fleshweaver, unless it was far more about how little information was given and Dove's behavior regarding his class and how he would, presuming good faith, joke or meme about it's imminent release.

I think the idea that we keep getting little morsels of information (like the final confirmation that FW will not have that previously mentioned story split which was the running story most players assumed to be true given, again, no evidence to the contrary) and being told how close it is and have been for the past 10+ years since this class's public inception was revealed is the reason for such very negative feedback as collectively speaking it's tiring always being told the same thing year after year after year with only relying on the same decade old info with nothing new about it. And the things that do get shared, are often dropped with very little more explanation than just "it was an idea at the time that's no longer relevant" (such as dropping that at some point Fleshweaver was to have DC-locked elemental skills/spirits without any elaboration until like 2 months later).

I want to close this out by saying that I do not want FW because it will radically change the game, nor because it's a core feature that's been missing forever. It is a class that was prematurely revealed during a time in which there was severe issues going on both publicly and behind the scenes. HOWEVER, that doesn't change the fact that what I want and what we've been asking for is just more transparency when it comes to these things. We do want information, but we want it complete and something to actually tell us how far you've guys come. Saying it's had work done means nothing when we also know that some odd months back only half of the class's skills were done and last month how the animations were just a few left along with training quests and testing and coding. Progress has no meaning when we don't have a clear start and end point and that's all we want.



Coddiwomple -> RE: Concerns about the direction of the game so far (11/14/2025 20:35:13)

quote:

My friend TFS hosted a poll recently and the results overwhelmingly showed, however, that the interest in the game from the part of endgame players was dropping. Out of the 16 voters, 56% have stopped playing the game due to boring releases and 38% were not inn minmaxers. I fear that this is a bad statistic. It's relevant to mention that my friends Harken and Coddiwomple, who were not part of the poll due to not being on the server on which it was conducted, still do play the game regularly and enjoy attempting every new fight with multiple classes or attempting old fights with revamped or bad classes. I feel as though this proves that the game has something to hold people's interest in, but that just isn't being meaningfully channeled.


It's also worth mentioning that we've more or less reached the endpoint with most inn-viable classes, at least when it comes to maintaining the "crutchless" (i. e. no extra potions or consumables) club. I'd be willing to bet that I'm not the only one who thinks that full budget, crutchless clears are a great middle ground for inn enjoyers — it provides a good challenge, and if it's ever too easy, one can always choose to optimize for speed and/or resources. There are also "weakcore" (i. e. using gear that mimics someone's progression through the inn + a 200 pt dragon) restrictions as well as "crutched" challenges with weaker classes, but the former isn't everyone's cup of tea since it can be a bit depriving, and the latter can be seen as less rewarding and more proof of concept. As of writing, a whopping 15 classes have been able to clear the entirety of the inn with crutchless restrictions, so it's only natural that things have slowed down as the strongest classes have been filtered out of our options for new frontiers. Sure, there's some new ground to tread with reworked EPL, but within a week, most of the inn's hardest challenges have already been beaten by it. Aside from some unexpected snag that may lie ahead, I think this is proof enough for people who don't actively enjoy playing the class that it has the potential to perform as well as the other 15 classes. Doing challenges "top-down" in this manner isn't necessarily wrong; in fact, it's quite understandable, but it can create the perception that the rest of the inn for the class is busywork instead of a slow, steady crawl towards the finish line. Granted, it isn't the fault of the developers that the community has imposed certain standards upon itself when it comes to the inn and recordkeeping, and what feels janitorial to some may be engaging to others. Speaking for myself, I enjoyed running through Entropy's backlog of challenges after Womb's buff simply because I always enjoyed the class and was excited to test the limits of its newfound power. It could very well be the case that somebody has the same passion for EPL, but I have yet to see that manifest (the class was changed as of writing, so perhaps interest will renew).

What we're left with, then, is a lot of inn content involving underpowered classes, weakcore restrictions, or potential reliance upon crutches. Again, it's only natural that we'd get here eventually, but we're now at the point where a lot of people who mostly enjoy crutchless content with strong/competitive classes just wait for the monthly inn challenge or any balance changes. I don't intend to push the devs to "solve" this issue, as it wouldn't be productive to push out piecemeal balance changes just to engage a small portion of the community; rather, I just think it's an unfortunate coincidence to reach this state of affairs while the game outside of this little corner has been winding down as well. There's also the possibility that I'm wrong in assuming that this has been putting a damper on endgame inn enjoyers, but this is just my two cents about it since I haven't seen too many speak about this occurrence in particular.

BUT, tangent aside, I think that challenges could be better, even if I haven't personally minded this year's inn releases (including YD). I'll echo Bluu's sentiment about seeing more DF-exclusive characters, but I also wouldn't mind getting easier challenges. For example, I think it'd be cool to see a medium difficulty multi-fight, about on par with Akriloth, the Protector, or a bit higher. We don't have too many inn fights with 3+ enemies, and having another one would be helpful since the progression of multi-fights after Akriloth, the Protector, is InD and then CS, both of which are notable difficulty spikes with respect to the multi-fight format. I also think fights that give buffs or beneficial mechanics for people to play around with, have options for who to kill first, and provide consistent pressure (e. g. enrages, revives, threatening phase changes) are good ways to spruce up fights that are too easy on first blush. Leaning into the theme of a board more would also be nice, as I distinctly remember Lost Fables being my favorite board when starting the inn, since it gave us glimpses at characters that were mentioned in passing or past their prime, which was really cool! I understand that having too narrow a theme can be restrictive, so I don't fault some boards for having broader ones, but it'd be nice to get a more focused theme when inspiration provides for it.

quote:

The Book 1 and Book 2 rewrites are great releases in my opinion, but alongside TFS, TheErosionSeeker, and Baron Dante, I feel like we are in the minority of players that look forward to such releases.


Just chipping in real quick at the end to say that while I might not be as enthused about them as Bk. 3 releases, the rewrites are important for the game's longevity. Introducing game mechanics more clearly to new players is a big plus in my eyes (bosses getting rotations also helps engagement on quests) for the Bk. 1 rewrites, and seeing how Bk. 2 pans out after being put back into the oven some more has been a bit nice.



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