Thanks so much for playing Arkheron during Steam Next Fest! Our team had a blast seeing all the new item combinations you came up with, and all the hectic Beacon fights you conquered! This playtest gave us a huge amount of insight, and we want to share what we learned and what’s coming next. 

The Fun Stuff
More than any previous test, we saw players really dig into Arkheron’s depth. Players were theorycrafting builds, breaking down item interactions and sharing discoveries with each other across the community.

We saw: 

• Detailed discussions around build synergies and item trade-offs

• Players iterating on strategies after tough beacon fights. 

• Early signs of a competitive meta beginning to form.
  

Seeing people engage with gameplay in this way is incredibly motivating for our team. The next step for Arkheron is unlocking deeper competitive play and progression, which we’ll begin exploring with Ranked during our upcoming closed beta. 

What Needs Work 

Next Fest also helped us clearly identify where Arkheron needs improvement. 

The biggest area is performance. We knew going in that we had some work to do on optimization. You can read more about our optimization goals in this post. This test gave us much clearer data across a wide range of PCs and setups. The information will directly guide our optimization work going forward.

Performance issues were sometimes compounded by crashes, disconnects or high ping. In a fast-paced game with a steep learning curve, technical issues can make learning and improving much harder. Reducing these problems across the board is a big priority for us. 

The new player experience can be challenging. There’s a lot to learn and it’s hard to learn it realtime in fast combat. To be clear, we're not looking to sacrifice or water down what makes Arkheron fun at a high skill level, but we do want to figure out how to make the new player experience more approachable. This was our first playtest with a tutorial in place, and so we’ve got some good insights on how we can improve this alongside other things we can try.

We also received consistent feedback around hit clarity and UI. At times, it’s unclear whether hits are landing or why they miss. Players have also asked for clearer HUD information about items to support faster decision-making during combat. 

We are digging deeper to get a very specific list of where players are experiencing these issues. If you have thoughts on these topics, we’d really appreciate them in the dedicated Discord threads here and here. 

Beyond this, we received a wide range of feedback covering balance, modes, queuing, matchmaking and more. We're reviewing all of it, even if it’s not called out directly in this post. 

The Road Ahead

This week, our team will regroup to assess everything we learned from Next Fest and lock in our plans for Closed Beta. We will share more details soon about what to expect next.

In the meantime, if you want to sign up for Closed Beta, go to our steam page and click ‘Request Access’. If you already have a key from our Alpha Playtest weekends, you won’t need another one.  

Keep an eye out for more updates on our website, steam announcements, and Discord.