Hey there Armellians!
If you’re seeing this post, the v2.2 Crossplay Open Beta is now live on your platform!
With Crossplay enabled, you will automatically start seeing players from other platforms populate the new crossplay multiplayer environment on your platform, and vice-versa.
Naturally, if Crossplay is not your thing for some reason, you’ll be able to opt out and just play with others from your platform’s multiplayer environment.
So what is this v2.2 Crossplay Open Beta? And why?
An open beta is often performed when a developer needs to monitor and iterate on a particular release in a live environment. In order to support Crossplay, the new v2.2 update has a major rewrite of our multiplayer architecture, and so the Crossplay Beta will run for as long as we need to ensure it’s stable (a week, a day, two weeks?) and once we’re happy, we’ll call v2.2 official and announce it along with the patch notes.
Who can I play with?
Armello’s new crossplay functionality will enable multiplayer between our Steam, Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo Switch multiplayer communities.
The first console platform that approved our v2.2 Crossplay update was Xbox, and so Steam and Xbox players are now able to play together in the Beta. The moment v2.2 passes the certification process for Nintendo and PlayStation, those platforms will join the crossplay beta. If you’re here from the Crossplay Beta newsfeed item on Nintendo or PlayStation, well, that means they’re already live!
v2.2 and Crossplay multiplayer will not be coming to mobile.
Cool! What else is in v2.2?
As just mentioned, the full patch notes for v2.2 will be released with our final stabilisation patch at the Crossplay Beta’s end, but we can give you the headlines:
- Crossplay between Steam and all console platforms.
- New, improved multiplayer flow.
- Improved reconnect feature.
- Support for Steam Deck. (Armello is amazing on Steam Deck!)
- Community localisation improvements.
- A multitude of quality of life improvements.
- Numerous bug fixes, major and minor.
- You can also find major known issues listed below.
And for console players, yes; this does mean all console platforms have been updated to v2.2, bringing them into parity with Steam. And you guessed it; The Dragon Clan DLC will arrive on console too!
(If you can’t see The Dragon Clan DLC yet, it may just need some more time to populate on the store.)
That’s it!
For those of you who've been with us for some time, thanks again for your patience over the past couple years. I can't express how much those of you who have extended your understanding and support have made a difference to our team and our drive to get this update out. We’re so happy to get you all playing together - it’s been over a year in the making on our end.
See you in Armello!
<3 Trent & the LoG Crew
Other Stuff
Why has this update taken so long?
After five years of content and feature-focused updates, when we reviewed all of the community requests and asked ourselves what has the best chance of ensuring Armello’s future for our community, it wasn’t more cards, clans or content, it was… ensuring the game is stable and joyful to play, whilst connecting you all to as many players as possible.
Additionally, for many, many years (in fact all of Armello's life), Steam has been Armello's lead platform (due to its agility for smaller dev teams) and as a result there are hundreds of thousands of console players that have always had to wait to receive updates long after Steam. For the last few years, they have been waiting far, far too long for an update. It was time for us to turn our attention to our console players again, bringing all console platforms up to parity with Steam - consoles have been on v1.8(!) for well over three years now.
So, this was always going to be The Crossplay & QoL Update that finally brings consoles in line with Steam.
For a team of our size with two brand new games in the building that’s already a lot of work, but honestly, the boring and tragic truth here is that with a global pandemic and a tonne of curveballs aimed directly at Armello’s development that were out of our control, this update has taken over a year longer than we’d hoped. For real, there were times we thought we'd have to just cancel the update, but we pushed on.
Still, we do wish we’d gotten v2.2 (and the console updates!) out much, much sooner. There’s no one more frustrated at how long this has taken than us, and we do understand what it’s like to wait for a game you love to address issues you experience. So on behalf of all of us at LoG, we thank you for your patience and understanding!
What about mobile?!
Sorry, mobile pals! v2.2 (inc. crossplay multiplayer and The Dragon Clan DLC) will not be coming to mobile platforms. This is just for Steam, Xbox, Playstation and Nintendo Switch.
As previously announced, Armello on mobile only just makes enough dosh to keep the servers switched on, so active development and support of mobile platforms ceased back in 2019. We know there's a small dedicated community keeping it alive though, so we'll do our best to keep those lights on for as long as we can.
If you're still reading, thanks again for all your support. We appreciate you. <3