The stream was hosted by Andy (Community Manager), Nicole (Community Manager) & Chris (Lead Designer).

It was all on about Dark Agartha, if you don’t want spoilers about it, don’t read on or watch the stream. Otherwise you can rewatch the stream on twitch

You might want to watch this for fun as well with audio on

Dark Agartha Basics

Launched this week

Solo Instance with 5 bosses

Changed Daily

Aimed to be relatively difficult

Way to progress to 4 pip gear

Currently 4 pip glyphs but they intend to add 4 pip talisman as well

It’s a permanent addition to the game, not an event

The enter (after first time ever) costs 7 AP & 15 SP

Uses the scaling difficulty Tech

No plans currently to make a group version

Details

Takes advantage of the Gadget Slot and how it allows players to adapt

Expects players to adapt to each encounter (build, allocation, gadget)

You can buy items at a vendor at the start, pretty strong buffs

Some can only be used before the run and others only during the fights

Buffs include combat buffs, extra 5 minutes, another life, etc.

You can buy and use all buffs

Combinations of Mobs, environments and abilities are random

Some unfair combinations have been made impossible to appear

if you die, bosses recover some health, but no necessarily go back to full health

it is very possible to succeed even if you die 2 or 3 times

Gatekeeper always is the final boss but his abilities vary

It won’t be a normal, explorable zone

AP & SP will not have the caps removed

Costs are intended to give endgame players something to spend them on

No Museum pieces on DA this path

No achievements either, they ran out of time but will add some later

Bosses have a general theme their potential abilities are based on

They are planing to add difficulties beyond E10

History

Dark Agartha was mentioned quite a while ago

Last checkpoint on their old roadmap

Changed quite a bit but always meant as challenging solo experience

Had to wait for the anima allocation system, otherwise it would not have been fair to include a solo experience like this

Some encounters already encourage you to switch the allocation

Answering a question: no one from the CotSG design team worked on Dark Agartha, they are not even on SWL anymore

They considered giving a daily free entry to premium members but it’s not something they are doing for now

Andy did the trailer and a friend, who specialized in trailers, the music

The track coincidentally is call “You can not save this world again”

Art

The Concepts they showed are in this thread: Behold: Dark Artgartha

They few through the area and showed the details

not trying to describe either, for visual content, watch the recording

Lore

There is no Jump-pad because Gaia does not want you to go there

She won’t stop you, but she won’t help you getting there either

What you visit is a unstable timestream & you need to attune yourself to it by spending some of your anima (AP & SP)

The vendor is mostly there for gameplay & not fully founded in lore

You might recognize some items from the agent system mission chains

Purple has a specific, story meaning but they did not go into details

Each day represents a slightly different timeline

Please let me know if I missed something important. Was good to see a stream again!