Greetings Wizards. Been a while, hasn't it?
A while ago I decided to stop updating Rift Wizard 1 to devote my full energies to Rift Wizard 2.
I did this because I wanted to try some things that would be wildly inappropriate for a patch- things that, in my opinion, have the potential to improve the game quite a bit.
RW2 started as a direct fork of RW1, but unlike in a patch, I had absolute creative freedom to go in any direction I pleased. I tried quite a few things. Some worked, some didn't. Those that worked, well, they are Rift Wizard 2. Its been a blast, and its nearly time to start sharing it with a wider audience.
The most significant new feature in Rift Wizard 2 is equipment. Random drops are a part of most roguelikes. Rift Wizard 1 plays around a bit with random drops in the form of shrines, but mostly emphasizes the non-random SP buyable skills, spells and upgrades. Rift Wizard 2 replaces shrines with equipment. You can hold a staff, wear a robe a hat and boots, and have any number of miscellaneous trinkets active. One article of equipment tends to be less powerful than a shrine, but applies to more than one spell, and can stack with other equipment.
Its much easier to design equipment than it is to design shrines, and thus, RW2 already has more equipment than RW1 had shrines. Equipment adds a flavor of chaos and randomness to the game that RW1 lacked, and gives each run a sense of uniqueness and gravity- permadeath + random drops is a powerful combination.
RW2 also contains many large balance changes. Potions are reduced in quantity, but a free refill is given at the end of each level. Spells can be upgraded only once (though generally with more powerful individual upgrades than they had in RW1). Realms 1-5 only grant 2SP, with realms 10+ granting 4+. Damage redeals no longer bypass resistances. Levels are bigger (well actually, the levels now scale with your monitor resolution, but the main supported size is bigger- 33x33 instead of 28x28). The game ends at level 21 instead of level 25.
One big balance goal of RW2 was to reduce the incentives pushing the player towards picking one 'carry' spell and ignoring everything else. I think the most fun situations in RW are the ones where the player has many viable choices about what to do with their turn, and this is much more common in runs where the player has 5-10 spells than 1-3.
Rift Wizard 2 also contains many new challenges to face. The old hand crafted variant system is replaced with a procedural one, many new enemy wizards are added, and the monster list is in the process of being revised.
Ultimately, Rift Wizard 2 is quite similar in many ways to Rift Wizard 1. Yet it is also quite different. Rift Wizard 2 embraces randomness to a degree that Rift Wizard 1 did not. It has higher variance between runs, meaning winning once is probably easier, but streaking is probably harder. Following guides and forcing builds is much, much harder. But the fundamental game is the same: spend SP to upgrade your wizard and guide said wizard turn by turn through a series of randomly generated levels.
Rift Wizard 2 will enter early access in January, which I expect to last a year, mostly devoted to content creation and balance.
Check out the screenshots and trailer (and follow/wishlist the game!) here.