Materia Spotlight- Mephistopheles Gift

“Mephistopheles is a demon- a worker of Satan- who grants corrupted men with a gift. Mephistopheles is known from his deal with Johann Georg Faust in which he exchanges his soul for unlimited knowledge and other pleasures. In the Afterlife, Mephistopheles grants the Student a more physical gift with a very powerful flame. This flame allows the Student to cast physical, magical and astral cards at a reduced cost but will get hit rather hard if they are attacked.”

Welcome back Students! In this Spotlight we will be looking at another Construct but on the Dark side known as Mephistopheles’ Gift! As you read above, this fire Homunculus takes the idea of trading something valuable for something just as valuable. Like Faust, you’re receiving immediate gratification for your body which may not affect you right away. This was another card where the name came first and the Ability came second.

Mephistopheles’ Gift specifically states that your cards cost 1 less to play. Attacks made against you gain 1A (This includes Magical and Astral attacks). This passive is extremely powerful and has a lot of utility. It is easy for new players to pick up and play multiple cards without worrying about dice fluxing too much. It is difficult to master however because that additional dice hitting you can add up really fast. When designing this card we thought about how powerful it was to be able to cast cards with less dice for ALL pools. So we initially had the enemy roll two dice instead of one. If you didn’t already guess, this overwhelmed your Homunculus and made games extremely one sided so that was changed after quite a few paper prototyping sessions.  

Thanks for reading and if you didn’t know, Visions of Zosimos was Greenlit! This means we will be working extra hard with check out our new Patreon too! We will be offering exclusive content and discounts for donators. We are also working on a physical board game which we will have more details on that soon!

http://visionsofzosimos.net/download.php

https://www.patreon.com/ForeverInteractive

Materia Spotlight- Behemoth

“The great beast Behemoth was described by Job as a great, powerful and gentle beast. His bones are as strong as pieces of brass and are like bars of iron. The Light Realm took the opportunity and retrieved the fallen beasts’ bones and have being using it as Construct Materials.  The Behemoth lives on in the form of the Homunculus and it shows in the way it acts in the battlefield. It’s strong legs propel the Behemoth and the added momentum pushes back any creature that gets in its way.”

Welcome back students! In this Spotlight we are going to look at the Materia Card, Behemoth. If you didn’t know, Construct’s are what determine your Homunculus Movement Speed and Attack Range. This Construct, specifically, is all about moving around the board because of its passive ability. It is similar to Charge in the sense that as you move you gain power but it is unique in the sense that for every two movement, instead of Attack Dice you gain a point of Knockback. So as the Behemoth moves it builds momentum and with a total movement of four it can knock enemies back up to two tiles.

In the last post, we talked about what came first, the Name or the Ability and with the Behemoth I cannot rightfully say what did. However, I do know it’s ability was based on its art and model. Materia Cards did not start with abilities. They only determined the amount of dice your homunculus starts with. With that said, we had the model made and the rhinoceros horn really stood out to us. We wanted to feel like it was creating a stampede or a rabid animal chasing you down. We didn’t want to straight out give it charge (Which may not have existed at the time!) This is why we gave it this knockback ability that is based off movement.

The Behemoth is by far the most offensive Light Earth Construct and Materia overall. It is strange to think of Light Earth as this offensive force but they can pull it off very well and even if you don’t want to get up close and personal you can use this knockback as a way to control the board. The knockback the Behemoth has is based on the direction you are facing making it easy force minions into Glyph radii, Ambush trigger radii and into allied minions, walls or choke points. There is a lot you can do with a direct knockback!

Thanks for reading and we hope to see you this year at GenCon 2016 August 4th through the 7th! If you are new and would like to play the game yourself, click the link below and we will send you an Alpha Key!

http://visionsofzosimos.net/download.php

You Got To Support Your Local Stores!

The Visions of Zosimos development team has recently been hitting the road hard with our Paper Prototying version of our game. We here at Forever Interactive believe that customer engagement is our number one priority as a independent game studio. We have been to a number of local stores and a convention recently so we just wanted to share a some pictures of our most recent trips playing VoZ with some really awesome people!

VoZ @ Johnny Cee Cards

VoZ @ Chimera Hobby Shop

VoZ @ Board Game Barrister

VoZ @ Midwest Gaming Classic 2015

Stay tuned into our social sites for when we will be at a local store near you!

Jorney Onward!

The Forever Interactive Development Team
"Visions of Zosimos"

The VoZ Kickstarter Countdown!

The development team here at Forever Interactive would like to personally thank each and everyone of you who has backing us on our Kickstarter campaign. Whether it was sharing or retweeting a post, or it was actually backing our project, we just want to let you know that we appreciate you for your support!

In case you missed our most recent Kickstarter updates...

• We recently had added a new tier onto our Kickstarter! Our Immortal+ Local level tier grants you and a guest access to our pre-launch dev party!
• Check out the Immortal+ Local Level tier HERE.

• Project Update #14: Quest 2 is still looking for a winner! Want to be the first person to receive a redemption code for the Damned Soul to use as a minion in game? 
• Find out how to win by going HERE.

• To reach 3k on our campaign, we introduced a drawing for all Kickstarter Backers. We broke our 3k mark just yesterday! Three lucky winners were awarded a FREE VoZ Digital Booster Box ($100 value).
• Find out who the winners are by going HERE.

• Want to download some really cool VoZ wallpapers? 
• Click HERE to go to our Project Update #17 of our Kickstarter for the link to download the high quality wallpapers!

• As of today we are currently sitting at 41 backers, and are 90% of the way funded! We couldn't of done it with out the wonderful support of our friends, family, and our players!

Keep spreading the word of VoZ as there is only 7 more days to become a backer and earn some really cool in game exclusive rewards!

Thank you and stay tuned in for more!

The Forever Interactive Development Team

"Visions of Zosimos"

Brand New Players Guide for Kickstarter!

We are proud to announce that we have released our new Kickstarter Edition Players Guide of Visions of Zosimos and that we are 72% of the way funded on Kickstarter! Check out some images from the Player Guide below, or go to the link HERE to download the PDF Player Guide file.

The Inclusion of Victory Points

Visions of Zosimos is clearly a rare breed of video game.  It is the first true MMO CCG and board game. It is also one of the few games that is both a tactics and strategy video game. Tactics, dealing with the how a battle should be fought within a given board and how many minions and wandering monsters they must face.

Strategy, planning out your strategy to achieve certain goals is more long term planning than tactics. With the inclusion of Victory Points, Visions of Zosimos will have a whole new layer of strategy that we haven’t had in the game. Victory Points will ultimately determine the winner of each battle. Victory Points will change depending on the map making players rethink their strategies as well as their tactics. Killing the enemy homunculus is still the main goal but may not always claim victory. With the Victory Point system, players will earn points for defeating wandering monsters. The strength of the monster will determine the amount of points you will earn with the homunculus always being the most. In addition to this, games will have bonus objectives like conquering a boss’ territory after defeating it or collecting objectives on the board itself, such as bits of lore or relics that could be fought over. Be careful with enemy territories though, because bosses may re-spawn! Another thing to keep in mind is that objectives are long term and the points are gained at the end of battle. Victory points are currently under testing, both the points above and other objectives like achieving first blood from killing a minion.

Victory Points allow players to shape decks based around earning certain Victory Points. We also believe that they will create a sense of randomness so games are always new and exciting. Victory Points also create new strategies for team battles. For example, a three vs three match could mean one player goes for collecting lore pieces while the other two go after wandering monsters and lore pieces. Some teams may even try to end the game as soon as possible and go straight for the enemy homunculi.

Special Announcement for those who wish to join us!

For those who are trying to log in to old clients or players who wish to become part of our Open Alpha. The client that is downloaded is out of date due to a recent engine upgrade. It is in the process of being fixed. In the meantime, you may use a generic player client available for download here:

http://www.adrive.com/public/AQ5mFY/VozInstallFiles.zip

Inside are two files. First, run LnchInst.exe to install the Launcher. Then double-click the heal file to begin the client installation. After you login you will need to choose a world (there should only be one choice). Enter the world called "Forever Interactive Beta". The client will likely need to stream the art assets which can take a while. So please bear with us; once you are able to get into a game with that client, future loads will not take nearly as long.

We will keep you posted when there is a new official player client available.

Meet the Void!

You’ve seen our Light Earth realm and Dark Fire realm but you have not seen anything like this yet.  Our latest realm in the works is going to play much differently than our last two decks.  This realm is the Void!

The Void deck has been designed to make the opponent's life very difficult and keep them second guessing the way the use their turns.  The Void deck has a great early game and will attempt to keep the opponent from getting to their late game.  Magical cards like the Plague of Locusts will destroy terrain tiles removing elemental dice and Achilles’ Heel will reduce the opponent's homunculus movement by two for three movement phases.  Our Astral card, Blighted Landscape, will disable a terrain card's elemental dice for two turns and our Infestation Ambush card deals damage to all adjacent tiles.  The Void minions will have new abilities like Consume, which gives players a stat boost upon killing a wandering monster or minion. As you can see from our featured image, the Enchantress minion is one of our less horrific creations.

As I mentioned before, our Void deck has a great early game mainly because the cost of playing strong cards is less than other decks and the Void homunculus has more dice and health than other same tier homunculus.  So what’s the catch?

The Void deck is all about destruction and not about creation.  Thus, the Void deck has no terrain cards meaning they have no elemental dice.  This has been our biggest obstacle and after many prototyping sessions, we believe we have hit a sweet spot in balancing this out.

Onto an unrelated note, the dev team will be hosting a dev play session every Saturday at 8:00pm CST to mingle with all of you Alpha play testers!