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Creatures of Aether Patch Notes [1.5.3.0] – Slade Makes Landfall!

Patch 1.5.3.0 adds a completely new Rival from our upcoming Dungeons of Aether roguelite – Slade! His penchant for stealing led him from the Polekai Islands to a swashbuckling pirate life.

When Slade is played, you are able to take any creature on the field in your control and swap it out with a card in your hand. This ability can even capture enemy Rivals, allowing you to use their abilities against your opponent!

Slade makes landfall with his Thief’s Gambit ability in our newest Rivals Pass, available now!

Slade’s ability opens up a lot of unique interactions, let’s look at some specific scenarios involving Thief’s Gambit:

Forsburn:

  • The Slade player still cannot hide vanillas inside smoke.
  •  The Slade player can move Forsburn (if they own him).
  •  If the Forsburn player takes Forsburn back, they can still move Forsburn.
  •  If the Slade player retakes Forsburn, they’ll still be able to move him.

Fleet:

  • Once stolen, Fleet regains all of her pips (usable by the Slade player).

Elliana:

  • Elliana’s overheat depends on the number of cards the player has, so by this logic she is not reset but has an overheat equal to the number of cards played.

Slade:

  • A Slade cannot steal another Slade.

Bug Fixes:

  • Fixed a bug where some sound effects ignore the sound settings.
  • Fixed a bug where AI Forsburn would softlock the game.
  • Added a scroll functionality to the rival selection view.

Download Creatures of Aether on iOS and Android.

If you haven’t already please wishlist the game on Steam! It helps a lot with Steam placement on launch day. The more people that wishlist the more new players there will be!

Community Tournament Organizer Spotlight: Pride

Pride is one of several TOs that joined the community over the last year, bringing the wildly competitive PX series to North America. Pride’s tournaments, PX East and PX West, run every Friday with a stream utilizing Rivals Spectator Mode and a special East Vs West battle of champions to finish the night. We recently reached out to Pride to learn more about him and his background to give this amazing community member a well-deserved spotlight.

 

How did you first hear about Rivals and get into the scene as a competitor?

Pride: I heard about the game way back when it went into Early Access. My main competitive focus at the time was Melee, but I had a lot of fun playing Rivals casually with my roommates when it first came out. Back then, I mostly played Maypul because her dash attack was broken.

Later on I switched to Smash Ultimate. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I grew dissatisfied with Smash’s poor online experience and started to explore other titles. I ended up rediscovering Rivals, and was really impressed with all the improvements and new content since I’d last played it. I remember picking Elliana and thinking her hover mechanic was super cool. And the overall feel and balance of the game just felt really good. A week later I ran a tournament, and the rest is history. These days, I mostly play Ori because their dash attack is broken.

How long have you been running events? How did you get started and what motivated you to get active in the community?

Pride: When I picked up Rivals again last April, I wanted to compete. I didn’t really know much about the broader North American Rivals community back then – really all I knew were a handful of Ultimate and PM players in my region (Seattle) who also played Rivals. And our scene didn’t really have any kind of tournament. So I got 8 of us together and ran a bracket on my stream. That was PX Rivals #0. We had a blast, it was the closest I’d felt to attending a local since quarantine began.

So I ran it again next week. The week after, some Oregon players asked to join, and about a month later we added California. Back then, there weren’t a lot of other West Coast tourneys besides for WCS. So it was important to me to keep pushing PX Rivals, as a community hub and as a place for WC players to showcase their skills.

We’ve continued to run the event every week since. The scope has grown to a double-header event featuring both the East and West halves of North America. Every week I get to watch top players duke it out live while sharing the mic with some of my favorite people. I love running the series, it has and continues to introduce me to lots of awesome people in the scene.

 

There are very few TOs that stream tournaments in Spectator mode, what about this format entices you to stream this way?

Pride: I love watching live tournaments. Melee Top 8 streams always used to get my adrenaline pumping and fuel my passion for competing. I also love the community aspect of locals, which I didn’t want to lose in the age of COVID. So it’s always been important to me to keep PX Rivals a live experience. I want the event to capture as much of that magic as possible.

The series began months before Definitive Edition was released, so we didn’t have spectator mode at first. We made do with Steam Broadcast and grew our scene around that. Steam Broadcast and spectator mode haven’t always been the most popular decisions, but I believe they’ve gone a long way toward defining the atmosphere at PX.

People sometimes ask me why watching an event live is different from watching a replay without spoiling yourself. For me personally, there’s more than simply the suspense of not knowing what’s gonna happen. There’s also knowing that every single other person in the audience with you is experiencing that same suspense. There’s knowing that we’re all going to find out what happens at the same time. And I love how when everyone’s reactions are in sync, they amplify each other.

 

You have a pretty interesting format, running two region-locked (PX East and PX West) events. Why did you go this route instead of having one big North American event like other TOs run?

Pride: So, I can give my retroactive justifications for why I think it’s a good format. Splitting North America in half prevents anyone from having to play egregious cross-continent connections in tournament. It also mitigates issues introduced by time zone differences – full-NA events typically have to compromise between starting too early for West Coast and too late for East Coast.

But really, the reasons are historical. PX Rivals did not begin as a North American event but rather as a tiny Seattle-based local that grew bigger over time. Restricting long-distance connections was always a priority for the event. By PX Rivals #31, we were already starting to really push the boundary of what that meant, as our “West Coast” event now spanned from Hawaii to the Rockies. I really didn’t want to increase the region size beyond that.

Around that time, we were starting to get East Coast players in chat expressing interest in participating themselves. So I started to think, if I ran an EC event before our standard WC event, maybe EC people would wanna stick around and check out our top WC players. And maybe we’ll get WC folks tuning in for EC, and maybe this can help bring the overall community together more. So the next week we tried out the double-header format, and we’ve been running it that way ever since.

 

With local tournaments slowly coming back in some capacity, do you intend to host any LAN tournaments, or do you think you will stick to strictly online?

Pride: Offline events interest me, but the logistics are more complicated. Finding a venue and securing enough setups can be difficult. I’ll say that it’s not out of the question, but offline events are not my priority in the near future. Regardless of whether I host any LAN events, I definitely intend to keep running PX Rivals and want to push it as far as I can.

What are your interests outside of the gaming community?

Pride: My professional background is in artificial intelligence research. Over the last ten years I’ve been involved in a number of fields including audio analysis, gesture recognition, and game AI. Most recently I worked on chatbots and programming language analysis at Microsoft Research. AI is super cool, and I’m especially interested in AIs that reason with programmatic constructs, a young and challenging field.

I’m also passionate about making music. Folks who regularly tune into our events are probably familiar with the PX Rivals Theme. I play the bass and a number of other instruments, and my music tends to be influenced by rock and trip hop. I’ve been streaming live jam sessions lately and I’m hoping to continue doing that more!

 

What’s the thing you’re looking forward to most this Summer (Rivals or otherwise)?

Pride: In terms of Rivals, I can’t wait for rollback. Even with offline events returning, online is still going to be incredibly important, especially to those with small local scenes. Rollback is going to be a huge step for Rivals.

Outside of Rivals, I’m excited to finally see some live music again! I’m sure a lot of exciting acts will visit Seattle.

 

Is there anything you would like to say to the Rivals community reading this feature?

Pride: PX Rivals happens every Friday! Come compete, watch, commentate. Join our Discord for more information.

Big shoutouts to LilFox15, Tricki3, and everyone else who helps the series run smoothly.

Creatures of Aether Patch Notes [1.5.2.0] – Summer is Here!

June is here and our mid-month patch contains fun new features, balance changes, and gameplay improvements! This patch focuses on improving our daily reward system and adds two new card skin bundles for a limited time. Let’s dive in:

Summer Skins

Ranno and Elliana have brand new Summer skins available for a limited time in the Shop!

Daily Quests

Earn more rewards through special in-game challenges!

Daily quests have been added to the game in place of the daily calendar:

  • Each Quest slot gives 3 quests each day for that category.
  • Category 1: Win a match on ladder with a random legendary.
  • Category 2: Get 50 flips in any mode.
  • Category 3: Play a X amount of cards with an ability.
  • Daily Quests cycle in a predetermined order.
  • Every consecutive quest after the first give 1/2 the rewards of the last.

Ability Changes

  • War Drums: Grants up to 2 non-ability creatures, when summoned, +3 (does not stack with other drums).

Drums lacked consistency and shared a similar strategy to Avatar decks. This change should spice things up while adding some additional counterplay. Now players who don’t run drums might think about sneaking more vanilla cards into their decks to share the benefit.

Elliana

In case you missed it: our newest Rival, Elliana, released via Rivals Pass earlier this month. The Aerial Arsenal is just the second Rival to bring multiple abilities to the field, except with her, you are in complete control of when to they unleash.

Missile barrage strikes from a distance! This ability triggers if Elliana is played before she overheats.

When Elliana Overheats, she ejects from her mech and lands in any open board space. Use this late game ability for devastating multi-flips!

Improvements

  • Added a legendary introduction screen for Wrastor.
  • Removed the Daily calendar.
  • Added more SFX.
  • Added 4 new emotes.

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed a bug where Absa wouldn’t deactivate Master Cai’s poison with her ability.
  • Fixed a bug that caused Shifter card to not interact properly with Ranno’s Bubble Flip.
  • Fixed a bug where you couldn’t properly scroll down the upcoming cards list if you were missing too many cards.
  • Fixed a bug where some cards wouldn’t get affection proportionate to their captures.

Community Commentator Spotlight: GPik

GPik is one of the most prolific commentators in the Rivals community, capable of holding down the mic at any event imaginable. GPik is widely known for his uncanny combination of professionalism and game knowledge of any event he works. We recently reached out to GPik to learn more about him and his background to give this amazing community member a well-deserved spotlight.

How did you first hear about Rivals and get into the scene as a competitor?

GPik: I had heard about Rivals across multiple Smash 4 events and even watched some of it at CEO Dreamland, but it wasn’t until the Ranno reveal at Smashcon 2017 that I decided to buy it. I was trying out the cast against CPUs, landed Absa uptilt -> upair and thought “oh, somebody at my level can kill in this game, cool” and really got into it.

It didn’t take much at all past that to enter Rivals brackets; there was often one at the Smash 4 majors I was attending anyway (like GTX 2017 or Genesis 5), and I just really wanted to play the game offline, bracket or not.

How long have you been doing commentary? How did you get started and what eventually attracted you to honing your craft for Rivals?

GPik: I stumbled into commentary back in 2015, at some local Smash 4 weeklies. It was originally something to do after I got eliminated from bracket, and plus one of the venues only ran the AC in the room with the stream setup so it was just more comfortable to commentate than play friendlies. Commentating for the people who eliminated me in bracket also shaped a lot of my commentary style: why were these players making further than me every week? If you were to pull up my earliest commentary so much of it is me doing analysis by taking note of what different players were doing that were working for them. The local community also really supported my commentary, and encouraged me to apply for NorCal regional events in 2016, and then to majors in 2017. I wouldn’t be commentating today without the support of the Sacramento Smash scene.

When I started following Rivals in 2017, the first sets I watched with commentary were Shine and GTX 2017 Top 8. Dan and Etalus’ commentary is fun and I still love that the devs commentate their own game. However, at the time I remember wanting to hear commentary with slightly more analysis focus, not necessarily in-depth but enough that a total beginner like me could walk away with a little bit of insight. I was curious if I could try to apply something like my style to a game that was much faster paced than Smash 4. Also, Rivals is just a super fun game and I feel like I could talk enthusiastically about it for hours. That also helps.

What has been your favorite event to commentate and why?

GPik: It’s so hard to give a single answer for this. Smash N Splash 4 is special for me since it was the first Top 8 I got to commentate for Rivals and also had some memorable moments like Cake stealing Penguin’s mints, or one of the most one sided sets I’ve ever commentated with Penguin vs Bagel. I’ll always remember First Impact for Adi’s insane run. Heatwave 2 and 3 have so much passion put into them by the entire AZ community that makes it a treat to attend and it’s impossible to not feel hype when commentating there. The Season Finales are fun to commentate because so many sets feel like the conclusion to a different storyline that’s been building for at least a year.

In this online era I will give an honorable mention to MSB’s Mystery Invitational last year. Watching a stacked pool of players compete in such a ridiculous format was hilarious, and I still hope to see something like it again in the future.

Do you have a favorite matchup (player or character) that you look forward to commentating at events?

GPik: I’m lucky that I can honestly say that there’s something I like about every top player’s style in Rivals. Right now, I think the player matchup story-line I’m most invested in is Kusi vs Penguin. Kusi put in an insane amount of work last year, and in the process was able to take at least a set off of almost every top player but Penguin. Given what we’ve seen of Kusi’s work ethic, I’m so interested to see what improvements he’ll make to close this last gap.

How much time do you spend researching recent results and player stats before big events?

GPik: For most majors I spend a couple hours or so the evening before traveling going through the results of the previous one, taking notes of placements, who beat who, and re-watching matchups that I anticipate happening again that either I don’t remember clearly or that played out much differently than I would’ve expected. For the Season Finales, it’s pretty much every evening in a week, this time counting up the total RCS set counts for the season so I know who’s favored going into every set, reviewing the best performances of the top seeds, and also spending time deciding how I want to quickly introduce a fresh audience to them, including a summary of their season and what I think makes their play-style stand out compared to the rest of the field.

LightWalk (2016) – GPik’s 2D Puzzle Platformer

What are your interests outside of the Rivals and Smash communities?

GPik: Game design, especially level design! Years ago a couple friends and I made a puzzle platformer while in college called LightWalk that we released on Steam, and since then I’ve steadily gotten a larger itch to make something again. So this year I’ve been spending a lot of time making a new puzzle game in GMS2, and it’s so satisfying to build a puzzle that stumps players with as few moving parts as possible. I also spend entirely too much time listening to video essays on YouTube.

How can event organizers best reach out to you for commentary bookings?

GPik: My Twitter is @GPikSmash, and is usually the best way to reach me. Feel free to ping me to check DMs with an @, since Twitter doesn’t give notifications for DM requests, so they can sometimes slip through the cracks.

Rivals of Aether – 2.0.7.5 Patch Notes

Summer is around the corner and we are excited to rollout some nice quality of life and UI improvements that affect both local and online modes.

  • The Random Stage rule will now only pick a stage once, not repeating until every stage has been played at least once. (Once that happens, every stage can be picked again.)
  • You can now use Up and Down on the milestones screen to scale the progress bars up and down.
  • The match timer is now always centered based on the total width of the timer, instead of just on the colon.
  • The foreground water in Merchant Port and Frozen Fortress have been made slightly more transparent.
  • The Team Attack rule now defaults to being on.
  • Display options have now been split into two menus: Display and Graphics.
  • You now have the option to hide the top bar on the HUD under Display options.
  • The HUD top bars now display the players’ steam names instead of their profile tags.
  • Air Armada’s background now uses a texture instead of a hard-coded color.

  • Zetterburn’s NSPECIAL now overrides the double jump aerial buffer, meaning you can buffer a doublejump out of it easier.

  • Fixed declining a casual mode rematch booting you back to the online menu.
  • Fixed workshop mode forcing itself on after every match in local VS and local Tournament modes.
  • Fixed Forsburn’s clone destroying other players’ articles on death.
  • Fixed online CSS screens with Abyss mode enabled not playing the correct music.
  • Fixed online profiles not saving color palettes (for real this time).