"It's been a difficult journey," Moonlighter 2 co-director Victor Ribera tells me ahead of his roguelike sequel's early access release this week. It's also been a long journey, one split into multiple stages, but that speaks to Digital Sun Games' deep connection with its players.
Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault might have only just launched into early access, but its release is actually the third opportunity the devs have handed out to allow die-hard fans to play. A Steam Next Fest demo in the summer gave way to playtests in the Fall, and Digital Sun has been tweaking the game constantly in order to ensure it hits.
On the Radar with Moonlighter 2: The Endless Vault: Delving beyond the early access launch of this roguelike RPG with exclusive developer access.
While Ribera says the journey to launch has been difficult, he says the team is "feeling really great" as it approaches launch. This close to release, he says "we are actually now playing the game a lot. We have the time right now to actually polish and feel what the players are going to feel. Us being able to have fun with a game that we have spent so much time in, where we know so much of the game, where we can still have fun, is really great, because we think the players will feel those decisions much more than us."
The focus on the players and their feedback is a theme that runs through our entire conversation. It's also one that's likely to be felt keenly by anyone who's stuck close to the game over the past six months - in my Moonlighter 2 review, I personally didn't resonate with all the changes that had been made since the demo in the summer, but Ribera makes it clear that those changes have come in based on wider audience feedback.
"We know that the players are the ones that are actually enjoying the game," he says, "so we want the game to be the best we can do. We know that the team shouldn't be the only ones that like the game." The demo and subsequent playtests, he explains, led Digital Sun to realize "a lot of things" that needed changing. The first iteration of its store management sections, for instance, "was not what the players wanted." And while the developers believed they'd created a solid system, the reality for Ribera was that they hadn't, "because the players didn't like it."
Team players
The changes that have hit Moonlighter 2 in just the past few months are so substantial that Ribera says coming up with solutions for the issues that players had highlighted was "exhausting." Those difficulties were exacerbated by the fact that the team knows that "there's no perfect solution." The biggest overhaul came to the interplay between value and rarity - loot recovered on dungeon expeditions used to have a fixed price that could be augmented with an inventory management minigame. But players wanted more control over pricing, so that fixed cost was replaced with a multiplicative rarity system
The changes appear to have gone over well, with positive results in both internal and external playtests. But beyond simply making players happy, it also benefited the devs, who "discovered a lot of systems that we weren't using" as a result of the tweaks. Reminding players of the way things have changed has helped make the interplay between the three pillars that make up Moonlighter 2's core gameplay loop "easier to understand," which should mean that ongoing development through early access gets a little easier too.
But while its player-first philosophy ensures its future looks bright, Digital Sun is also happily looking backwards. Asked what drew the team back to Moonlighter for a sequel in spite of the breadth of its other games, Ribera says that the original "was pretty fantastic in its fantasy," but the team thought it could do better. The devs were keen to deliver more of the roguelike fantasy, to ensure a new take on Moonlighter was content driven and could be expanded "to make the players play over and over again." Eventually, that focus is what brought Ribera to the confident spot he sits in ahead of early access. "We thought it was a good idea, we prototyped it, and it was fun. As we did more and more content, as we polished all the systems, we realized this was the way."
