Season 1: Harvest Festival

We are right on the precipice of the new Season, so we wanted to give you a heads up about the changes that are coming. We are moving our release target from late August to mid September.

Season 1 — what is it?

⏱️ Season duration

• 50 days / ~2 months (~10 days of off-season)

📅 Season 1 start

• 15th of September is our target
• The 1.0 update will come out before this and the season will be remotely activated.

🌾 Season 1 theme

• Harvest Festival

🎟️ Season Pass

• Free reward track + paid Gold Pass reward track
• Gold Pass is priced $14.99
• Gold Pass will unlock the new hero immediately when bought
• All the content of the free and gold track will be revealed later
• You progress the track by winning ranked fights, which earns you Season Points
• Each day will give you a 20 season point bonus pool to make the first runs per day more valuable

😸 New hero connected to the season

• Pepper the Purrisian Chef
• Pepper can only be unlocked through the Gold Pass during Season 1
• Will be purchasable like other heroes when Season 1 ends

🔧 Season Mechanic — Boons

• Powers acquired during a run in classic rogue-like manner
• Choose between three random Boons when entering the shop on rounds 3, 7, and 11
• 20 different Boons to be discovered and upgraded over the course of the season
• Boons are only active this season and will be deactivated at the end of the season
• The Boons are connected to seasonal challenges
• Boons and their upgrades are entirely free to play and for everyone to enjoy

🧑‍🍳 Season Challenges

• A series of special quests that unlock as the season progresses
• One page of challenges will unlock each week for the first five weeks
• Complete these challenges to earn rewards and upgrade your Boons

🎖️ Ranked changes

• Same ranks as now ()
• Each rank now spans 500 rating points
• The points you earn at different ranks are tuned to allow faster climbing
• You can no longer fall back down into a lower rank during a season
• New rewards for reaching each rank each season with each hero

🚀 Rank head start

• Each season will reset all hero ranks.
• To not completely crowd Bronze, and in lieu of doing placement matches, we will give each hero a head start based on the rank they achieved in the previous season.
• Rank head starts per hero (previous rank → new rank):
  • Mythic → Sapphire
  • Legendary → Ruby
  • Epic → Ruby
  • Heroic → Emerald
  • Diamond → Emerald
  • Sapphire → Gold
  • Ruby → Gold
  • Emerald → Silver
  • Gold → Silver
• For Season 1 this will happen in the pre-season update leading up to the start date
• Each season will award a Badge for the highest rank you achieved in that season. This badge is only achievable in this manner.
• Preseason has a classy Beta badge based on your highest rank.

🏆 End-of-run rewards — Victory Chests and Coins

• The chests earned at the end of each run will scale in a new way.
• Chest content now scales with each win rather than the fixed increments at 5, 10, 15 wins.
• The value will now also scale with current rank and player level in addition to area progress.
• The coin reward at the end of a run will also scale with rank, player level, and areas.

🌟 New types of Chests: Enchanted Chests and Coin Chests

• Coin Chests will only contain coins and will scale with your progress
• Enchanted Chests will scale on progress as well and have 4 chances to upgrade when opening
• Some Enchanted Chests will have guaranteed upgrades

Follow-up questions

We asked our MVPs in Discord about concerns about seasons and the future of Backpack Brawl, so here are some rapid-fire follow-up questions.

What about story mode / campaign?

Our intention is to introduce Story mode as an alternative play mode to seasonal ranked play. It is not being worked on right now other than brainstorming, as seasons have taken priority first. We will not remove Unranked for now, until a fitting replacement has been found.

What about 1v1, 2v2, synchronous multiplayer, co-op play, friends, guilds or “other game modes”?

We are very interested in adding more social aspects to the game, and will pursue this further after 1.0 goes live. There are many both technical and design hurdles to doing synchronous PvP, so we have not wanted to dive deep into it yet. We have a working prototype of adding friends, but we would like to add a purpose to it before we add it to the live game.

What about leaderboards?

Leaderboards have been scrapped for seasons. There are various reasons for this, but one of the reasons is that it would be a lightning rod for cheaters, profanity-dodgers, and other unfortunates. We don’t want to spend all our time moderating the leaderboards rather than further developing the game, and we feel that if we made leaderboards we would take the game in a more directly competitive direction, which is not the direction we want to go.

What about balance updates?

We would like to make smaller, more targeted balance updates than we have in the past. We are not “locking” balance throughout a season, and intend to do balance updates as needed, between seasons. We will not commit to how often, but “as needed”.

What about feature updates?

We will not do major feature changes mid-season, but we may do entirely new features mid-season. We mostly plan to do major changes between seasons.

How often will you release new heroes?

We intend to have a regular release with each season, at least for the time being, and possibly do additional heroes mid-season from a future season. This means at least a new hero every 2 months.

Will there be more cosmetics?

We have established 2 skins per hero path, and with this season there will also be a skin for the new hero as part of the Gold Pass. This skin will not be available (at least for a while) through other means. We are looking into doing direct skin sales, or skin bundles of some kind as well, but nothing has been finalized yet. There will be more cosmetics too later.

Will you release more items from time to time?

Likely yes. We are also wanting to add items more as part of the player progression, instead of stopping at area 11 as we do now, then add more to area 12+. We may carefully move existing items to unlock later as well, but it’s a little tricky to mess with.

Will matchmaking go down the drain with every rank mixing together?

Matchmaking logic is not changing. The new rating point gains and ratcheted ranks should improve the experience already. We are aware of an oversaturation of Ronans , and we will address this as we move forward.

What happens to the Diamond-unlocked Relics if ranks are reset?

Uniques and Relics you have gained through ranks are unlocked forever. The reward is replaced with something else in following seasons.

How will offline play work? Can it be potentially abused?

Offline play will still work as it does now. You will need to be online for the season to activate, but after that you can play offline. We generally recommend you go online regularly to make sure you get the correct settings from our servers, but we want to maintain offline functionality, as players should be allowed to go on an airplane and play, or through tunnels, or just have a poor connection. Always-online gameplay is not something we like — even if it makes things less abusable.

How can we as players help to detect and prevent cheating?

Report suspicious opponents from the fight screen or match history screen, or join our Discord and report it in there.

What about the Grind?

The ranked grind should be significantly reduced from the “forever numbers” that we had preseason, so Mythic is achievable in the 2-month period. It requires effort, and if you want to get multiple heroes into Mythic it requires a lot of effort, but we expect big things from some of you. If anyone manages to Mythic all 12 heroes, we will have to make some sort of big reward for the community.

Are events going to be somehow changed to be more appealing?

We have neglected events, apart from Flappy Bombus, since seasons have taken all our design focus. We do want to improve events. We’re not quite satisfied with where they are now, and it’s clear from the player analytics that only a fraction of players engage with them as well.

We would like events to be “distractions” from the main game of Backpack Brawl, and we have a lot of events which are just “the same game with a small change”. We would like to play around with more drastic departures from Brawl, but we have not yet dedicated the design time needed to it.

Any further questions?

Join us on Discord and ask away — we’ll answer as best we can.