Soulfiend. The name alone brings nightmares to mind, which is what some of our favorite Veil Demons will be attempting to create this weekend as we officially welcome Soulfiend to the VD roster. If you're ready to possess and empower your minions with the souls you've collected from across the realms, then it's your turn to shine.

Infuse your soul with that of any minion to possess and empower them unlike any other Veil Demon class. The longer you control them, the more powerful they become. Want to summon a Grael Heart to make one of your allies immune to damage? Want to possess an ally and give it instant stealth? All of those questions are now answers with the Soulfiend, who comes with a host of new spells to really take control and empower your army of demons.




With that out of the way, let's talk about the next Technical Alpha test session, which includes our longest test yet - 8 straight hours! We're going to test only on Friday and Saturday this week, and we've heard the requests from our West Coast testers who have been asking us to go later into the evening. As a general reminder, we have not yet started to invite our friends from outside of North America at this time. Once we feel like our North American servers are in a good place, we'll place some in other regions and extend our hours more in those tests, as well as invite in those who have been eagerly waiting since our reveal at Gamescom. For full timing, see below:

• Friday Nov. 16th: 3PM - 7PM Central (1 - 5 PM Pacific)
• Saturday Nov 17th: 3PM - 11PM Central (1 - 9 PM Pacific)

We're excited to see the various cheers and jeers that will undoubtedly occur with the addition of the Soulfiend to Breach, and please be sure to provide us your feedback either in the forums or on our Discord channel.

Updates & Fixes:

• Added Soulfiend Veil Demon Class.
• Temporarily replacing some of the stronger enemy NPC's within Kiev while we correct some issues with the default enemy NPC's.
• Corrected an issue with the Arcane Mender tutorial where it asked you to revive with an Ultimate. As the Ultimate no longer revives, this was removed.
• Fixed the tooltip for Arcane Mender's "Greater Heal" spell.
• Fixed an issue where during the Leshei fight, if a player Veil Demon disconnects while possessing Leshei, upon reconnecting the player may have been underneath the floor unable to move.
• Fixed an issue in Tokyo Sector 4 where players could potentially get stuck inside the stairs.

Known Issues:

• If the Necromancer tries to summon Minions on the ground floor of the Ra boss fight, they will not spawn. However, if you utilize any raised platform in the boss room, they will spawn.
• We've observed a small chance where if a Veil Demon disconnects mid-match, they could clip through walls.
• Invert Mouse / Invert Controller selection may not work.
• Controller support is available, but the "F" command may still be shown for "Interact" - Please use "D-Pad Right" if you see "F".
• There is no scrollbar in the Social Menu ("O").

Quick note: We have a Technical Alpha test TODAY (Friday Nov. 9th) from 3-5 PM Central

----

The moment you’ve all been waiting for has arrived, the first official set of Breach Patch Notes!

Thank you all for participating in the Technical Alpha tests so far. Your feedback on the forums, discussions on Discord, and data we’ve collected from the tests have been a tremendous help towards our continued development of Breach. Together we are defining a new hybrid genre of gameplay, and we are so grateful to have you as part of this growing community.

For this week, we’re rolling out a new build of Breach, which should be quite evident from our awesome new loading screens. In this build you’ll see some changes that are aimed at both smoothing out the experience for new players, while keeping it challenging for seasoned players. Among them is a slight change in how the revive mechanic works, where Heroes will now automatically consume a health potion (if they have one) after being revived.

We’ve also started making balance adjustments to some spells, equipment, gems (now with differentiating icons) and NPC stats in this build, with more on the way as we continue our path through Technical Alpha. You’ll see additional changes as we roll out some more balance adjustments over the next couple of weeks, but a few weeks from now we’ll be introducing a suite of new equipment and Veil Demon spell synergies that reward difficult to pull off combos with bonus damage output. One other very noticeable change is that during the Class Selection phase, the Veil Demon will now choose their core class after they choose their first Elite and two heroes have been chosen.

Finally, this build has a bunch of bug fixes, due in large part to all of you reporting your crashes (THANK YOU!) and sending us detailed reports about issues you've run across when in and out of a match.

Here's more specific details for those that like bullet points:

• New loading screens
• Added more emotes
• Added more sprays
• Added new outfits and outfit variations
• Updates to Gems
• Balance pass
• New icons
• When a downed player is revived, one of their remaining health potions will be used.
• Arcane Mender's Ultimate no longer revives downed players.

Boss Fight Updates

• Updated combat balance for Leishi fight
• Fixed issues with Leishi walls not displaying correctly
• Updated UI for Oni Maelstrom ability (The red circle appears later)

Also, here's a list of known issues currently:

• Chronoseer can't use spells
• The tooltip for Greater Heal doesn't mention that you can heal yourself, but you can by using Alt. (Greater Heal no longer revives)
• Invisible to Veil Demon talent incorrect says that you can see invisible characters if you're a Veil Demon and you possess a creature
• We've made an adjustment to the Level 4 Hero Talent that allows a Mage to be invisible to the Veil Demon while they are not possessing a creature. When working properly, every 8s the Mage will go invisible as long as they are not using basic attack or spells, but can still be seen by a VD if the VD has possessed a creature.  Using either of those while invisible will remove the effect. However, there is a current bug where a VD can't actually see the Mage when they have possessed a creature. This will be corrected in a future build, apologies to all the VD's in advance for your sudden blindness.

Instead of us writing a few paragraphs, let’s focus on the best parts of our next Technical Alpha testing period:

• Pre-Orders for Breach are available now!
• You can now stream / record Breach during the testing period!
• We’ve doubled each testing session length!
• We’re adding the Engineer as a new playable class!
• All testers get 1,500 Sparks to get the Engineer, or buy a sweet hat!
• You can still enter for a chance to win the custom Breach Origin PC!
• Halloween is over :(

Let’s also cover the specific test dates / times for the next three days:

• Friday, Nov. 2nd @ 3–7 PM Central Time (1–5 PM Pacific)
• Saturday, Nov. 3rd @ 6–10 PM Central Time (4–8 PM Pacific)
• Sunday, Nov. 4th @ 3–7 PM Central Time (1–5 PM Pacific)

As with all previous tests, we'll also be sending out a handful more invites to those that have already signed up for Alpha Testing via this website. Also, just to make it clear, purchasing a Founders Pack does not guarantee you access to the Alpha. We're excited to get even more players into Breach starting tomorrow as we continue our Technical Alpha testing.



For all of you streaming, you may just see some friendly QC faces (or the official PlayBreach account) jump into your stream over the next few days, so keep an eye out. Don't worry, we won't judge your skill level too much at this point, but just a little. We've also added some new channels to our official Discord server, so feel free to play along with other members of our growing community that have access along with you.

You've seen our teasers, but the time has come. We're giving away a custom Breach Origin PC, valued at over $3,000 TO ONE OF YOU. Yes, you reading this, you could actually win this PC and have it sitting next to you if you win this giveaway.




The custom ORIGIN PC MILLENNIUM gaming desktop is powered by an Intel Core i7-8700K CPU, and an 8GB NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 GPU. On the outside, the tempered glass side panel is adorned with our special Arcane Mender art on an HD UV glass print! This giveaway runs until November 15th, so there's plenty of time to enter and complete all of the various tasks. Full rules and details can be found on the giveaway site. Good luck, and make sure to sign up for a Breach account up above while you wait to hear if you're the big winner.

As a special surprise as well, for anyone that comes by our booth can pick up a handout card that will grant you an EXCLUSIVE TwitchCon 2018 outfit + spray, which will be added to the game during a future test. Supplies are limited, so we recommend you come by earlier in the weekend, or let your friends in attendance know to come by the booth.



Good luck to all that enter the giveaway!

Did you know that we sent out the first VERY SMALL batch of keys to some of you for testing this weekend? Be sure to check those emails (including your SPAM/JUNK sections) and see if you were one of the lucky few. It should be noted that you are more likely to NOT get a code for this first test. If everything goes well, we'll send out more keys next weekend, so stay tuned!

Now, Let's talk TwitchCon 2018!

We’ve booked a trip to San Jose, CA, and you’re all invited to join us! On October 26th - 28th, QC Games and Breach will be setting up shop on the floor of TwitchCon, amidst the sea of purple, Kappas, and FrankerZ’s (We’ll miss you buddy). Let’s talk about our plans for the show, and why you’ll want to stop by the Breach booth on the floor.



First up, the most obvious reason for our attendance (since we’re at an event called TWITCHCON) is that we’re there for everything Twitch. We know, CRAZY IDEA. Whether you stream, watch, or just like using random emojis in our Discord, we’ve got you covered. We’re bringing out members of the dev team to Booth #1447 (map coming soon) along with a couple of couches, some kiosks to play Breach, and a few surprises....



Speaking of surprises, we’re going to have a fantastic one debuting in our booth, in the form of a giveaway. There’s an image of it above, isn’t it amazing? For the folks not attending, you’ll be able to enter as well. Details on that soon™, but let’s talk more about Breach.

In addition to going hands-on with Breach, we’re also there to talk directly to content creators. We’re ramping up the early stages of our Breach Partner Program, for which we still need a MUCH better name. Feel free to suggest on in our Discord. We want to talk to creators about how we can help build YOUR community through Breach, and how you can maybe even earn a spot inside of the game (via more than just making your personalized in-game avatar). 

NDA’d secrets? We’ve got them. Feel free to DM us on Twitter and let us know if you want to set up an appointment.

If you’re not a content creator and are coming to visit us in San Jose, we may also have a few things for you too, but they’re still going through an approval process. We’ll update this post with new information once we get the purple light to make it happen. Also, if you’re not going to TwitchCon, we may still make them available via various ways, once approved. Don’t forget to follow our official Twitch channel, as streams from the office are planned to begin soon.



As a final note, we want to give huge Thank You to some amazing friends from Origin PC, as we’ll have a handful of their CRONOS machines to play Breach on the show floor, all connected via Razer peripherals, and some slick PIXIO monitors. It’s going to look AMAZING all together in the booth, and we can’t wait for you to try it out hands-on. We’re looking forward to seeing all of you at TwitchCon to discuss Breach, all while continuing to move forward with our Alpha testing process, with the first tests occurring this weekend!

We know how much you want to play Breach. We want you to play too. 

We want to see what sorts of crazy Hero and Veil Demon builds all of you put together. Soon™ that will become a reality, but first we need a little more time with internal testing, which is part of the reason we've been a little quiet here. Today though, we have news arriving in three differing flavors:

• The “Oh darn!” Flavor: We are slowly ramping up testing under NDA, via invited co-developers only at this time. It’s going to be a little longer until we start letting the general public in to play the game, even under NDA, in October. For everyone that signed up via our website in advance or has a code from Gamescom / PAX, you’re all set, and we thank you for being here and waiting patiently. If you haven’t signed up yet and you’re reading this, that “Create Account” button in the upper right corner is looking a little lonely right now. Also, we will likely start with players in North America first, and expand from there alongside our server expansion.
• The “Good” Flavor: This extra development time is allowing us to make the Technical Alpha client more stable and even push out a new build for that upcoming non-NDA testing period. This comes with some great adjustments after what the team learned from public demos at Gamescom / PAX, and we've also added a new tutorial for all of the new Heroes that haven’t had their chance to play. As mentioned above, we will be inviting in some public players a little earlier, but under NDA.
• The “Great” Flavor: If everything comes together in the way we hope, not only will the first non-NDA folks get a key to play around Mid-October, but we’ll also allow everyone to stream it right away via Twitch, Mixer, YouTube, or anywhere else, as well as capture content for whatever your choice of platform may be. We may even let in more folks initially than we had planned, so more can go hands-on and experience Breach.

While you wait, feel free to join us on our Official Discord Server, as we chat with all of you while development of Breach continues. Did you also see our run-through of a bunch of classes on our official Instagram?

This is a super exciting time for Breach, and we’re thankful for everyone’s patience while we get these final steps in place to bring the Technical Alpha to life. Oh, and we may just be at a certain convention in October located in San Jose, but more on that next week.

Before we get to the news, all of us here at QC Games want to extend a HUGE “Thank You” to everyone that either came to play Breach at Gamescom / PAX West, talked to us on our various social channels, or helped spread the word of Breach. As a new independent studio with a new IP, it means so much, and we’re excited to share Breach with the world.

Which brings us to the question of “Well, when can I play???”

Below is our plan for the Technical Alpha stage, and beyond. If you’ve never been involved in a Technical Alpha before, it means that we are mostly testing backend systems and infrastructure to ensure stability.

1. We’re taking all the feedback gathered from Gamescom and PAX and putting together a new build that will become our first Technical Alpha Test. We learned a ton from those early hands-on and chatting with everyone.
2. Starting the second week of September, we’re then going to open the doors SLOWLY on Steam, with the initial round of invites. We know you all want to get your hands on the game ASAP, but our main goal is to maintain a stable service so everyone can play as they want, when they want, without issues. This means we’re going to do a few small tests (likely less than 300 total people invited for the first one), that will last for just a few hours or days each. This will likely last until Late September, at which point we will invite far more people and hope to start around-the-clock service (with downtimes for patching / maintenance).
3. If you’ve already registered an Alpha Access Code via one you received at Gamescom or PAX to your PlayBreach.com account, you’re all set right now. If you don’t get into those early Alpha tests, don’t worry, since around the end of September is when we’ll be starting to open the faucet and let more folks in. 
4. If you haven’t registered a code to your PlayBreach.com account, we’ll start letting in more folks in October, before we begin our [TO BE NAMED] Beta period. In addition, we are still determining details on how and when Alpha testers will play in the Beta, and will share details on that in the future.

Our goal is to be as transparent as we can with all of you as we move forward, but all of these timeframes are subject to change as we work through the development process. Our final goal for release is to come out of Early Access in early 2019 as a free-to-play title, and we hope all of you will come along with us for the adventure.

Finally, one last “Thank You!” in advance for all of your patience as we continue to develop Breach, and joining our community this early in the process. Make sure to join our official Discord to chat not only with our dev team, but also with other players. We look forward to seeing all of you inside the Library of Alexandria soon!

For everyone going to PAX West, you'll be able to play Breach at GameWorks right across the street from the convention center from 5-8 PM on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights. More details here >> https://www.playbreach.com/news/article/5/gamescom-pax-future-details

No PAX badge required, all you need to do is show up, head towards the second floor, and we'll get you seated and ready to play. We hope to see all of you there!

If you can't make it out, be sure to register for our upcoming Technical Alpha at https://www.playbreach.com, and we'll have more information soon on when the first tests will begin.

Welcome to Breach.

Wait…. Have you signed up to join the Technical Alpha? If you haven’t signed up yet, do that first at http://www.playbreach.com , then come back and read this article. Go ahead, we’ll wait for you. There’s also our announce trailer below to get you even more excited about what we have in store.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si_9mpi89BY

OK, all signed up, yes? Ready to learn even more? Good, let’s begin.

Breach is a fast-paced third person action co-op RPG. You create your own character, choose from dozens of classes with endless customization options, and can switch to any class between battles.

• Want to launch your enemies in the air and juggle them with rapid attacks? DO IT.
  
• Want to play a classic support healer? You can.
  
• Want to sit on the edge of the action and snipe away from a distance? We got it.

You then take your character onto Missions across the globe. These Missions can be played Solo or in Co-op with any number of other players up to 4. You will fight your way through mythological monsters in several areas toward the final area where you will face a giant boss monster. Along the way you will be challenged by the Veil Demon, a smoke-like spirit that can possess and empower any monster and create breaches, pulling in environmental hazards from the parallel, Mythological Earth.

In addition to playing as a Hero, you can also play as the Veil Demon in Solo or Versus modes! Breach also has a Custom mode where you can play with any number of friends up to 5 playing as either a Hero or Veil Demon.

Breach is more than just the core game, however. Breach is also about you, our community. We want to get off on the right foot here, and focus on two key words:

FEEDBACK GATHERING

Within the gathering of feedback, please remember constructive criticism. This means whether you like or dislike something about our game, you at least tell us why. Everyone likes to hear the good things, and get showered with praise, but we’re also going to be starting with an early Alpha build, and there are going to be a few things that don’t feel right, and maybe even a few parts that are broken or imbalanced along the way. The more forthcoming and open you can be with us about it, the better, and the quicker we can move forward and find the most fun for everyone involved.

For instance, saying “This stinks” is not good feedback for our team. But if you say “This stinks because of reasoning that goes here”, then we can actually have an insightful conversation and maybe discover what the root cause of the issue is. Feedback is one of the most important loops, and it can start and end with every player and every fan along the way. Our goal is to remain open and honest with you throughout development, into Beta, to our eventual launch and beyond, but we need to receive that in return.

Over the coming months, we’re going to be adding new classes to the game, a new map or two, and potentially trying out a few things that seem quite different. We’ll provide some developmental roadmaps along the way, but for these first few sessions, we’re aiming to kick the tires, light the fires, and get this goose off the ground.

Last in this article, but certainly not least, if you’d like to learn more about QC Games (that’s us!), feel free to check out our website, as we have a handful of open careers inside our studio in Austin, TX. You can also follow our various social channels for more fun from inside and around the office:

• Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/qcgamedev
  
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/qcgames
  
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/qcgames/
  
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/qcgames

Sorry, no tours at this time, but maybe in the future!