Greetings Scavengers,
We’re excited to let you know that the next Persist Online Playtest is coming soon!
While we don’t have the exact start date and time locked in just yet, we’ll share all details in the near future. Make sure to join our Discord server and follow us on our social media channels (@PersistOnline), as this is where we’ll share the exact dates first.
You can sign up for the playtest here. Selected players will receive an invitation email shortly before the playtest begins, containing everything they need to join.
Developer Comment: Our goal is to start the test at some point next week.
A Fresh Start
This playtest will be an important one for Persist Online. Over the last updates, we introduced major changes to progression, balance, and the overall game experience. Because of the scale of these changes, we want the next test to begin under clean conditions.
So, for this playtest, we will wipe all characters, families and guilds from previous testers.
This allows everyone to experience the new progression from the beginning and gives us much better feedback on pacing, balance, the updated systems and the overall game experience from our community.
Developer Comments: If you already created a pre-alpha playtest account in the past, you can still log in with your account details. But as mentioned all created families, characters and guilds have been wiped. Permanent tester families and characters are excluded from this wipe.
What Changed Since the Last Test?
The upcoming playtest includes our new progression overhaul and the latest changes from the recent game updates. Our goal with all the changes is to make progression feel smoother, clearer, and more rewarding from the very beginning. Here is a short overview of what testers can expect in this test:
Major Progression Overhaul:
- Item level requirements reworked from skill to character level.
- New Badge Distribution system for skills.
- Developer Comment: We made more changes to the system after the progression overhaul. Read more about it in the newest patchnotes.
- Reworked how items can be upgraded in Safehouse.
- Adjusted the time and costs of tasks, room upgrades, and room expansions in the Safehouse.
- Removed skill level requirement for tasks in the Safehouse.
- New consumables.
- Harvesting now grants Character Experience (fishing excluded).
- New Elemental Elite enemies.
- Improved spawn and respawn mechanics for zombies, mutants, and elite enemies.
Find out everything about the above in Part 1 and Part 2 of our latest Developer Update blogs.
New game feature: Faction Quests.
- Read more in our feature preview here.
Other Changes and Updates:
- New areas in and around Ashwater to explore and new Factions: “404” and “Forum Transcendum” to interact with.
- Optimized Outline Shader graphics as well as Field of View (FoV) and camera changes.
- Improved game and server performance.
We implemented even more stuff, including a large number of quality-of-life improvements as well as several bugfixes. You find all details in the patchnotes and hotfix blogs on our website.
Why This One Matters
This test will help us evaluate the new progression experience with a fresh player base and clean starting conditions. Your feedback will be especially valuable, as it will show us how the updated systems feel when experienced from the beginning.
Whether you are returning from a previous test or joining Persist Online for the first time, this is a great opportunity to help shape the future of the game.
Share Your Feedback
The best place to stay up to date and connect with our team and fellow testers is our Discord server. There you can:
- Team up and discuss the game with other community members and testers.
- Report bugs and issues that you run into during the playtest.
- Share your thoughts, impressions, and feedback directly with the Persist Team.
- Suggest ideas on how we can improve the game in the future.
- Note: In our Discord forums, we also plan to create multiple focus feedback threads to gather in-depth insights on specific playtest topics.
Our Community Team (and sometimes members of the dev team) are active on Discord and are looking forward to talking with you.
Content Creation during Playtests
If you love creating content around games and get access to our playtests — fear not! There is no NDA for Persist Online playtests. This means you can livestream your sessions, upload videos to YouTube, and publicly talk about the game. We’d love to see your content!
We also have a small Content Creator Program running. So, if you are interested in joining, you can find all details and requirements in our blog. We look forward to your application.
This playtest is yet another important milestone for Persist Online and you are a key part of it. Your feedback will help us improve gameplay and the overall feel, validate new features, content, and systems, and shape the future of the game.
We are looking forward to your input!
-The Persist Online Team