 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Enter the Ether, the podcast all about the upcoming third person mobile ethereal clash of souls. I am your host, the one and only mangoes joining me as always is my enthusiastic charismatic and dare I say handsome co-host jelly knees. How are you doing jelly? It's mangoes feel so special. I'm doing great, man. I'm always happy to be here as usual. So this week, yeah. A lot of like crazy info about like a relatively small system. Like it's a weird it's a weird thing. Like the last two weeks, we've gotten like crazy info dumps about something you would think is really simple and it's not. Yeah. So that's the main theme of the show is going to be we're going to be talking about some of the changes that have occurred since ethereal first started out. I mean, this it's been in production for for years now. And of course, a lot of things have been changed. The most recent thing being the map. That's kind of what brought this on. But before, of course, we get into all that. We're going to talk about their newest fun fact development fun fact that they released on their blog, which is on their website and in their discord, which is a entirely new system. I've never seen this done in a MOBA before. Jelly, you've you probably have the best grasp of this system out of the two of us. Do you want to try and explain this to the folks? Sure. So if if it's complicated and you're not understanding, please reach out to me. I'm happy to go over it with you. I had to reach out to mud and have like an hour long conversation with her to like really understand. I was like, OK, yeah, no, it makes sense now. So yeah, please feel free to reach out to me. No problems at all going over it with you. But so this is their loadout system is what they're calling it. And there's going to be multiple combat tactics. Each one will have a different set of stats tied to that tactic. My guess with the image they gave us is that we're looking at the assault combat tactic based on the fact that we have penetration, attack speed and life steal. So this will most likely be what you would take on a marksman. They so you have three stats for each combat tactic and they'll vary from tactic to tactic. And you'll have a fourth stat that is a custom that you can choose any stat from the other combat tactics. And it's but it's only those stats. So not all the stats in the game are necessarily implemented into the combat tactics. So it's going to be limited in which ones you can choose in order to decide which stat to take, there's going to be a point system. So on the image, there's underneath the combat tactics, there are four boxes with one, two, three and four corresponding to a color. So when you see that color anywhere else reference back to those boxes and it'll tell you how many points that color costs to receive that stat. If we move to the right side of the image, let's start with penetration. It says penetration one with a white outline, four with a green outline and 10 with a blue outline. So the one because of the white outline will cost you one point to get one penetration. The four with a green outline will cost you two points to get four penetration and the 10 with the blue outline will cost you three points to get 10 penetration. So the color corresponds to the cost and the number corresponds to how many of that stat you're getting. So that's the same across all of the stats or the combat tactic. The one that is different will be your custom stat, which will be an increased cost for each tier. So instead of one of whatever custom stat you choose, let's say health regen, just for this example, one health regen will cost you two points or health regen will cost you three points and 10 health regen will cost you four points. And if we look at this image and do kind of the reverse math of what they've shown us, we're going to have eight points total to spend per loadout, but that may be subject to change. This is just the image they showed us so that may be different already or it may not even be accurate in this image. That's just me kind of tinfoil having the the image that they gave us. But I think that that covers the system. Yeah, and it's I was trying to think of a way to compare this to other games so that you can kind of people have an idea of what you're looking at. It's kind of like a character creator where you're picking stats like like you want stamina, you know, maybe you want more stamina for more health or maybe you want more like strength for more attack power or something like that. But these custom loadouts and you do this not even in the game, you you save these loadouts, you create them like well before you queue up and you can create different ones and then save them and then as you you know you queue up and you're loading in that's when you pick your preset, your pre-saved ones, you can't just do this in the lobby, you pick one that you've already saved. So at first I was kind of looking at it like the old Paragon deck system where you build a deck and then you have a couple deck slots and then you when you queue up for a game you pick which deck you want to use. But it's a little bit like that, but it's more of a character creator and you pick which character you want and so I'm assuming you know maybe for if you want to play a tank you would have a tanky profile that you would go with whereas if you wanted to play an ADC you would have a more assault driven profile that you would go with or maybe you want to say the hell with it and you pick the tank but you've got two tanks on your team so you just want to do more damage so you could just go ahead and pick your pick your assault profile that would you would normally use on your ADC so I think it's a really cool system it'll help people counter certain strategies and just overall a neat thing that that they've added into the game like really cool stuff like you said it's kind of hard to it's hard to explain it and it's it's hard to really wrap our minds around it without ever having experienced something like this in a game before I guess somebody said that there used to be something like this in legal legends, but I have no idea It's kind of so yeah the original legal legend system was you could buy individual runes that had stats and insert that into a build by itself and so you could have 10 of this rune 10 of that rune and things like that so it's it's vaguely similar to that But I actually really like your analogy of a character creator The combat tactic is like your class that you're picking into and then you're just altering the stats in that class from there I think that's a great way to put it that makes it way more understandable for a lot of people The other thing about this image is we've got these weird I want to say creatures underneath the image that are silhouetted That we have no idea what to and aren't talked about at all in the blog post Yeah, in the past I didn't pay any attention to this whatsoever until the old tinfoil titan himself jelly knees was like Hey, what do you think those images are? I thought they were just like there to look pretty and then like as I looked at I'm like holy shit. That is something that is something Leave it to me to find something where others think there's nothing. Yeah But I I've been looking at these and the best guesses I have is that there's something to do with the combat tactic itself And potentially What they're doing is that the combat tactic gives you a certain one of these pets I guess I don't know if that's the correct term or not But gives you a certain one of these pets and that pet has a specific ability So when I take the assault tactic And I'm changing those stats because I'm in the assault tactic I will have some kind of special my auto attack does five extra damage or Something among those lines The thing that gives that away to me is demolition Assault protects and reinforcement. You could argue Are kind of you could argue the stats that would be in there just kind of go toward that end demolition unless it contains like damage to towers and things like that Which is it would be an interesting stat to implement I would think that demolition means more so that there's some kind of active element to the combat tactics themselves That's a the visual representation of that that's a pretty wild theory If you're right about that Okay, place your bets now because But I mean if you look at the if you look at the outlines one of them looks It looks like a sky slider. You could you could if you zoom in on it You could definitely tell that it's like a sky slider holding a sword and shield The next one looks like some sort of little gremlin. I thought maybe it might be like a nickelized skin or something and then the other one It looks like the symbol for I think I think it's over gone was the realm From back for way back when the old website was up But I mean it could be like a little I mean it Could be a skull with uh With some hands or something like that. It's Pretty interesting pretty interesting stuff If I'm right Owen even now is sitting in his seat going like how did he figure this out like Yeah, because I it's farfetched to be sure but yeah, that one's crazy man. That one's out there We'll see we'll see So I think that's about it for the loadout system That's about as much as we can really get into we'll get into a hell of a lot more Once the game's in our hands and we can try this loadout system for ourselves But let's go ahead and move on with the main topic of the day, which is the changes Let me switch over to our document here. So I know what we're talking about first change Did you know That the original plan for ethereal was to have mounts In the game you could summon mounts that would give you faster travel speed That was when they had a much larger map sort of and uh much larger and flatter map Which we'll get to in a bit too, but that has since been removed. Uh, what do you think jelly? For the most part that this is okay I think it's one of those it would have been cool to have another cosmetic But at the same time if it's not needed. There's no reason to have it We'll have to see what rotation times look like on the map that we have seen To see if some kind of increased movement speed Travel mode, whether it be mounts or just like similar to a paragon's travel mode We'll need to be implemented, but otherwise. I don't think it's a problem that they're being removed I think that that's a good that's a good point comparing it to paragon's travel mode because Like they've removed this system. So we don't have to worry about it, but paragon's travel mode I mean there were zero problems with that nobody nobody had a problem with travel mode in paragon He didn't have leapfrogging and people abusing the shit out of that system I think it could work though if there were no movement penalties whenever you got dismounted And um, of course, you wouldn't be able shouldn't be able to attack from atop a mount Another game that does this with mounts is here's the storm a lot of you guys probably know that I play The crap out of that they have a mount system, but that's a very Very different sort of MOBA and uh, I think if they did it like here's the storm It might work because like I said, there's no Penalty and it actually takes you a while to mount up. You can't just immediately jump on a horse's back and ride out of battle if you're in trouble, but uh Yeah, I'm I'm glad they took the mounts out It would have been nice to see a cosmetic like that, but it was probably way too much to put in um So Yeah, go ahead I think if they're going to institute some kind of travel mode I would actually say to look to over prime Because their travel mode is the better parts of of paragons without all the downsides Yeah, you don't get stunned when you get hit out of it You don't you just fall out of travel mode and then have to spend the five seconds getting back into it That's the way it should be done because the penalties just become easily stackable That you're gonna get stunned out of travel mode then get stunned again. It just feels really bad So I would definitely say look to them for at least inspiration if they're going down that road Even without that though, you can still leapfrog with it if you guys don't know what leapfrogging was You would take advantage of somebody's inability to mount by One person would keep them in place and prevent them from going into travel mode by hitting them with basic attacks While somebody else on your team would mount up and get in front of them And then they would start doing the same thing while the first person would mount up go around That's what the leapfrogging was and it was just very give you a very unfair advantage with easily abused But moving on to the next topic as the topic we covered when we talked about the maps, which is the uh the cake layer style map structure has been replaced with the more standard MOBA style map However, the lanes are still broken apart and at different altitudes so I really don't have much to say on this. I've already said Damn near everything. I wanted to say where we covered this in its own video jelly. Did you did you have any uh epiphanies or anything about this? No, I just think this is something that The community is going to have to play on before they can really feel one way or the other About how how it is set up But I really like that we're making a consistent effort to use this cake layer hand gesture every single episode. So I'm gonna start going this way with it And then uh another big change. This is the one That probably set them back the most When they first had their character models, it was a very anime looking game and um This is one of the things where I think uh Owen is probably gonna kick me in the deck for saying this But there was some paragon refugee influence here They don't like to they they they didn't create like the creators of ethereal didn't play paragon They played a lot of smite a lot of legal legends. They never played paragon. So they don't They don't like it when you say that the game was in the word Yeah, the p word, but What happened was I mean People learned about ethereal after paragon shut down But then they saw the character models. They saw malaya was the main one that that was out And she had a very soft rounded features She had these big dough eyes and just very anime appearance A bit more smite-ish than Paragon-ish And then they decided to completely you know after people were like, oh that looks like shit. We're not going to play this game Everybody was because you know people from paragon are used to the paragon models So that's why they completely scrapped all those models Even though a lot of mirari rigged and animated and everything And came up with the new models, which I like the anime style personally. I really liked it I am glad that they changed it though because these new models look absolutely Amazing. I think they look better than the paragon models. That is of course my opinion Some people will think they look on par with paragon models Some will say that they don't look nearly as good, but I don't think anybody could say that they're just like Like a million steps below the paragon models. They they I think they look better, but I think this was a great change. I think this will bring a lot more people into the game It just they the new character models look fantastic Absolutely, and at the very least if this is where we're starting You can only go up from here, right? Right, like they're only going to get better and better if the game is supported and well loved by the developers Which it feels like it is so Even for how good they are now. I can't wait to see like when they institute something like crazy transformation aspects Or xcl. I think that's the one. I'm most excited to see In how he is his shadow is going to interact and look different in the world I think it's going to be crazy to see. I hope he has a johnny cage shadow kick That would be amazing Oh my goodness He does look a little bit like johnny cage. You throw some sunglasses on him. You got johnny cage right there No, stop He's going to uppercut people's heads clean off Another thing like uh the old model for calia She had she didn't have many clothes on she looked again very anime-ish and uh, you've probably hard to say before that actually Think she looks better with the more clothing and she really does like her model is significantly improved with her little tunic and uh Just the overall changes to the calia model Absolutely and hers. I think the fur texture is really where hers like goes above and beyond That looking at her her arms. You just like like that's so much detail packed in such a small area Really cool stuff So what's our next one jelly So the next change is that in the original map that was the cake layer, right? We're gonna we're gonna keep using those hand gestures um the cake layer the Lanes themselves were relatively flat looking and granted. We only saw a very limited amount of that map But the new map that we've seen not only are they staggered lanes, but in the lanes themselves There's way more verticality Just from what we've seen with platforms above and trees going across over paths and things like that And it looks insane. So there's going to be multi multi level layer multi. What am I trying to say here? um Multi level verticality. There we go In the lanes themselves and in lane, which is just going to be crazy to see Yeah, I think the the original map looked very smite-ish like smite is supposedly a third person mobile. I say it's a 2.5, but the the lanes are very flat. You do have the rocks and stuff But there's no real altitude change. You don't run up and down those rocks They're just in your fucking way And then everything else is flat whereas in paragon you see a rock like that You might be able to climb climb over it jump over it stand on top of it. Whatever And then they've changed again I think it was a lot of this was due to you know The paragon refugees coming in looking at how flat that map wasn't like amen Can you add some hills to that then we might play it? And so they did and then they we came out they came out with that beautiful new map um That we originally saw and then they even updated that even further after that. So we have what we've seen most recently so I really like it's it's been Which with each one of these changes though it has pushed the alpha date back Which I think it's fine as long as we're getting a better product And I think that's a lot of people will complain about that You know, here's a fun fact Their original alpha was scheduled for november of 2018. I know. Oh, man But but that was with the very flat map And the anime style models for the character so And here we are december. Oh, it's not even december anymore. It's january 2021 Happy new year But yeah, I think it's uh, well, I hope I hope that it's worth it playing the demo that we did for extra life It was definitely worth it. She was so much fun. And it was yeah, and that's I keep thinking back about extra life and like even just What it looked like aside and all of that I just remember being In it and like having a great time and that's all I want for ethereal. Is it just I I want it to be fun Yeah, if it comes out and it's fun. I'm in well, whatever it is This next one. It's not really a change as much as What happened to the overseers, man? Yeah, we we They still plan to have the overseers. They don't plan to have them in the pre alpha though They've already come out and said straight up that the overseers Are not going to be in the pre alpha and the overseers of course being their eighth class that nobody knows jack shit about and everybody likes to Throw including us likes to throw in our own two cents and try and figure out What the hell the overseers could possibly do but it's been years Since like they mentioned overseers And then nothing We're Go ahead jelly I was going back through the other day and looked for their announcement in the discord And sure enough it was like two and a half years ago and I was like it's been that long like It's weird that we still don't know any information about them at all They're playing that one really close to the chest I bet The only people that know anything about the overseers are probably Owen and Kai And and that's probably it. They probably have people working on character models And they're not even telling them that they're working on an overseer, you know Oh Great ethereal mystery So I can call that one if I can solve that one. I'll be impressed Yeah So what's our next one jelly So Owen who was originally a myth that we'd seen model for he was in the original login screen that they showed us Uh, it's been removed from the myth pool. He's no longer a myth that's in development Um, he it as far as we know will not ever come out So that me that's He was one of the ones that looked really cool and could have had really unique gameplay So it surprises me that they removed him But I imagine that they had good reasons for doing so Yeah, uh, there there is a specific reason that he was removed and I cannot for the life of me Remember what it was. But yeah, he was kind of a cool cool hero Without knowing anything about him though, like I don't know whether I'm Sad or not that he was removed like I don't even know what he's I know he was supposed to be a reaper That's about all I knew know about Owen To me So what I was looking at today of Owen's old model is it looks like they may have just replaced him with xl Yeah, kind of yeah In that the model is very similar the reaper aesthetic We didn't know anything about Owen's lore So it's possible that that's who they wanted to be Malaya's brother and they just shifted its xl instead But the world may never know it's like how many licks does it take to get to the center of a titsy pop? That uh about covers it there's been like now that you mentioned it though like This is something that people bring up a lot that original login screen There was like a werewolf style hero off to the side and a lot of people are like hey What happened this werewolf guy like that's another that's another big mystery We don't wonder if that was chi so we had Owen and chi and now neither of them are a thing They sacrifice themselves for the game Another change I talked about this a little bit too is grace's hair went from white to uh to just to bellica brown Oh my god, I never realized that but yeah, absolutely it did Yeah Even in her um emoji that is in the discord her hair is white And I wish that would have stayed the way it was hopefully they can just do something They could just make it white because I wanted I wanted white hair dr. Grace I don't know how I've never noticed that before I assume though that she'll be in her mech for the most part and we won't even see her hair but Maybe I see that's the one of the ones I'm most excited to see her kit Because how does a mech and a medic work together? I just I can't see the connection, but I can't wait to see how they made the connection And I'm only assuming that she'll be inside the mech. Maybe the mech just follows her around Like I don't know But I think that's all we've got for this week man goose. I do got anything to plug for yourself Oh, no, I did I did another one of my state of the game videos if you guys want to check out what's been going on with all the different games I track, but uh, you know, that's about it What about you jelly? I've got five more videos coming out this week I went through and I have five more videos man. You are a madman I've got plans for another 20 videos right now So I just putting that out there and I'll do one a day during the week days Take the weekends off to get the others made And do that for as long as I can before we run out of stuff to talk about right on Well with your uh with your imagination, I imagine you'll never run out of things to talk about But uh, that's gonna wrap it up for this week folks I I know there have been a lot of changes through the game But I hope hopefully they're all for the better And hopefully the postponed alpha will result in us getting a much much better product So I hope you all join us as we enter the ether jelly guns man