Aim it. Dodge it. Pay for it.
Aetherfall plays like a hybrid action game with the rhythm of an MMORPG. Where you stand, where you point and when you move decide a fight. No hidden roll decides whether you were hit.
Readable, deliberate, fair
Position and timing decide
You do not select an enemy and press a button. You aim, and the rune hits what its shape overlaps.
No avoidance rolls
There is no dodge chance, parry chance or block chance. You dodge by moving, and you block by holding a stance.
Every attack is telegraphed
Enemies commit to their blows, and you can see where they will land in time to step out of it.
The crosshair is your weapon
There is no target lock on enemies. A hostile rune goes where the crosshair points and hits whatever its shape overlaps. Each rune’s shape comes from its Form, the glyph that decides how it is delivered:
- Strike sweeps a cone in front of you, five metres deep.
- Bolt and its kin loose a projectile that stops at the first enemy or wall it meets.
- Lance pierces everything along a long line, stopping only at walls.
- Volley throws a fan of projectiles, each flying on its own.
- Channel holds a beam on whoever it meets, and keeps following your aim.
- Wave lands a circle on the ground where your crosshair meets it.
- Ring and Pulse burst around you, with no aim needed.
- Beacon plants a standing effect on the ground where you point.
Hitboxes are generous. Every target is tested slightly larger than it looks, because a hit that was a little too kind is easier to forgive than a phantom miss. Walls and closed doors block your line of sight; open doors do not, and a cone will not reach someone on the floor above.
A miss still pays
If a hostile rune finds nobody, the cast is not refused. It spends its Aether and starts its cooldown exactly as if it had landed, like a swing at empty air. The only aimed runes that can be refused are those placed on the ground, when the point is too far away or has nothing to stand on.
Projectiles are real
A bolt takes time to cross the room. Sidestep it before it arrives and it passes you by. Allies do not stop a projectile; the first enemy or wall in its path does.
Lock on to the people you save
Healing the right person under pressure should not need pixel-perfect aim, so ally runes work differently. Hold the rune’s key, sweep the crosshair across your allies, and release. Every living ally the crosshair passes over, in range and in sight, is locked, up to the rune’s limit: three for a Ward or Bond, one for a single heal. Escape cancels.
Lock nobody, and the rune is for you. A tap with nothing under the crosshair is a self-cast, not a failure.
The global cooldown
Every active rune shares a 1.5-second global cooldown. It sets the cadence of a fight: one decision per beat. Every cast also plays out in phases inside that beat: a short wind-up before it lands, the moment it resolves, and a recovery in which you cannot cast or block and move at half speed. A rune with a cast bar uses the bar as its wind-up.
Moving never cancels a cast, but a casting Warden moves at half speed. Press the next rune a moment early and it is held and fired the instant you are ready, so slightly-early input still chains cleanly. Interrupts are the exception to the global cooldown: they are cast off it, and have a fifteen-second floor on their own cooldown.
One pool, six schools
Aether is the only resource
No mana, rage or energy. Every Warden spends one bar, and each rune’s cost is derived from its power: a stronger rune costs more. A Brand may add its own wrinkle, such as the Hollowed’s Corruption meter or the Lampwick’s magazine, but there is no second hidden pool underneath.
Six damage schools
Physical, Aether, Poison, Corruption, Cold and Fire. Each Warden carries an Attunement to each school, raising the damage they deal in it and lowering the damage they take from it. You invest in the same stat whether you mean to deal that damage or survive it. Physical Attunement is the only armour.
You avoid damage with your hands
Dodge
A burst of 4.5 metres in half a second, in the direction you are moving, or straight back if you are not. For 0.35 seconds of it you cannot be hit: a hit that lands in that window deals nothing and brings none of its effects. It costs no Aether, only a cooldown of about a second and a half. Dodging out of a cast cancels it, and the Aether is still spent, so a dodge is a commitment.
Block
Hold the stance to block hits that arrive through a 120-degree arc in front of you. A shield absorbs half the blow and a melee weapon three-tenths, and some flat damage is shaved off on top. Hits from outside the arc land in full. You move at half speed while blocking, and blocking needs a shield or a melee weapon. A blocked hit wears your shield or weapon instead of your armour.
Perfect block
Raise the stance in the instant before a blow lands, within about 0.3 seconds, and the hit deals nothing and brings none of its effects. You cannot spam it: after one window opens, another cannot for a full second. Ordinary block is never locked out.
Read the attack, then punish it
When an enemy attacks, its shape is drawn on the ground with a fill counting down to the moment it lands. The enemy’s facing locks for the wind-up, and the blow resolves along that locked facing, so stepping out of the drawn shape means it misses. A typical blow gives you about 0.6 seconds to react; heavier ones give you more. Afterwards the enemy recovers for a moment, and that is your window.
Enemies turn at a limited rate, about half a turn per second, and never snap. A hit from behind, within the rear 120 degrees of an enemy’s facing, does twenty percent more damage.
Interrupts
A rune built with the right chain of glyphs can interrupt a cast: it clears the cast outright and silences the caster briefly. A weaker form, Stagger, only pushes a cast back, and each cast can be staggered only so far, so a party cannot hold a boss’s cast open for ever. Interrupts and Stagger work on enemy wind-ups as well as cast bars. Every Brand has access to the universal interrupt, Rebuke.
Parties of six, and the engagement lock
A party holds up to six Wardens under a single leader. Enemies keep a threat table: damage you deal is threat, a heal on an ally earns some, and threat does not decay. An enemy always goes for the highest threat, unless a live Taunt overrides it.
The first hit on an unengaged enemy stamps it: solo, it belongs to you; in a group, it belongs to your party. From then on, threat from anyone outside the owner is simply dropped, so a rival party cannot steal a mob you have tagged. The lock lifts when the enemy dies or leashes back to its spawn.
Death is a Shade
At zero health the Soul Crystal catches you. You become a Shade, a half-incorporeal presence at the place you fell, free to move at half speed but unable to cast. There is no timer. When you choose to Release, you are returned to the nearest Lamp with full health and Aether, and one stack of Soul Fracture, which dims your damage and Aether regeneration until it fades or is cleansed. Enemies, who have no Crystal, simply die.
Every ability is a sentence in a grammar
Wardens have no classes. They carry a Soul Crystal, and the crystal holds runes.
The Soul Crystal
A crystal carries exactly one Brand and has four facets: Tank, Healer, DPS and Support. Each facet is a complete loadout with its own runes and its own nine-slot action bar. Switching facet is instant, and changes your role without changing who you are. Active and passive runes compete for the same slots in a facet, so every passive you inscribe costs you an ability.
A rune is its circuit
Every rune is a small graph of glyphs wired together. A Form decides how it is delivered. An Essence decides its school, or makes it heal. Behaviors add the secondary effects: damage over time, slows, shields, interrupts. A compiler reads the circuit and derives the rest: damage, cast time, cooldown and Aether cost. Nothing is tuned by hand, so a rune cannot be strong for its cost by accident.
Power buys cast time; breadth buys cooldown.The rule of the rune system
A bigger hit costs a longer cast, up to a cap of three seconds. More riders on a rune cost a longer cooldown, up to a minute. Some classes of effect, such as hard crowd control, major defences and interrupts, carry a cooldown floor that no circuit can undercut. Interference between opposed essences, such as light and shadow, or heat and cold, costs a circuit power. See the Brands for the runes each lineage carries.
At a glance
Keys can be rebound in Options.
| Action | Input |
|---|---|
| Move | W A S D, relative to the camera |
| Look and aim | Mouse, always; the cursor is hidden and locked |
| Free the cursor for menus | Hold Left Alt |
| Cast a rune | 1 to 9, or click the bar |
| Lock on to allies | Hold the rune’s key, sweep, release; Escape cancels |
| Jump | Space |
| Dodge | Left Shift |
| Block | Hold right mouse button |
| Interact (doors, levers) | E |
| Camera zoom | Mouse wheel |
Come and test your nerve
Combat is being tuned in play, and the numbers on this page are starting values. The closed test is where they get proved.