
The Underlords Have Arrived
The Underlords (as in the folks we named the game after) have finally joined the fray after watching on the sidelines for months. Before every match you’ll choose an Underlord to lead your crew. They’ll fight alongside your heroes, fire off abilities, provide buffs, and grow stronger throughout each match.Each Underlord has their own set of unique Talents that can be picked as the match progresses – these talents improve and unlock your abilities. Anessix and Hobgen have a total of 22 Talents each, and 11 are locked by default. Play games (bot games count) to unlock and discover the rest of the Talents available to you. For more information about Underlords, see our previous posts about the Underlords, Hobgen, and Anessix. You’ll also be able to read about them in-game.

Duos Mode – Battle with Your Buddies
With this update we are adding a new social game mode – Duos. In this game mode you’ll party up with a friend and queue up with seven other teams of two (16 players total, if you were counting). You and your teammate will each be hiring and leveling your own crews, but now you’ll be able to help each other out by sending gold and heroes to each other. Watch out though, your health is also shared, as is your level. Battle is fought in pairs against other teams, and round damage is summed up. We are launching Duos with Casual matchmaking with plans to ship a Ranked Duos mode soon.
Freestyle Mode – The Board is Your Test Lab
We’ve also added a new mode we’re calling Freestyle. With Freestyle mode you can quickly set up and test different scenarios. Maybe you want to test out different theories for your own strategies, or maybe you want to put a new hero through its paces to learn what they do and how they fight in a battle. Or if you’re like us you just want to see who would win between 32 Tomatoes and 32 Potatoes (Potatoes by a mile).
New Heroes for Hire, and New Alliances to Form
Insects, Healers, Brute, and Champion Alliances can now be formed, and favorite Heroes like Faceless Void, Io, Broodmother and Legion Commander are now for hire in the shop. In total, 12 Heroes have been added to the roster, filling out the new Alliances and padding a few of the existing ones. The team has also made a host of balance and gameplay updates to the rest of the Underlords roster, so head over to the patch notes for details if you’re curious.
Too Many Heroes? Introducing JAIL
You may be asking yourself “Wow, that’s a ton of new heroes. How am I ever going to get anyone to Rank 3 in a match?” We hear you, and the local law enforcement of White Spire also hear you. A random group of 8-12 heroes will now be detained in The Rookery for a day, and this group will update every day. To see who’s in jail, and what they’re in there for, we’ve added jail buttons to the dashboard, the game-start panel, and the Shop. Not to worry though – even though these heroes are in jail, all Alliances can still be fully completed.
New UI. So Fresh, So Clean
Meanwhile, the team has been overhauling our PC and Mobile user interfaces. From the new Dashboard (lovingly referred to internally as the Beautiful Corner), to the new notification message system (all yo-able of course), to the new full-featured in-game PC UI - we’ve worked hard to give the whole experience an upgrade. This is all in addition to the new interfaces to help you communicate with your Duos partner, set up experiments in Freestyle mode, pick Talents for your new Underlord, and all of the other new features that have been added in this Big Update.A Note About Ranks
When this update rolls out, ranked play will be disabled for a few hours as we watch to make sure things are stable. Once we set ranked live, player ranks will be compressed a bit as part of the new update. Try to beat your previous record, or be the first to climb back to Lord of Whitespire.And that’s all! Again, if you’re someone who likes seeing all the nuts and bolts – check out the full Patch Notes here.
Extra notes