In honor of Play NYC, a Valiance Online open beta event will be held for the duration of the convention. The event is New York City’s premier gaming convention and despite everything going on this year, the event is going ahead online. From August 10th to the 16th anyone anywhere in the world will be able to play Valiance Online which is typically only playable by backers. After the event, the game will go back to being backers only. It is possible to donate to the game, however, none of the donation tiers actually mention getting beta access so it isn’t immediately clear if you will be able to get access or not.
Despite not having updated their website since 2018 the Valiance Online team has been hard at work behind the scenes on the game. They post frequently in the forums and on Discord. Their most recent update to the game was quite extensive and includes things like unlocking level 50 (the previous cap was 20), fixing attack animation bugs, and updating the launcher in preparation for the Mac and Linux launchers which are coming soon. If you’re interested in reading the impressively long list of things that were updated you can read them all here.
On Facebook, the developers have addressed the fact that their website hasn’t been updated in two years saying, “We are working on some updates but you are right, we’ve not been updating the site. Mostly we’ve been posting on social media and updating people on Discord. We DO have a big update we’re prepping for the site and will be trying to update it more often.” So it would seem that they are aware that their site is neglected and they do have plans to fix that in the future. We will have to keep an eye out for that.
For now, though, mark August 10-16th on your calendar for the opportunity to play Valiance Online completely free during the open beta event. The team has said that there will be more of them in the future, but when that will be is anyone’s guess and who knows how much the game will have changed in that time. I’ll be logging in during the event for the very first time, so you can expect some new content here on Maressa.net during and after the event.