Opening Up the Echo Woods

We soft-launched Open Enrollment back in December, then took some time to work out the kinks. Now we're ready to tell the world about the big changes Open Enrollment brought to Pathfinder Online, the additional improvements our surprisingly small two-person development team continues to make, and more specifically our new pricing of just $5 per character per month.

First, though, let's take a moment to look back at the tremendous strides made during Early Enrollment, all with the help and support of our amazing community:

• Settlement leaders can now build up their settlements as they wish, placing and upgrading individual structures to support their favorite activities.
• Spellcrafters can enchant gear with hundreds of bonuses, using rare raw materials (available only for gathering in specific monster hexes) and salvage items (available only as loot from specific escalations).
• Adventurers can face off against over 20 escalations that offer a challenge for everyone from level 1 to level 20.
• Gatherers can find resource "gushers" that attract attacking creatures while being harvested.
• Companies can attack each other's vulnerable holdings to steal bulk resources, and can even use siege equipment to attack and take over enemy settlements.
• Players can track other characters they'd like to interact with regularly in-game through Friends Lists.
• Even inactive characters can play the game as much as they'd like in Free Trial Mode, though with some gameplay limitations (e.g., support restricted to level 6, no influence earned, no XP granted over time, can't participate in territorial PvP games).

Open Enrollment capped off all those additions (and countless other quality-of-life and performance improvements made along the way) by introducing our new Character-Based Subscription Model and lowering the price for a month of game time to $5. Now all three characters on your account can be fully active and training at the same time for only $5 each per month, with further discounts for purchasing six or twelve months at a time, and you can log into the game with all three characters at once. You activate and manage individual characters on the in-game Character Selection Screen, using a credit for a month of game time to activate or renew each character. Any characters you prefer to leave inactive will be in Free Trial Mode.

As part of this change, we also tripled any unused game months on accounts that already existed when Open Enrollment soft-launched, along with adding two more months to any accounts that were active at the time. You can see how many months of game time your account has on your Rewards page.

Launching Open Enrollment doesn't mean the end of development for Pathfinder Online. Since then, we added a new role to the game, the Combat Alchemist. With their Alchemist's Tools and Formula Books, and Bandoliers loaded with Reagents, Combat Alchemists specialize in healing and protecting allies with elixirs, buffing (while simultaneously debuffing) themselves with mutagens, or damaging enemies with bombs and other alchemical items. They have a full complement of feats to train at the Visiting Combat Alchemist Trainers, and will soon have their own structures and a new tutorial. We've also started work on transferring our servers to the cloud, upgrading to the latest version of Unity, and adding even more content to the game.

As we're welcoming many new players to Open Enrollment, we're also in the middle of our Home Sweet Home Event, making this a particularly good time to visit the Echo Woods. Until Daily Maintenance on Monday, July 6, 2020 (or later if widespread school and workplace closures continue), rare event raw materials and salvage items are available for gathering and looting, and sets of these items can be exchanged for a choice of recipes/expendables and raw ingredients.

If you have any questions at all about Open Enrollment, please contact us at customer.support@pathfinderonline.com. Also, and we really can't repeat this enough, thanks again for everyone's support over the years, from the Kickstarter, to the Alpha, to Early Enrollment, and now during Open Enrollment. Thank you for joining us on this adventure, and on the many adventures ahead.

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