Dear Community,

On the 2nd of May 2018 we published a Twitch-Stream for our Empire players in English and we want to provide you with a summary below.

You can also watch the Twitch-Stream again (or for the first time if you haven't got around to it yet): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTECUqi2XuY

Battle for Fury's Blade Stream

Tonight we are going to talk about the Battle for Fury’s Blade. We will introduce you to the event and we will talk about what’s going to happen and explain what’s going on during the next couple of weeks. We will show the actual prices! So you already know there are a couple of prizes and actually the main prize is going to be a real forged sword: Fury’s Blade!

It is a Berimond reward, which you might already have seen in the game. We are going to show that to you as well, we are having it here in Hamburg. So let us look forward for what’s next:

Let’s start with some information about the event itself:

Battle for Fury’s Blade is going to start next Monday, May the 7th with the long term point event coming up. So the first stage will also include your long term point event points, in order to get qualified for the next round. The whole event will run until May the 30th overall. Some of the Empire players may have already seen that pop up in the game: we have stage 1 running from May 7th to May 22nd. All players can participate anyway during the whole event from May 7th to May 30th and we have some nice rewards, which we are going to talk a little bit later about. We have awesome decorations that you can get. After each stage you will also get really nice boosters, construction items, etc. so there is a lot of stuff that you can get.  

So during the first stage we will use the long term point event points to qualify for the next round, that means in that time frame the Top 1000 players from Empire and the Top 1000 players from Empire: Four Kingdoms will be (based on their long term point event points) send to the next round. Stage 2 will run from May 22nd to May 25th. We will have the Battle for Berimond running there and depending on your gallantry points you can then qualify for the final round that will run on Stage 3 from May 25th to May 30th where we select the Top 50 players of Empire and the Top 50 players of Empire: Four Kingdoms. 
The player who gets the best point series during the Shapeshifter event, will be eligible to win the sword! As a second prize we have a nice Shield which we will show in a couple of minutes and as a third prize we have a nice artwork. For those final 100 players that make it to the final round we have a really awesome decoration and we will also show that in a moment as well.  

So here we go: That is “The stone of rising fury” which is for the Top 50 players of Empire and Top 50 players of Empire: Four Kingdoms with 1000 public order! That’s quite amazing! I think we never had one like that before. Then we also have another really cool decoration: That’s “The fury forge” which is for the Top 3 Servers in the global ranking with 400 public order, so also a really nice one and for all the other servers that won’t make it to the Top 3, we still have an awesome decoration with 275 public order “The fury’s tomb”. They are looking really nice and they are awesome and only created for that Battle for Fury’s Blade event. So take part, play and try to get a hold of the sword and all the other stuff and win some awesome ingame decorations, items and so on. We have a lot of it in place!

Here we have a really, really nice and stunning Artwork with the Berimond Shield and also the Fury’s Blade from Berimond. Coming up next, we are also showing you the prizes that we have for the event. So this is the key artwork or prize visual, that we came up with. And this was painted by one of my artists, Vera. And this piece has been signed by the team, so you got this nice framed piece signed. So that is one nice prize that we are giving away. We are really proud of this artwork and i think that it is a really special thing! So we have this as a third prize. Then we have this authentic shield and this is being (again) hand painted by one of our artists and also incidentally it was the same artist, who did the key visual for the third prize, that designed this shield design and also painted it as well. We also have some interesting distress work, so it looks used, looks like its been in battle. Kind of a rigid styling, used by viking soldiers. So that’s the second prize which is super awesome! 
But then, we go from super awesome to this proper no joking sword. It is heavy and weighs around 6 kilogram, so you will experience that if you have it in your hands for a couple of minutes then you will know that it is a real sword! We showed the trailer in the very beginning of the stream: it’s a 400-layer-folded blade out of damascus steel, so you can also see that typical framework or styling of damascus steel. The sword is not that sharp anymore than it was in the beginning, because we want to make sure that whoever might win it will not cut his fingers off or anything else. It is not so easy to recognize now, but there is also the crown of king Leopold crafted in. We have the pommel with a really nice stone in it and you can also see the lion’s head from Berimond. It is a real and authentic sword and it is heavy, it’s really heavy!  It is something really, really special and we are giving that away for the best player during the Battle for Fury’s Blade.

So make sure you’re going to play from May 7th to May 30th! To talk a little bit about where the design for that blade came from: Incidentally by the same artist, that did the shield and the key artwork, so we’ll get to that in a bit of a second.         

So we have a ton of stuff, we have cool decorations, we have intermediate rewards in between every stage with boosters for the upcoming event, also a couple of construction items. There is a lot of that in there and as said the main prizes: the shield, the sword and the artwork signed by the team. That’s something really, really special and unique stuff, which we are handing out.

So on the left you can see the sword that was created by our artist Vera. This was one of the items from one of the Berimond reward sets that we created. And we felt, that this particular design would translate quite nicely into the actual sword itself, which it did. And as you can see, it is a pretty faithful adaptation of the actual design, so that’s pretty cool! So the guys at Man at Arms did a really nice job! If you have not seen the video yet, then check out the Awe Me Channel on YouTube and have a look at how they craft our sword.  

Let us hop right into the art creation. We have some stuff prepared, which we would really like to show you, so here we go: So we showed you the actual framed key visual a few moments ago - we show it again in a minute - but i thought it would be interesting to show you some of the initial sketch work that we did, before we arrived at the eventual key visual. One of the things that we wanted to do, was to really kind of explore the ideas of how we are going to represent this sword and this shield, so obviously these two things were very important for us, in particular the sword. It was a case of how we are going to represent this, so we looked at various kind of compositions, looking at different kind of character stances, looking at the composition of where the character is going to be in the frame or that kind of thing. To look at something that was cool, interesting, dynamic and also something that would tell some kind of story. So on the left you can see a whole bunch of black and white thumbnail sketches and these are really a nice tool for us to just come up with some idea quickly, to explore a lot of these compositional ideas and then from there we take some of our favorites and start playing around with colors. So the ones on the right side - this is where we put some color in and see what this does with the composition and whether this helps it or whether or not that actually is not working that good. These were produced by one of our artists Merel. This is a great sequence of sketches, really, really nice!  Ultimately - if we go to the next ones - these were the ones again produced by Vera and you can probably recognize one of the initial sketches for the final artwork that we used. Again, Vera took the same approach. So we are looking at different compositions, dynamic character stances, mood and all that kind of thing and again exploring just in black and white, quickly coming up with sketches. I think there is some kind of a common thread: the two on the left and the one on the top right. These are the ones, that took us to our eventual image. Our favorite one from that Vera worked up into a color sketch. So now this is looking very familiar, but this is still very sketchy. But we really liked this, we really felt that this was the direction that we would like to go. So this is really focussing in on the sword and you can also see the shield on his back as well, so it’s a very dramatic-, fiery shot and then we go to the final piece itself. So this is the actual painting itself that’s been framed and it is a really nice painting! It’s got a whole bunch of mood in it, there’s some really nice detailing on the metal work, on the helmet and along the sword and Vera did a really nice job with it! We are really proud of this piece, this is a nice piece!

For those who might be curious about it: How long does it take to create such an artwork?                                                                                                            

The thumbnails took respectively round about a day and sometimes it goes around a little bit more, if there is any further kind of iterations. And for the final piece of art, i think that was around 3 - 3 and a half days. And you can see in the background that some of our guys took the artwork that we did and applied some nice funky animations to it, which gave it another level altogether, which is nice.          

[Talking about the decorations]

So this one, “The fury forge” was created by Merel and as you can see you got the shield and the sword and we just wanted to make some interesting shrine sort of thing, with these elements that remind one of a shrine. It’s like a sculpture so we wanted to carry on that way with the other decorations. We took a similar approach, but we went for the full on conversion into an actual stone sculpture, which was a really nice take by Francois! The nice thing about this one [“The fury’s tomb”] is that you got an additional sense of scale with the trees and stuff, which gives you a natural and realistic kind of feeling.

And then with the other one [“The stone of rising fury”] it’s a variation on the previous one, which is slightly different, with a little bit different kind of trees’ color and a slightly different decorational arrangement on the sword itself. Some really nice work by the guys!        

Twitch Stream Question: Top 3 servers reward

Yeah the Top 3 servers of Empire and the Top 3 servers of Empire: Four Kingdoms will get the decoration. So there is no split in between the games like that.

We will always produce new decorations like that for the game as well. The ones for the Battle of Fury’s Blade are really special and i don’t want to reveal too much, but there will also be similar events in the future where we will also have really specific decorations and rewards for those events as well.  

Twitch Stream Question: Top 1000 reward

For Top 1000 players we will have intermediate rewards as well after each stage, so you will get something as well, but no decoration to be honest.   

Let’s get back to the event overview. So just that everybody is aware of, because we were already briefly talking about it: Keep in mind to really take part! On a daily basis we will have the rankings from May 8th on our Community HUB (that’s https://empire.community/language/en/ as our URL). We will share the intermediate results there, we will also have a daily livestream from next week Tuesday on (8th of May). During that livestream we will also give you each day a number and those people who are actively watching our livestream and also the uploads of the livestream later on can collect the correct number from May 7th to May 30th on. We will then give away some nice stuff as well for those people who get the correct number. We will probably have up to 10 prizes to give away. So again: Take part, watch our stream, look at the content we are creating; there is also something in addition that you can win, which is really something special as well!

About the event itself: We were also briefly talking about that. On stage 1 we have the points from the long term point event. For stage 2 we will have the Battle for Berimond and stage 3 then the Shapeshifter coming up, where the best players can compete against each other. But there are only winners no losers, so even if you don’t make it into the Top 1000 or later into the Top 50 for each game, we have still that classic structure around, that everybody will get the intermediate rewards after each stage and everybody will win something: Either Top 3 decorations for the top servers or the other decorations for the other servers. So anybody who’s playing during that time frame is a winner, there are no losers in this type of event for everybody will get something.

And again: the sword is very cool and really something unique! It is a very special thing and we have never done something like this before, so we are really looking forward to see from next week on, who’s gonna be able to fight for the sword and all the other prices we are handing out during that time! And in regards to the sword: There is only one of these in existence!        

As said from next week on the event itself starts at the 7th, that’s Monday and from Tuesday on we will have everyday the intermediate results, except for next Thursday (10th of May), because that is a holiday in Germany, so that’s the only day where we won’t have the results ready for you. For all the other days you will get an update on where you are standing in the current ranking to make sure that everybody is on track of what’s going on and we will provide as much information about the event as possible during the next couple of days.