What is Abilities Simplified?

This is a revamp of our ability system that will make them easier to understand, more impactful to progress, and position it as a key element of the Stumble Guys experience.

What’s changing with abilities?

• Reducing the number of levels from 15 to 9

  • With fewer levels, each upgrade will feel even better. Current progress will be mapped to the new system, so no power is lost.

• Removal of stat choices at each level

  • Each time an ability is upgraded one, two or three of the stats will improve

  • As the player upgrades to higher levels the impact of upgrading will increase

• Changes to final level effect

  • No ability will have an effect that only unlocks at max level.

  • Depending on the ability this effect will either be applied across all levels or will be removed entirely.

• Removal of visual variants

  • Each ability will have one consistent visual that’s used in screens and during matches

• Updated UI/UX to focus on most important information about each ability

  • The ability stats screen are also being simplified to provide a more digestible summary of what the ability does and how it improves with each upgrade

• Ability loadout now accessible from main menu

  • Equipped abilities are visible on the main menu, providing a shortcut to equip or upgrade different abilities

• More abilities and more opportunities to upgrade

  • Each month we will release a new ability to the game, and provide more keys and tokens across the tracks of the Stumble Pass to give more players more opportunities to expand their ability collection.

What will not change about abilities?

• Ability Tokens will still be required to upgrade abilities, and they’ll now be more available in the new Stumble Pass

• Each ability will still have the same three stats that can improve (cooldown, and two others distinct to each ability)

Ability upgrading

How will upgrading abilities work?

• Ability Tokens are still the only requirement for each upgrade

• With each upgrade the stats of the ability will improve

• Lower level upgrades may only improve one stat, but higher level ones may improve two or three

Visual improvements

What changes are we making to the main menu?

• Four ability slots will be shown on the main menu

• Making it easier to see what you have equipped, and whether any of your abilities can be upgraded

• Provides a shortcut to screens where you can change or upgrade your equipped abilities

• Placing the abilities on the main menu alongside the Stumbler will also reinforce that abilities are a key part of the game

What changes are we making to the Ability screen?

• New icons will make it easier to see where to go in the game to get abilities

• Simplifying the presentation of ability stats by:

  • Replacing hard-to-understand numbers with simple progress bars for each stat

  • Updating stat descriptions to be clearer to understand

• New ceremonies for unlocking and upgrading abilities will give a celebratory feel to these exciting milestones.

Why are we doing this?

• Ability upgrading at the moment can be slow, and each level of upgrade does not always feel impactful

• The system asked you to make choices (which stat to upgrade) causing some confusion

• System was harder for new players to understand

• The new seasonal cadence of ability releases will provide players with fun and varied ways to engage with the game each month

Conversion to new system

When Ability simplified rolls out, any abilities you own will have their existing level converted to the new 9 level system. The level your ability is converted to will depend on its existing level.

FAQ

• What happens if I had an ability maxed out at level 15?

  • An ability maxed out on the existing ability upgrading system will be converted to a level 9 (our new max level) on the new system.

• My ability is level X on the existing system, will I still be that level?

  • Because the new system has fewer, more impactful levels your starting level may not directly match your previous one, but your overall strength will remain aligned.
    

• Why have you removed all the different visual variants?

  • We know that some players enjoyed the opportunity to change how abilities looked. However, to streamline the upgrade system we took the decision to remove this option to keep focus on the increase in power that upgrading provides.

• Why can’t I choose which stat upgrades like I used to be able to?

  • We know that some players enjoyed getting to choose how their ability upgraded but as part of simplifying the system and making it accessible to more players we’ve streamlined how upgrades are applied.

• I’ve chosen to prioritise stat X when upgrading my abilities, will I lose progress?

  • You may see that stat reduced, while other stats have increased. We have designed the new upgrade path to ensure that at each level the overall effectiveness meaningfully increases.

• Where will I be able to obtain Ability Keys and Tokens?

  • Ability Keys and Tokens will primarily be available across our new Stumble Pass, but there will be further opportunities to earn them in features like Stumble Journey and Ranked.

• Where have the final level effects gone?

  • Some of the older abilities in the game only unlocked their full effect at max level. Our goal with these changes was to make progression more impactful at all levels, rather than being focused on a single end-point. On reviewing the effects we found that some were overpowered, while others were not behaving as intended. So for some abilities the effect is present at all levels and for others we have removed the effect entirely.

• Why can’t I see how much each stat is increasing by?

  • We found that raw stat values and small incremental improvements weren’t always easy to understand or compare. So we’ve updated the UI to visually represent how close each stat is to its maximum potential at each level. We understand some players want to see exact stat values, but this update will make upgrades easier to understand at a glance, and keep progression consistent across the system.

• Why did you change cooldown times?

  • Our goal is to make progression feel more impactful. Previously upgrades to cooldown were small enough that they did not feel meaningful. By adjusting how cooldown scales we have increased the impact provided by each upgrade while max level performance remains unchanged.