We released our updated road map today that includes the areas of focus we will be working on over the coming months. Read for more details and stay tuned for our upcoming patch next week. Read more: Design Statement and Road Map
When we will see the first of these improvements? Q4 2020? It's hard to read all the changes that were suggested from players months ago, before launch. Its good to see the focus of the game is moving in the right direction. Everyone can talk but only some can produce what they say.
The first few changes will be coming with our next patch, scheduled to go live sometime next week. That includes spawn scaling, runebooks, new village capture mechanics and updates to the in-game map.
The following points on the roadmap are going in this patch: Map information: The map will be enhanced to include much more information to users. This includes locations of mobs, dungeons and portals, political information such as cities and territory ownership, and better searchability, customization and performance. SPAWN SCALING The new spawn scaling mechanics added during beta will be expanded upon and encompass many more types of monsters and mob spawns. These mechanics increase respawn rate and total monster spawn count based on the performance of the group fighting them. We will also be expanding how the mechanic works to provide more of a challenge through mob stat changes and better loot. RUNEBOOKS These powerful books will allow you to place marked runestones within them so player can then teleport to those marked locations using charges. A runebook will be able to be charged by fusing portal shards into it, and a new equipment slot has been added making the runebook equipped undroppable on death. VILLAGES Village capture is changing to a “capture and hold” system. Each village will have three platforms that go live on village capture that users must claim and maintain control over in order to win. The loot received upon capture will also be gained instantly into your bank and will be getting a heavy increase to incentivize more conflict. Timers will be closer together to have villages going live more often and several villages will go live together to ensure no one party can capture them all. The following patch has these features lined up: CAPITAL CITY VILLAGE TELEPORTS To continue with our casual friendly changes we plan to allow users the ability to travel to a village before it goes live from capital cities. These will cost portal shards and will be open only for limited times, and is something that will be a great incentive for players that are blue. CHAMPIONS(Assets already made, some touch-ups needed and a few bugs which delayed them from this patch) Champions will be getting new unique weapons that drop exclusively from the chest found after defeating them. There is also a small chance that players will be able to acquire a crafting recipe that Artisan crafters will be able to consume, giving them the ability to make the item. In addition a new stat consumable will be added to their loot that allows users to bring some stats up to 120. We've been working on these items not just making words on a page, you can try out the new village and runebook mechanics on the public test server right now . --- Post updated --- Much of these ideas were already on our internal "roadmap" but with the pivot change we altered several features to align better with this direction. We have also changed our design process internally which was not working out as we wanted and resulted in too many ideas/directions which made it difficult to nail down a longer term roadmap. It worked fine before when we were exploring the codebase more(Which is why we made tons of smaller more contained changed across the whole game) but now we are focusing in on the long-term and aren't exploring so we need to focus more. This change will be prevalent in the coming months as we start knocking these items off the list, groundwork and design/asset creation has been done for many of them so we're primed to knock a lot of bigger tasks off in the next 3 months.
so Beta is over now ? I really like the Rune book change , also making Rune book Libraries that were so common in Ultima would be awesome too
The game will never stop changing and evolving, getting updates, new features and modifications to current features. We're not going to wipe anymore so yes it's live/launched but the game will never be "Done". Not quite sure how to classify it really heh, an MMORPG is never really out of Beta until a company stops adding to it really.
Love every single thing mentioned on the road map! Look forward to change and new players this brings! Props
I very much like that you have taken away the full loot system for noobies. That should have been done ages ago. The only problem is, how do you intend to bring new players in? You should really consider moving into a F2P model and making your money on micro transactions. It's near impossible to suddenly bring in an influx of new players for a large majority of these changes to actually matter.
The question everyone has is... Are these changes enough to bring people back, keep them back, and bring in new players?
I think they have confirmed that they plan to take the game into a F2P direction with restrictions for free players and Game Time Tokens/$$$ serving as the subscription to unburden those restrictions. It would be necessary for a Steam release because the sub system as it was just doesn't fly anymore.
I agree, you can't have a mostly outdated game, and one this difficult at that, and expect people to pay a sub.
@Andrew An interesting theme in seeing with many of your roadmap plans is giving incentives to stay blue. For instance, traveling safely through the portal hubs, which will allow them to travel more cheaply as well. Here's a blasphemous thought and expansion upon new player protection: the more blue you are, the less EQUIPPED you lose, but everything in your bag is lost, period. For instance a full blue player will keep, randomly, 3 equipped items. This idea will not only simplify things for new players -because its an easy concept to realise that killing other players means im ready for the more advanced parts of the game- but will give incentive for players to stay blue AND opt in to faction based warefare which will mend the restriction from staying blue, which is that blue players tend to get less pvp because they are blue.
A lot of road maps... I'll check these systems out when implemented. Runebooks could be very interesting. The biggest DISLIKE that I found is the capital portal system is time based... Don't limit travel ... Cause w/ my luck and I'm sure many peoples luck, you will always want to use the capital travel system and it'll be locked down
