Update Notes 17th July 2008
With this week’s update we wanted to start a new tradition in providing a more detailed commentary of the reasons behind the changes in the updates on the live servers. So welcome to the first update commentary where we will provide a little insight into the current update priorities and explain how we are looking to further improve the game experience for everyone.
Update focus
The focus of this update was to ensure that we could continue to resolve a good deal of the inconsistencies that we can see have been affecting the game-play and at the same time improve on some of the existing game systems so that they are more accessible and more intuitive. So this update sees a good few changes intended to deal with some of the most frequently raised queries from the community.
General Updates
The first set of these changes were generally aimed at what we termed ‘convenience’ fixes, things that have provided unneeded frustrations for players. Not the largest or most comprehensive changes by any means, but ones that we felt could have a direct influence on the general play experience.
- We have added more travel NPCs to the capital cities that allow travel to more locations in the game world.
- The price of the basic mounts has been reduced from 2 gold to 75 silver.
- The price of additional bags has been reduced by between 20% and 50%.
- It should no longer be possible to accidently sell your mount.
- A teleport item, the Totem of Origins is now dropping from boss encounters in group instances. You will be able to acquire it from locations throughout the game starting in the Black Castle. This totem teleports you to your home city once a day and can be used in addition to your path of Asura.
- It will be possible to get experience from ‘grey’ quests again.
Combat Changes
Combat is obviously the core part of the game, and we have been working flat out to ensure that we can address the game mechanic issues that have lead to some inconsistencies. It’s important for us that players feel they are in control of their combat actions and the changes in this update have been worked on to improve the flow and immediacy of the combat system.
- Clickable instant abilities will now actually be executed instantly rather then queued behind other attack animations.
- We have resolved the basic issues with discrepancies between male and female attack times. This has now been resolved for all standard attacks and we are moving onto looking into the combo animations as soon as possible.
- The issue with multi-hit combos ‘rolling back’ their damage if aborted should be resolved. You won’t lose any damage that has already been inflicted anymore.
- Combo finishers (the last attack in the combo chain) now have 25% extra range, which should aid in getting them to land in PvP.
- We have changed the way that requirement checks were processed when spell casting so that the target still needs to meet all the necessary criteria when the action finishes. In the case of range checks, the range of the spell gets an extra 25% bonus to its range when checking at the end of its cast.
GUI Updates
On of our early focus areas now that we have more and more feedback from players has been improving the GUI and this update sees a lot of new features and improvements in the GUI. This update sees a series of changes to improve the options available in the GUI, including
- A GUI element for emotes has been added. Press Y to access this window.
- A host of improvements to the Tradepost Interface to make it easier to use.
- The ability to toggle off the on-screen messages off is now available.
- The Friends/Guild Members window has been changed. It now works with tabs that sort friends by type: Guild Members, Friends, Offline members, and Ignored characters.
- Ranged combos will now appear red on your shortcut bar when your target is out of range, similar to spells
- Floating/movable character portraits were added. They can be enabled from Interface > HUD options menu.
Class Updates
In terms of class specific additions and changes our focus for this update was making sure that the abilities and spells had their effects and notifications improved where needed. A lot of abilities that were without appropriate visual effects have now had them added and a few abilities should be easier to use with clearer cooldowns. This has included optimizing a few of the spell and ability effects so that they don’t adversely affect client performance as much.
Quests, items and other fixes
We have managed to resolve a lot of quest, item and world bugs with this update. Ensuring that we keep resolving these issues will continue to be a major priority for us over the coming updates.
You can find the entire list of update notes here.
Content Updates
In closing we just wanted to provide a quick update on where the content addition plans are! We are very excited to be very close to introducing the first major new additions to content with coming updates. Of course our primary focus is the addition to the new PvP system changes that are being tested extensively at the moment. The systems are now all in place (and indeed you will start to see some of the first signs in the GUI in preparation for it in this update) and it’s now a case of ensuring that it’s fun and stable before we let it lose on the live dimensions.
In addition the live team has some of the new updates just about ready for your consumption. Within the next couple of updates you will see the latest revamped dungeon in the form of a new and improved version of the solo instance the Pyramid of the Ancients in Khopshef. With some great new challenges and quests the designers are really looking forward to seeing how you fare against their latest efforts.
