Hello Vanguard!
It's been too long since we've talked. Holy smokes it's nice to see you again! You guys have to visit more often and at the very least, please call once in a while to let us know how you're doing. Heck, we never hear from you anymore!
I was driving to work this morning and I was thinking how I was going to wrap up all of the details into a letter that really represented the good work that we're doing right now. The same thoughts I have had for about a week now but haven't carved out the appropriate time to write it down in a consumable format. What I was really doing was over thinking the process. Not to simplify things to the point of having no depth but I think by the time you read down to the bottom, all you really want to know is what we're working on and how does that affect the game, you, your character and your play experience.
"Under Promise and Over Deliver"
This process can be a convoluted progression though (and I have many people here that will back me up on this). "Don't give out dates!" "Don't give out quantities!" "Don't promise anything!" These are the comments that remind me not to stick my head out too far or it will get lopped off. Internally and externally. Holy Smokes, I'm afraid of my own shadow at the moment. I'm afraid that if I promise you the sword of 1,000 lies or potentially a feature that was promised by a previous developer/producer/<fill in the blank>, I will be setting myself up for failure. We all know what happens when promises are made without any thought to implementation. That's why I'm NOT going to tell you a single thing about what we're working on right now. That's right - Nothing! How do you like those apples?
But, if I were to say something, it might look like this....
Update 4
Everyone knows that we just published Update 3 at the end of the year and the next update can only be Update 4 by chronological standards. ...And also, we may have already stated that we've been working on Update 4 so there isn't anything I can take back now and say we aren't working on Update 4. So yes, "I" let the cat out of the bag. Number 4 follows number 3...shhhh!
"Put a stake in the ground"
Seriously though, I made mention that we are working on a few things in a previous post and we are targeting the end of February to publish it live. Maybe I should not have done that but let's be honest about this for a minute... Below, you'll read through some of the items we are working on. If by some unexpected reason one or all of those items are not ready at the end of February, we will publish without it or hold off the update a few more days until it is done right. End of February - We have to have a target or we'll never hit the mark. If we miss the mark, we'll find out why and correct for the next time.
"We're past the point of publishing something that is incomplete"
Bug Fixing
We're making a conscious effort towards bug fixing, polish, and optimizing the game. That's it in a nutshell. Me in a nutshell. Without quantifying, we're spending a good portion of our time fixing bugs, putting polish on the game and increasing performance. Goal for the team is to put out an update every two weeks that contains nothing but these changes. We're targeting to fix a lot of things at one time, each and every time including targeted fixes to increase performance in APW to say the least.
Permanent Flying Mounts
Stolen from the desk of Lead Designer, Salim Grant:
The griffons of Telon are in trouble. An unknown force has been stealing the magic known as hybrid magic from the griffons, causing them to die painful deaths. In order to stop this, King Targonor has formed a group known as Griffon Watch. Griffon Watch's task is to investigate and stop the evil behind these deaths. As a player you will assist the Griffon watch in their task. As you do so, you will gain ranks, titles, a necklace that increase in power as your rank does, and most importantly a griffon mount to call your own. This quest will send players into battle all over Telon destroying the denizens of areas like Rahz Inkur, Old Targonor, and Gorgalok. There are also two solo boss encounters that will test your abilities as you use a flying mount to combat one of the bosses and play a mini game to defeat the other. When all is said and done you will have a flying mount to soar the skies high above Telon and if you can gather enough friends you can make that mount even more powerful.
Riftway Improvements
More information stolen from the design team
We will be making improvements to Riftways! We'll be placing Riftways in locations that are logical from the standpoint of content progression in order to increase accessibility and guide players from one content hub to the next. The goal isn't to supersede travel in the game as it is now by allowing too quick of travel to any location in the world at any given time. Vanguard is a realm of mounted travel by discovery and exploration. In the future, we may have additional abilities that assist in getting a party member from one area to another in order to group up faster for battle but let's see how this improvement helps towards that issue first.
We will be introducing players to the Riftway system a bit easier; a bit sooner and with a bit more intuitiveness. We'll be giving quests to new players that allow them to travel through the Riftway in order to get to regions similar in level in order to keep them in appropriate level ranged content.
Riftways will be more identifiable on the map and will be tiered and color coded by a level range to help players travel to content hubs equivalent to their own level.
Player Character Improvements / Helmets!!
We've talked about the improvements before but here is some information from the art and coding team on this subject.
For more than just the time we've been back from the New Year, art stepped up to the task of optimizing the player character skeletons. Also, we've had to re-weight and re-export all player character assets as a result of the skeletal optimizations and let's just say that the amount of assets and work put into this is pretty staggering.
On top of that, we've also managed to get helmets in, which is one of the benefits of the skeletal optimization. Sounds easy right? Well, here's a little breakdown of the work involved to put helmets into the game: A few dozen unique designs multiplied by two genders and then multiplied again by nineteen races. Not too shabby, eh? Do the math and you'll see that it is a great accomplishment by everyone involved.
Three Classes Revisited
During this next development cycle, we'll be revisiting three classes. The Druid, Dread Knight and Paladin.
In order to do a thorough job when revisiting and making changes to classes, we go through a series of steps to identify inconsistencies in most of the following areas: Solo, group and raid DPS; Usefulness in the solo, group and raid roles; Discrepancies between classes and their roles (perceived and real claims); and then we ask more questions along the way like: Do the abilities work as intended? Is the class fun and unique? Can we streamline the class to remove unintended features or non-features? Can we emphasize the strengths of the class further?
We use our own experiences playing these classes and/or talk to other team members to get feedback on previous line items. We run through a series of checks and balances on collected data and goals. We have class leads that give us feedback to consider when evaluating necessary changes. We read the forums to corroborate information and in the end, we make the changes, test it out and package it in an update for you.
That's enough about process so here are additional goals we had for ourselves when started to evaluate these classes:
Druid
* Low DPS compared to other caster classes
* Phenomena not being used toward the main purpose of the class (DPS) and not being used often enough
* Adding in some uniqueness
* Abilities that don't match the goal of the class
* Abilities that don't function correctlyDread Knight
* Add 2 handed tanking for uniqueness
* Fix broken abilitiesPaladin
* Integrate their class mechanic, Gift of Virtues, within their gameplay more seamlessly
* Differentiate combat forms
* Fix broken abilities
* Make sure abilities add to fun factor of the paladin
* Add wield preference type weapon and shieldI am going to reserve the right to not go any further here and punt the ball back to the designers who will go into more detail as we get closer to our update.
"That's not everything"
We have many more things we will be doing in the next few weeks and like the punt to design from above, I need to reserve my right to button my lip (before someone else does) on further changes and disclose that slowly over the next few weeks leading up to launch. Also, it will allow me some peace with the Community, PR & Marketing Teams because they love getting their hands on this stuff first J
Gold Farmers
You may have noticed a few posts recently on the boards regarding gold spammers. I just wanted to reiterate that we are taking these players very seriously and we are banning each and every account that we catch. I wanted to thank everyone for helping us as well by sending in your /petitions. This helps quite a bit and we will be taking extra measurements to step up the process in getting these headaches out of Telon.
Best of the Best
One of the things that we would like to do more this year is by giving you extra events that you can look forward to throughout the year. The Best of the Best style tournament is just one of those ways to get you to show off who you are in game
Starting next week, Customer Service will be running a Best of the Best style tournament on all servers, for all classes. Get your swords and spells ready folks, because this is going to be a battle until the death, with only one left standing! Read more on this on our News Section and good luck!
That is about it for the Producer's letter. Thank you for reading through it and I look forward to your comments.