Greetings dear readers!
This is our first development update of the year so hopefully the year has started well for all of you!
First of all I'd like to say a warm thank you to all of you who had time to participate in the Alpha Test. Thanks to you I was able to gather lots of new ideas, bugs and ways of making the game better. Thank you!
Quite many new features have been added since the previous development update. Some of those were already seen during the Alpha Test but I'll write about them here anyways for those who did not get to try out them yet. Some new things were also added already after the test.
Player versus Player
PvP (Player versus Player) was first implemented just temporarily to kill time with few QA-team members but after a bit of testing it turned out to work pretty nicely which resulted in it getting some more work.
The PvP in the game is mostly free almost everywhere. However, players will need to "opt-in" to use it. This means that players will need to turn their PvP-mode on at certain NPCs inside non-pvp towns. After the PvP-mode is on it'll be possible to attack other players who have also turned their PvP-mode on. So it won't be possible to kill those who don't want to have anything to do with PvP.
Later on there'll be a rewards-system built around the PvP to make it more competitive. Also a tower defense-style battleground is planned. According to the feedback from the Alpha Teters the PvP-mode seemed to be rather entertaining already.
Water fade off
The water effect was updated slightly to make it fade out near the shorelines. This ended up making the shorelines a lot less blocky.
Oculus Rift-changes
The Oculus Rift-mode got several changes before, during and after the Alpha Test. The first visible change was the addition of a chat box. For now it only shows messages but later on there'll be an onscreen keyboard for typing messages as well.
During the Alpha Test some players didn't get their gamepads to work with the game. To address this issue the quickslot hotkeys were made to work with keyboard keys as well.
After the Alpha Test it also became obvious that some players wanted to access quickslots with their gamepad buttons. While there are easily more quickslots than there are buttons in average gamepads, it's now possible to bind quickslot to gamepad buttons. This will most likely work best if players bind only a couple of the quickslots to buttons and use the rest using the normal selector.
Small chat change
Another great suggestion during the Alpha Test was to mark the Chat prompt more clearly when it was active. The blinking writing cursor was often not noticed so all the key presses went to chat instead of the game.
The chat prompt is now highlighted with a white border whenever active.
What's next?
Next I'll be going through the rest of the suggestions and feedback received during the Alpha Testing. There were lots of new ideas for the user interface and the Oculus Rift-mode and also many other things.
After that the main focus will probably be on world building for a while. The plan is to get the huge capital city of the Empire somewhat accessible before the next Alpha Test. This may or may not happen.
Other possible additions are fast travelling between stables, passive skill trees, crafting and the Mage-character class. The order will be decided after a survey has been sent to all the Alpha Testers first.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned!
Dope Dope Dope Dope. THIS GAME LOOKS AWESOME!!!! I'm definitely getting this when I get my oculus rift.