Major Patch: The Celestial Throne & Minor Patch 23728
Zenith: The Last City DLC · published
Hi everyone! We have a number of juicy updates, so we’ll just jump right in.
The Celestial Throne Update
We are thrilled to announce our first major update since launch: The Celestial Throne. The update will have dozens of hours of new content, systems, and quality of life enhancements we have been eagerly working on (like left-handed controls!). We’re aiming to launch The Celestial Throne by the end of June.
Emerging from the violent storm essence that kept it hidden for the last 60 years, a flying castle hovers down near the surface once more.
The Celestial Throne Update will have:
- Six new instanced dungeons filled with interactive puzzles, traps, adversaries, and an abundance of treasure
- Instance matchmaking for parties of 4-8 players
- Quality of life enhancements like left-handed controls & much more!
We’ll unveil more of the epic end-game raids in the coming weeks. We’re also coming up with ways to grant early access to special members of the community and will share details soon.
Developer AMA on Tuesday, May 31
We’re hosting an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on our Discord on Tuesday, May 31 to answer any burning questions about the spicy major update. Join our Discord here: https://discord.gg/zenith. We hope to see you there!
Minor Patch 23728 - Core Architectural Upgrades & Bugfixes
Patch Type: Minor
Patch Number 23728
Release Date: 5/27/2022 at 10:30AM PST. Servers will be down from 10:30AM-12PM PST to prepare for the patch. *UPDATE: Servers will be down for an additional hour, and will be back up by 1:00PM PST. Thank you for your patience!*
The next minor update is here and comes with core architectural upgrades to Zenith's backend system, bugfixes, and a couple feature updates.
Architectural Upgrades to Support the Future of Zenith
In this update, we made much needed core architectural upgrades to Zenith's backend system. A strong and robust backend architecture is crucial to an interconnected real-time experience like Zenith. The upgrades will allow us to implement more of the interactive gameplay features that we've all been dreaming of, plus improve gameplay and networking performance over time. As a whole, this will improve our behind the scenes work and "quality of life" as developers so we can build the game faster too.
Breaking Changes
- 30 godstones limit per ability
- While we won't be removing any existing player's godstones, you won't be able to pick up additional godstones of that ability until you trash them.
- For convenience, we've included a clear godstones button that will remove all low level godstones with no XP from your inventory.
Resolved Issues
- Fixed several issues with referral points. In some cases the number of points shown in game was incorrect (too low), and in other cases the number was correct but the rewards did not unlock in the store.
- Fixed an issue with party members sometimes not being able to leave a party after previously disbanding a party.
- Guild members can no longer promote a party member above their own role.
- Fixed bug where the player was able to climb in the air after an object that was currently being held de-spawned.
- Fixed quest journal sometimes not appearing until the player switched tabs back and forth.
Feature Updates
- Add a button to remove all low rarity godstones with no XP on them.
- Capped the amount of godstones a player can hold to 15 (this will be increased to 30 for the public release due to player feedback!)
Testing Philosophy
We wanted to add a bit of color to how thoroughly we're testing this. Although there are no significant user-facing changes in this patch, it represents a significant code change in the backend, as such we're taking all steps possible for a small team to reduce the risk of disruption when we go live, namely:
- Hired 6 external QA testers and 1 new internal QA lead to test these builds non-stop leading up to launch
- Have been testing with 40 trusted community members on early versions of the PTR for the past several weeks
- Built a new phased rollout system that will let us dynamically increase the percentage of users on the new systems overtime.
- Several internal playtests where the entire team tested and reported bugs
- Public load tests to stress test our server tech
Despite all this -- there's always a chance that we may experience some unknown bugs on launch day, please don't worry, we plan on resolving every single one of them as quickly as we can, and also helping any people that are affected by such changes.
If do you come across any bugs, we encourage you to report them here: https://feedback.zenithmmo.com/boards/bug-reports