Hello Folks
As always, a huge shout out to our awesome community for helping us make our dream game. We know things are a bit grim atm, but our spirits are up, and we’ve been making awesome progress.
Roadmap Update – Stage Zero
Things have been a bit quieter since we posted our first major update. However, since then we’ve been making great progress, specifically towards FPS optimisation, and Crash fixing.
A big goal of Moxie and KZ’s work has been improving performance in a range of key areas. As such a big issue that was impossible to solve previously, has related to how the game handles VRAM. Anyone who played will know Renown makes a pc chug away.
We’ll have a blog in detail about this topic coming soon as we hit internal milestones.
Map Flow Redesign – Silver Mines, Locked POIs and Keys
One area that’s been receiving a lot of love relates to our work redesigning how the game flows around the survival map. I’d just like to say another huge thank you to everyone on our discord for their ongoing feedback and discussion regarding this topic.
Ultimately this is a range of changes which seek to promote more activity outside of the players base and its general area. Our goal is to make it so players can still get started and build a base without too much trouble, but to upgrade and raid, they’ll need to get more out and about.
Silver Mines – Gathering redesign
One of the big changes is the inclusion of the Silver Mines and changes to how silver spawns on the map. Previously all the players had to do for silver was to farm outside their base in a boring and repetitive loop.
Now four silver mine sites have been opened across the map. There will still be smaller amounts of silver spawning in the wild. However, if players want large scale amounts (like that for a big raid), they’ll need to compete over the choke points and confines of the mine locations.
We’ll be carefully monitoring how this change directly affects the raiding balance and making corrections if we’ve gone to far into the scarcity direction.
Locked POIs and Keys:
A key area we’re playing with at the moment, are major overhauls for the Points of Interest. Currently we’re doing it slow and steady, step by step but our goal is to redesign each of the points, so they have clearer and better siloed loot locations.
We’ve been using the term “Loot Silos” to refer to new gates and challenges we can add, which allows us to split up the loot so drops can be higher value, with higher risk attached.
Given previously all the points of interest had a very flat set of loot, we’re starting with the classic three tier key system, and related locked gates across all the points. These will be Bronze, Silver and Gold (I know very original) which players will be able to find, and which gain the player access to specific loot locations all over the map. We’re hoping this ties in well with the Ferryman system added in the Major Patch #1.
We’re very keen to hear folks feedback on this one so we can get the exactly correct balance of risk/trouble and the rewards attached to them.
NPC Life overhaul
Another area we’ve been wanting to do for ages is an overhaul on NPC life and the addition of NPC faction gameplay.
The NPC Life work is entirely focused on giving the NPCs a facelift when it comes to how they move, talk and handle themselves. Currently all the NPC’s act like mindless robots. We’ll likely do a few iterative versions of both of these systems as we make them more complex.
The first version aims to add in “Civilian/Non-Fighting” NPCs. This then allows us to redistribute the more code and server performance-heavy “fighting” NPCs around the map to complement the above-mentioned Key system addition. Alongside this, it should help the Points of Interest feel more lived in and give players a bit of a more entertaining time going the full “Pillaging” route on towns.
We’ll have another dev blog on the way in the next week or so. In it we’ll be going into more detail about contained fixing/optimisation, more content and map redesigning, alongside details about our Free to Play Session coming soon.