Weekly Dev Priorities: Feb 20, 2024

Shorter week here in Canada/Ontario as we celebrated “Family Day” yesterday. Our American team members are happy to get an unexpected bonus holiday mid Feb. 😝

Save File Hotfix

The top priority this week is a save file error caused when you try to save a game sometime after ambushing a patrol. Hotfix is coming out soon as we can prove it is resolved.

Mage Rivals

This is a mini-update with some new functionality while we work on the bigger planned update. It is being worked on by James, Zach, Tyler, and Nolan.

• Programming is complete on hunting down and fighting rival mages. Theoretically you can fight any mage, but right now the feature is only for rival mages.
  
• Programming is mostly done on NPC reactions.
  
• We’re about to go into internal playtesting and see how it feels before we set a date.
  

Update #3 Exploration

• ‘W’ recently posted some concerns about the NEW combat system. I believe most of their concerns will be addressed in the Exploration update:
  
  
  
  
  • We are caught in this weird limbo between combat can’t be too easy (becoming meaningless) and not too hard (early players can’t get anywhere). The real solution here is to properly scale the monster encounters between easy, medium, and hard based on where you are and progress in the world. This is what we are working on right now for exploration, to have the combat encounters feel better for your current stage.
    
  • Power damage scaling as you progress in the magic schools. This isn’t in right now as it breaks the game and trivializes combat.
    
  • Improve the spell unlocking process
    
  
  
• Programming finished on adding a new quest type: Unique Item. This allows us to make Excalibur or a jeweled crown, place it in the world, and have a quest to go find it.
  
• Programming continues on Elite named monsters and the ability to tie them to quests.
  
• Once Zach wraps up the NPC reactions for Rivals, he and Nolan are rolling onto implementing the Dynamic Quest system we prototyped late last year.
  

Thursday Patch

These are the main issues we're investigating right now for this week's patch:

• Dispel / Purge not properly dispelling some status effects
  
• Inn services sometimes not accessible (this may have been resolved in last week's patch, but we're investigating it some more)
  
• Blank status effect in combat (we think this is related to ambushing)