Shroud of the Avatar – Update of the Avatar #245

Greetings Fellow Avatars! Here’s what we have for you in this week’s edition of Update of the Avatar:

Game Development


The Making of Northwest Blackblade Mountains

SPOILERS: For Release 46 the devs are reworking Blackblade Pass to establish a path through the mountains and underneath the lava that is Tier 2. This involves adding Tier 2 side paths in Southeast Blackblade Mountains and Northwest Blackblade Mountains that connect to the entrances to Blackblade Pass, as well as adding a Tier 2 bypass tunnel in Blackblade Pass itself.

Additionally, they have completely rebuilt Northwest Blackblade Mountains (it was previously a clone of another scene) and it now contains a devastated arid landscape of dragon bones, mesas, sand, and possible dragon encounters!

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Travis “Vas Corp Por” Koleski]

Here’s some early teaser shots of progress on un-cloning the Northwest Blackblade Mountains. Let me know what you think of them!

Thanks for following our progress! More Soon!

Travis “Vas Corp Por” Koleski
World Builder


R45 Postmortem Missed Questions Answered

The devs had alot of pages of questions left unanswered after the R45 Postmortem!  Here are the answers posted by them to the forums Wednesday.

 

Roxanne: Will we ever be able to craft blank paper?
Yes

Randbo: Will you fix the true bronze crafting tools. without them i get 29% exceptional chance with blessing and table. with them it drops to 27%. used to be the other way around.
This sounds like a bug that should be submitted to bug forums.

Viper_Poison: Can we get prosperity tools for ingot molds and other molds or recipe to craft our own which have more durability?
We do not plan to create any more prosperity tools at this time

Viper_Poison: Can you make the default for ingot molds and other molds to use the mold with the least amount of durability first? Often I have half used molds all over in my inventory and it doesn’t make sense someone would actually do that.
Yes we hope to fix this

Amarious – When I press F the Social window comes up. In that window are player names and locations that they are in. We can sort players by alphabetical order by clicking on the large white Player Name text. I was wondering if we could get large white text next to it that says Locations and when clicked on it it would put locations into alphabetical order just like when clicking on the Player Name text.
Yes we hope to provide this level of polish for this UI

Amarious – The great minds of the Kobold kind have made a device where… if you step in it and pull a lever.. after 30 seconds every item you wear that has taken durability loss is now repaired. It would act as a coin operated device costing much more than it would to use repair kits, the price of convince is a good one.. How likely is it that the Kobolds could create such a device and could we put it in our homes? (if you haven’t noticed from my questions I, for some reason, really find repairing my items very tedious.) : )
We will consider

Tiina Onir: As I’ve noted elsewhere, In completing the main questline it seems less “story complete” then “outline complete.” Will these be getting dialogue improvements, real choices, divergent paths, etc? (see https://www.shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/spoilers-observations-on-truth.97952/#post-863486 )
We are going to continually polish the questlines with additional side quests, dialogue polish, etc. For instance in R46 we are doing an overhaul of Malice to make it more accessible (removing creature respawn and having an NPC actively help you through the dungeon) while revisiting the dialog to make it clearer and easier to follow.

Tiina Onir: Can we go back to the quarterly telethons (even if that means multiple releases per telethon)? I feel like doing them at this rate is just contrived and we don’t get to see the items from one before the next. I’ve heard at least a little grumbling in the community about it as well.
I am very sorry that you feel this is contrived and that the delivery schedule is causing you frustration. Regarding the feedback on pacing if you look at historical delivery data we are actually delivering at the exact same pace that we delivered for the quarterly telethons, if not actually faster than those. Regarding “grumbling” we have actually gotten much more positive feedback on the monthly model than we have gotten negative feedback. Would be interested to know why you feel this is “contrived”. For us as we stated with the R44 Post Mortem we had a very concrete reason to move to a monthly format: shorter length meant more focus and less fatigue. Also worth noting 3 months of 4 hour telethons equals 12 hours every 3 months.

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