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

The Latest Game Progress

• Making of Longfall Woods
• Making of South Paladis Scenes: Middle Downs and South Broken Road (cont)
• Post Episode 1 Content Plan – Initial Draft

Making of Longfall Woods

[A Dev+ Forum Post by Chris “Sea Wolf” Wolf]

Hey folks, today I’ll be sharing some screenshots of Longfall Woods, which is an adventure scene near Blood River. These dark woods draw inspiration from mythical forests such as Fangorn Forest from Lord of the Rings, or The Forbidden Forest from Harry Potter. In the scene, you can find a camp of vigilantes, a spider den, some haunted ruins, and a survivalist family of elves who have been hiding from the vigilantes.

The Woods

The Vigilante Camp

The Ruins

The Survivalists Home

The Spider Den

As always, feedback is welcome!

Chris Wolf
Level Designer

Making of South Paladis Scenes: Middle Downs and South Broken Road

[From a Dev+ Forum Post by Esteben “SorcerousSteve” Zaldivar]

Hey guys! SorcerousSteve here to give you an update on Middle Downs. This week I focused on terrain polish, finishing up the interior of the mounds, and also did some spawning. The Mound of the Sun can be seen below before night time, alongside this there are 4 satellite burial mounds within walking distance nearby…

Interior of the Drovak Mound:

Ancient cave drawings depicting hunts, fauna, and sun worshiping line the inside of the Mound of the Sun:

The Oldon Mound and its collapsed roof bring in light from the starry sky:

Des Morte Bog cuts through the Middle Downs, a burial mound can be seen on a nearby cliff:

Hope you guys are looking forward to exploring the burial mounds of the Middle Downs this R45!

South Broken Road

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

Hi again all! Here are a few more shots as we wrap up progress (for this release) on South Broken Road! Thanks as always for following!

Rolling Farmland (infested with Plunderers):

A travelling minstrel makes camp for the evening:

Looking forward to meeting all you travelers along the road!

Post Episode 1 Content Plan – Initial Draft

[From a forum post by Starr “Darkstarr” Long]

Greetings Avatars,

The beauty of being an online game is that we can continue to expand the game well beyond the confines of the launch of our first episode. That means we get to dream big! Here is a first draft of everything we would like to add to the game post launch of Episode 1. Some of these will get included in regular monthly updates (yes we plan to do those forever) while some will be part of future episodes. These are presented in no particular order and some are better explained than others.

This was formerly known as the “2 Year Plan” (as made famous by my tongue in cheek vocal rendition in the last telethon) but as we continued to add features to it we quickly realized that there was more to this than might fit in just 2 years so we have renamed it to simply “Post Episode 1 Plan”. This also of course includes the plans for further episodes.

Please note that none of these are committed features and none of these have final designs of any kind. This is just a very early draft that is the result of some quick brainstorms and ideas we accumulated when we are not crazy busy trying to finish Episode 1.

Enjoy!

• Episodes 2 – 5:
  • New Land Masses with new adventure areas and new towns per episode
  • New 40+ hour storyline per episode
  • New opportunities to settle Player Owned Towns and Player Owned Lots in the new land masses
• Navigable Ships: Boats that can move around in water of multiple sizes. This includes boats previously marked as either decorations (ex. Longboat) or homes (ex Pirate Galleon)
  • Ship to Ship Combat: Be able to shoot cannons and catapults and other ranged weapons between ships
  • Sea Monsters: Creatures that can be fought at sea either while swimming, from shore, or while on ships.
  • Ocean Scenes: fully oceanic scenes including random encounters while taking boats between destinations.
• Elven Playable Race: At character creation players can choose elves as a race. Elves will have slightly different stats than humans and different customization options
• Flexible Lot Placement: Allows you to put your house wherever you want on your lot, not just the default location.
• Player Owned Dungeons: Connects to bottom floor of basement or perhaps a placeable Dungeon entrance in a POT. Imagine a much larger basement specifically tailored to be an adventure space vs. a living space.
  • Placeable Spawners: imagine harvesting spider eggs and then being able to place them in corners for unwary visitors
  • Placeable Traps: imagine crafting an exploding chest!
• Wildlife Scaling in Town Scenes: As population in town rises the amount of wildlife decreases.
• Integrate Discord into Game:
  • Voice chat channels for Party, Guild, Town
  • Option to use discord in game
• True First Person: with visible hands/weapons
  • Limited VR Support: Not a full VR conversion, just support for stereo rendering to enhance first person mode
• Console / Controller Support: Expand beyond computers to consoles including full support for playing with a controller. Because we are using the Unity engine and we are scene based this is not as challenging as it might be otherwise. The biggest issue is reconfiguring the interface to work with a controller. Plans would be to expand to at least XBox One and PS4.
• Map Improvements:
  • Notes on Maps: Ability to annotate maps
  • Fog of War: Hide where you haven’t been
• Character Customization: More facial features, tattoos, scars, face types, body types
• Animal husbandry: An expansion of Agriculture to raise animals including chickens, pigs, cows, and sheep (and maybe more!)
• Companion Mobile App: A companion app that allows direct interaction with a selection of game features including the following:
  • Vendor Controls
  • Crafting
  • Chat
  • Maps
  • Mail
  • Player to Player Trade
  • Rent & Taxes
  • Town/Lot Management
• Rent Automatic Payments: Ability to set and collect automatic payments with tenants
• Pack Animals: Pets that are mobile containers. Mules, Llamas, Camels
• Mounts: Slightly faster than running, perhaps less drain on focus.
  • Mounted Combat: Expansion of mount system to allow fighting while mounted.
• Underwater Swimming: Ability to swim under water
• Lot Trading: Ability to securely trade lots between players in-game with option to include the currently placed house and basement as well.
• Crafting:
  • Interactive Crafting: Explosions, Mini-games,
  • Decoration Color changes via Materials / Dyes: Change the color of decorations either through different materials (ex. Different wood types) or dyes (ex. Cushions on a couch)
  • More Skills
  • More Recipes
  • More Patterns
  • Tree Visual Variations
  • More materials to craft with
  • More enchantments and masterwork effects
• Place Items Anywhere: with timers and limits (per user & per scene)
• Climbable Ladders/Ropes/Chains/etc: With actual animations
• More POT Templates:
  • Urban: Denser city style template
  • Underground: more variants
  • Mountain Port City
  • Floating City: Built in the style of Isle of Storms
• Expanded Quests
  • More side quests
  • Daily quest system
  • More tools to allow player created quests in game
• Expand Vendor System
  • Expand purchase order system
  • More detailed permissions and controls: being able to remove single items, set limits for specific people, etc.
• Customizable Convos for Vendors/POT NPCs/Servants: Build custom conversations for your NPCs
• Expanded Item / Container Permissions: Add a lot more customizable rules and permissions to items and containers (ex Only Take 1, Only Put 1, open only X times, open only during these hours, etc.)
• Guild vs. Guild Warfare Improvements:
  • Minimum Size Requirement
  • Limited to just the guilds involved (i.e. a big duel)
  • Set Win Conditions / Place Bets / Set time limits
  • Guild Warfare locations
• Companions / Hirelings / Mercenaries Improvements
  • Customizable Companions / Hirelings: Give them gear to use
  • Companions / Hirelings in Online Mode: Blocks summons for balance purposes?
• LFG system
  • Register at a lunar rift and allow optionally setting of preferred party role (healer, tank, dps), scene type (PVP, dungeon, outdoor), play duration (0-1hour, 1-4 hours, 4+ hours).  Show name as color coded using monster rules (more than 40 levels below = green, etc)
• Raid groups: Party of Parties
  • Up to 8 groups of 8
  • All in raid share a /raid channel
  • Those in raid behave as if they are in the same party for rules governing friendly effects.  So no damaging each other if PVP, players can heal/buffs others in raid
  • UI for viewing raid members.
• Tamed Pet leveling
  • Gain a bonus based on how much experience you’ve gained while they are summoned
  • Lose % of experience on res
  • Gain bonuses to stats, level based on how many experience they have
• PVP Improvements
  • Level balanced PVP scenes (all players are set to same level and max skills caped) (R45)
  • Ransom system improvements (larger ransom options)
  • Thief system for low risk PVP for casuals
  • Duel with wager: Player to player trade like interface, put up items, both agree to start duel, winner takes all.
• Siege/Defense Scenarios for PVE & PVP
  • Goal based challenges
  • Teams split by guild/party/virtue
  • Rewards through title, virtue, items, consumables, buffs, and skill unlocks
• Temporary Title system:
  • Allows for players to gain titles but only for a fixed amount of time
  • Opens up options for temp titles from being the guy who got the killing blow on a boss, winner of a tournament, getting more than X PVP kills in some amount of time, etc
• Item History and Leveling
  • Track small category of stats per weapon (Killing blows, largest single hit, total damage done, kills by small set of categories)
  • Small bonuses granted based on achievements in various categories
• New Creatures: We plan to steadily add new creatures including more that can be tamed. The below list is just a sample of ideas. We also plan to continue improving AI and visuals of existing creatures.  Troll should be considered the minimum baseline for a normal AI.
  • Wild Boar
  • Drakes: small tameable dragons
  • Hydra: Lots of heads, lots of attacks, avoid the business end and be sure not to make more heads for it!
  • Doppelganger: Looks like and gains many attributes of players in scene
  • Wendigo: Every point of damage it does makes it more stronger as it consumes your life
  • Yeti: Snow troll. Think troll with ice magic that uses stealth
  • Landvaettir: Powerful spirits that guard powerful resource nodes.
  • Emela-ntouka: Massive rhino like creature, paralyzing growl, and incredibly dangerous straight line attack so don’t stand in the open!
  • Door Mimic: Sticky handle = long root
  • More Clockwork Creatures: Can be looted for clockwork parts
  • Smoke Panther: Lives in darkness, stealth, bleeding attacks, and cancels friendly buffs.
  • Multiple new bosses: Not named here for secrecy reasons
• Combat:
  • Rework animation state machine to allow for smoother animation transitions
  • Weapon type vs armor type: Impact/Cutting/Piercing vs Cloth/Leather/Chain/Plate breakdown
  • Combos with Heat system
  • Stacking equivalent with Heat system (R45)
  • Expand combo system to include at least 5 combos for each school and combos of combos
  • More refinement on the current resistance system
  • Ammunition types
  • More Ranged Weapons: Flamethrower, Tesla Gun, Gas Gun, Blunderbuss, Net Gun, etc
• UI Overhaul
  • Everything detachable and movable on screen
  • Chat as separate windows from game window
• Lua Scripting
  • Expose limited set of functionality to Lua scripting for player added features
  • Expose simp
• Repeatable Puzzle Based Quests/Unlocks
  • Mastermind like puzzle mechanics to fix items, complete quests, unlock highly desirable game features (Blood Bay Housing?)
  • Scale in difficulty due to number of elements, difficult to acquire elements, and destructibility of the elements
• More POT and House Decoration Tools: More tools and polish to the ability to place decorations in homes and Player Owned Towns
  • Align to adjacent lot
  • Snap to Grid
  • Multi-Select and Multi-Move
  • Fencing Tools: Snapping together automatically and selecting complete sets to surround your lot.
  • Water lots fully water based
  • Water lots on docks
  • Toggle “View all Lot Markers & Lot Boundaries”
  • Ability to rename teleporter signs
• Skills
  • Expand existing combat and magic trees
  • Add tier 5 and 6 options for all spell trees

The list is also posted in the forums. If you do not see a feature that you hoped you would then please feel free to suggest it in the forums and we will consider adding it to the plan.

Enjoy!

Starr Long
Executive Producer