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Citan
02-17-2017, 11:43 AM
Next week's snapshot build will include Gazluk Keep, the new group dungeon. It will be the highest-level dungeon in the game for a while, so we're working hard on making it a fun place. It's intended for groups of five or six level 65-75 players. (Of course, if you have ultra-high-quality gear, you'll need fewer people.) It's a pretty dangerous place, and pretty chaotic, but I'm hoping that it's paced a little better than the other full-group dungeons. We'll see.

This is the third full-group dungeon. The first two are known in-game as "dark chapel" and "lab", short for "labyrinth". (To be clear, there are other dungeons where you can't solo, but they're mostly "small group dungeons", like the lower parts of Yeti Caves.) These big group dungeons are supposed to work like EQ2's "community dungeons" used to work: these are large areas that you know to go to if you want to group up. In fact, when there's a full server population, you should be able to enter the dungeon and ask in Local chat for a group, and have a decent chance of finding a pick-up group to join. For that to work, this dungeon needs to support multiple groups wandering through it at once. It's not a place where you run to the boss and call it quits, necessarily; your group can take one of several wandering paths to different areas, potentially staying a very long time, or a short time, depending on what the group members want to do.

This goal of supporting multiple groups is something I tried to accomplish with Dark Chapel and Lab -- they're both supposed to support multiple groups... but Dark Chapel proved to be too small for that, and feedback suggests Lab is too small too -- or perhaps just too linear. So this dungeon will be REALLY large, with a lot of branches and offshoots, so that two or three groups can wander through it. Groups will occasionally run into each other at crossroads, but they shouldn't get in each others' way too much. Of course, this is just the goal -- we'll need your feedback to make that work! And since we need that feedback about the dungeon's flow, only the first two floors of the dungeon will be included -- the lower two levels will wait a bit. But don't worry; the two existing floors are BIG, with many hundreds of monsters in total.

This is the second dungeon that Sandra ("srand") has helped on. She's worked on the layout and decorations, mostly, and though she's still learning the tools and getting up to speed with the process, I think the impact of her work will be clear if you compare Gazluk Keep to earlier dungeons. While it isn't exactly a "realistic" place (for instance, there's far more hallways than any real place would have -- they're needed for monster flow), it at least makes nods toward realism: it's clear that somebody (not me!) thought about what the orcs in here do every day, how they live, where they go. It's a slightly higher quality bar than I've tried to achieve on my own in the past, and hopefully that's something we can include in future dungeons, and maybe retrofit some of the weirder existing dungeons. (Not every little cave needs a backstory, of course, but some existing dungeons are kind of... inexplicable.)

Gazluk Keep is also being designed with an eye toward longevity: players will be returning here many times, hopefully, so they should find different things now and then. Part of what they can find is unique loot: there's lots of different orcish-cultural things to find, such as recipes, meditations, and so on, plus unique armor and weapons and skills to learn. But there's also secrets to discover in the dungeon itself. Not really any puzzles, though -- I've found that puzzles don't really fit these group dungeons too well. A puzzle in a solo dungeon is fun to figure out. But in a group dungeon? Super stressful, because you're holding up the group. In fact, EQ2 had some puzzles and complicated quests in their group dungeons, and it was considered polite for you to wiki the puzzle and learn the answers before you ever entered the place, so that you didn't hold up the group. That seems to me like a waste of development time.

So full-size puzzles are being saved for solo dungeons. But I still want secrets to discover! As long as only one group member has to know the secret, it ends up being an opportunity to share expertise, instead of something stressful that everybody needs to know. We'll see how you feel about the handful of relatively easy "secrets" in Gazluk Keep, and if they're fun we'll add more in later levels (and in other dungeons).

http://i.imgur.com/PsNxndh.png
A Gazluk Taskmaster oversees wrestling practice.

While Gazluk Keep is the main priority for the next snapshot, there will also be bug fixes, more work on the in-combat/out-of-combat logic, and some other little things to find.

And what comes after this Gazluk update? More content! The next few updates after this one will have more low-level and high-level solo content, including improvements to outdoor areas, improvements to some solo dungeons, and adding some crafting skills. And we're very close to having all the assets in place for the Bard skill -- I can't tell exactly which snapshot will have bards, but it'll be pretty soon. Very excited about that one!

cratoh
02-17-2017, 11:58 AM
Excellent! This is exactly what I've been waiting for, so super excited to try it out. I loved the contested group dungeons in EQ2, Sanctum of the Scaleborn and the Kromzek Keep were really fun - lots of stuff to find in them, and you could turn up there and usually find a few people to go with. While Labs has worked for a while for some people it has never really appealed to me personally as I much prefer a smaller, more organised group of 4 - 6 people really pulling their weight and working together, seems more a good test of skill and gear.

Reasons to go back again and again is also very good, perhaps a varied loot table and smaller chances of getting said loot would go a long way towards that. Makes it more satisfying when you reach your aim.

Can't wait to try it out!

Easylivin
02-17-2017, 12:50 PM
Sounds great!

Will there be a dungeon map?

Zeiss
02-17-2017, 01:00 PM
Will there by any mod lvl (65/70) increases with the latest update. Asking for a druid friend.

drivendawn
02-17-2017, 01:28 PM
I have been looking forward to Bard quite a bit so nice to know that it's coming soon for my thief/bard build. :D Also I do look forward to the new group dungeon as well as what ever you can do for lower lvl areas that don't have as much content as say Serbule does. Of course any Improvements to outside areas is always welcome.

srand
02-17-2017, 02:53 PM
Will there be a dungeon map?

Yup! Whether it's facing the right way is another question. :)

cratoh
02-17-2017, 04:11 PM
Yup! Whether it's facing the right way is another question. :)

Will me be able to put pins on it?

nimto
02-17-2017, 06:30 PM
Cant wait!!

Khaylara
02-17-2017, 07:48 PM
It sounds really fun and looking forward to trying it. There's a suggestion about dungeons (I'm sure many suggested)-an option to disable the particle effects. In both DC and Lab most players get massive fps drops, especially if there's more than one group.
I'm also looking forward to more solo content in the next updates.:)

PS-if srand had a hand in the redesigned Anagoge dungeon I'm sure this one looks good too (yay to more decorations)

Greyfyn
02-20-2017, 10:58 AM
As the next snapshot update develops, will additional skill-lines be getting mod improvements to 70? Some players still aren't making higher level gear in anticipation for those mods; for those of us using skill-lines that don't have completed mods, the dungeon loot would be slightly less rewarding. :eek:

Tsugumori
02-21-2017, 09:07 AM
(Treasure Cartography 51-60? *cough*)

Hood
02-21-2017, 09:12 AM
Excited by what stories you have to tell us in this dungeon, Citan and Srand.

Animal[801]
02-21-2017, 10:05 AM
Stoked!! Thank you

Citan
02-21-2017, 01:11 PM
Yep, for those asking, it's already ready to go: the upcoming snapshot lets all remaining skills' loot go to 70. That includes Hammer, Druid, Ice Magic, Knife, and all animal-curse skills.

Citan
02-21-2017, 01:29 PM
Also, a few notes to add:

- the snapshot update is still a few days away, as there are still a lot of problems to fix with the bosses. (The bosses in Gazluk Keep use lots of new tricks -- and there's an unusually high number of special cases, as well as just regular old bugs.)

- I'm not sure of the exact launch day -- currently I'm aiming for a Friday afternoon launch, as I think everything should be smoothed out by then. But it could easily slip into early next week. I'll keep you posted when I have better insight into the launch day.

- While I really hope the dungeon is fun, it's important to note that this is a development snapshot that we'll be putting live just as soon as it's stable. It will never have been "actually run" by a group of six high-level players -- that's you guys' job! So there's a lot of guesswork and estimation in the dungeon's difficulty. That's normal for our dungeons, but since we have a lot of new players, I want to set expectations: the difficulty is likely to be very hit-or-miss at first, both too hard in parts and too easy in others.

- I'll be asking for feedback from people who run the dungeon -- including video if you can get it -- and we'll make balance changes in the snapshot after this one. (Or in a hotfix, if things are really out of whack.)

Hood
02-21-2017, 03:17 PM
- I'm not sure of the exact launch day -- currently I'm aiming for a Friday afternoon launch, as I think everything should be smoothed out by then. But it could easily slip into early next week. I'll keep you posted when I have better insight into the launch day.

- While I really hope the dungeon is fun, it's important to note that this is a development snapshot that we'll be putting live just as soon as it's stable. It will never have been "actually run" by a group of six high-level players -- that's you guys' job! So there's a lot of guesswork and estimation in the dungeon's difficulty. That's normal for our dungeons, but since we have a lot of new players, I want to set expectations: the difficulty is likely to be very hit-or-miss at first, both too hard in parts and too easy in others.

- I'll be asking for feedback from people who run the dungeon -- including video if you can get it -- and we'll make balance changes in the snapshot after this one. (Or in a hotfix, if things are really out of whack.)

Could you add just one more note? We can do this, but we need a suggested quality level of gear to help your testing. I surmise that this is a lvl 70 dungeon, but would lvl 70 red/pink gear (not max enchanted) give you good testing feedback? Or would you rather we wear our best lvl 60 gear? This would help us to reproduce the best test environment possible.

PezOfDoom
02-22-2017, 06:49 PM
I know it's probably my imagination buuuut THAT looks an awful lot like Muntok Fist combat!

http://i452.photobucket.com/albums/qq247/PezofDoom/Muntok%20fist%20maybe_zpsj6ihguac.png

PezOfDoom
02-22-2017, 07:03 PM
Fiore had a different idea of what that might be....also possible!
http://i452.photobucket.com/albums/qq247/PezofDoom/Other%20Story_zpsk3iinydf.png

Citan
02-24-2017, 04:06 PM
Another update on the timing: it's going to have to wait until next week, sorry! The framerate in the new dungeon has turned out to be very bad and we're doing optimizations now. We wouldn't normally bother with optimizing a dungeon during alpha, but this is the largest dungeon we've done yet, and it turns out it needs some help!

It will take at least a few days to get the dungeon optimized... not sure exactly how long, so I'm going to shoot for the middle of next week. This will also give us a little more time to polish things like the lore documents and the custom loot.

Hood - I think a really good set of purple 60s or a reasonably good set of red 70s should work.
PezOfDoom - hmm, that's the naked fighting style, yes? I suppose they might have a bit of that technique in there...

fellentier
03-01-2017, 02:34 AM
Fantastic work, I agree that chapel was too small in that there werent enough routes to take to create varience, it felt like straight path. On3 thing I suggest is to make sure that there is enough symetrical varience between the options of pathing so you dont run into the issue of experienced groups neglecting all but one path because it is "superior".

Tsugumori
03-01-2017, 05:33 AM
Liking the idea of the new recipes and skills.

Consider my ticket to the hype train purchased.

cratoh
03-01-2017, 02:31 PM
Is the dungeon going to have a sort of entry area where people could solo a bit while waiting to do dungeon pug groups? This worked well in EQ2. You would often go to a dungeon and just kill time farming the entrance areas while waiting for someone else to come along to start a group with. Then once there were 2 of you you might start to go a bit further in while canvassing LFG channels. Or, after you had been doing that for a bit someone else might come along and start clearing the top of a dungeon while LFG as well.

It works well for contested/open dungeons.

PS. Tsugumori - you have to stop posting now! you are on 666 points ;p

Tsugumori
03-02-2017, 06:54 AM
PS. Tsugumori - you have to stop posting now! you are on 666 points ;p

I DIDN'T NOTICE!!! G++GUHB!IUB!rvnb