Darkfall New Dawn in den Startlöchern

[Loxley]

Man, wenn die das zum Laufen kriegen ...
Das hört sich immer besser an, je mehr sie davon schreiben. Ich bin echt gespannt!


Road to release #11
April 26, 2016 Ubergames
Greetings former and future denizens of Agon.

Since last week, we managed to pass the last few hurdles we had with our infrastructure testing and we solved the issues we could notice with our internal stress testing. We are also very satisfied with the pace at which Patch 1 is shaping up to be a real upgrade to Darkfall. We have a few more work in progress changes to complete and polish, and we’ll start the final QA drive.
We’ll go over the latest progress in the interface development, but also our first step in creating a meaningful alignment system.

What we have done:

• Finished implementation of our first batch of monitoring tools.
• Solved the software bottlenecks we could find with our internal testing.
• This revealed a networking hardware bottleneck and we preemptively upgraded our entire server infrastructure to solve it.
• We have made our first tweaks to client-side security, the first step of our ongoing efforts to reduce hacking.
• Implemented more interface improvements and our first step to make alignment meaningful.

What’s next:

• We’re not yet satisfied with our patch server setup, we’ve load tested it and it can still be improved.
• We have a few new features still work in progress and that we need to complete/polish before releasing them to the public.
• We need to QA our changes and make sure we did not break anything with Patch 1.

The weapons bar:

This is the final step of our early enhancements to the interface and what should make everything come together.
We have designed this system to make life easier for new players, but also give more power to veteran players. It should remove the need for most scripts that existed to “fight” the interface’s shortcomings.

The purpose of the weapons bar is as a list of weapon combinations that can be assigned to individual hotbar slots as a reference. By changing a weapon in a weapons bar slot, it will change the weapon for all the hotbar slots that used that combination. This means that in a couple clicks, you can change your keybinds to a new weapon.

But that’s not all it can do. Just like hotbar slots, a weapons bar slot has a default ability, an optional hotbar to switch to and be set to auto-cast its default ability. The default key bind to switch weapons will be very familiar to most FPS players as it makes use of the scroll wheel, and alternatively alt + 1 through 6 to switch to a specific slot. Of course all binds can be assigned to a key of the player’s choosing.

We are operating under three specific use cases along the interface learning curve:
– New players:
Simple default bindings with undroppable weapons set with their own hotbars and early abilities. This will just require to move the scroll wheel to work and leave “questions” for later in the game. It will be easy for the player to just see he needs to place his weapons in that list and transition smoothly to normal gear without having to understand the entire keybind system.

– Average players:
As players become more accustomed to the game and start using more weapons, they will want to have fancier bindings. For example, having a hotbar dedicated to specific types of abilities with a specific weapon. For instance a slow staff set to switch to a hotbar with all rays. It will streamline the process of using a large amount of abilities and will in many cases change 3 to 5 key presses into just one. Nothing complex that would require to open the keybinding menu, everything will be available from the graphical interface.

– Advanced players:
These players are those that will most likely make the best use of the system. Having the ability to bind both weapons slots and hotbar slots to individual keys, with auto cast and reverting rules, hotbar switching. The sky should be the limit and most features are dedicated for these players to not require third party scripts to play the game at their maximum potential.

Advanced features and work in progress:

To offer as much customization power as possible to high end players, we’ll implement more advanced settings for individual slots:

• Hotbar rules will take precedence for hotbar switching and auto-casting rules, but will cast its ability only once and then will revert to the weapons slot default ability.
• Revert rules that lets hotbar slots be bound to a specific key to cast a single auto-cast ability with a different weapon but then goes back to the previous combination.
• “Ignore in scrolling” rules on weapons bar slots, so that you can keep only 1-3 weapons accessible through scrolling, but still bind 6 combinations for specific situations not part of your normal battle flow.

We’re trying to have the full feature set implemented for Patch 1, but these may come for Patch 2. We’ll also implement feedback from players regarding ways of improving the whole flow of bindings and usage. Play testing will be essential and it is certain we have not thought of everything.

Making the alignment system meaningful:

One of our most important task in New Dawn will be to make the alignment system meaningful.
It is capital for an mmorpg’s sustainability to have a welcoming sense of community, and Darkfall is no exception. Fighting should not be senseless and racial enemies should be something players band together to face, rather than backstab each other whenever they meet.

The first step to make being blue meaningful is coming with Patch 1: Quest rewards are now impacted by alignment and the duration a character has been blue.

Since we will be making changes to quests to provide meditation points, and meditation points will be made much more important in New Dawn, this first change will scale up and synergize well withing our future plans. The next step will be to implement the engagement system, but that will take a lot more time as it is a tool that will serve many purposes.

Thank you for reading. We are looking forward to get your feedback on these new systems and see what the community makes of them in game.
See you next week!

Link to discussion thread.


News permalink

 

[Nanos]

RTR#13: Final stretch
May 10, 2016 Ubergames

Greeting former and future denizens of Agon.

This week we want to thank you all for your patience and your supportive remarks.
We have had a crazy past couple months and we are finally entering the final stretch before opening our stress test to the public. Now that we took the necessary time to understand and study every individual piece, we feel we are ready to have every thing come together for a sturdy release and having a constructive testing period.

We have now completed most of the mandatory preparatory work and are working on a new and improved download and patching infrastructure. We are also experimenting with Darkfall’s queue system to be prepared should we need to do quick adjustments when launching.
The goal being that in case of high success, we don’t fall flat and miss the opportunity of stress testing the game as it is now.

In the same vein, we have also added some resources to the team to work on finally overhauling the website and forums. Both should have better branding and be more presentable to new potential customers that come because they are attracted by the free period.
We have already gathered many past suggestions, but feel free to post more in the discussion thread.

Our feature team will continue work but is now splitting its time between testing and development. We are aiming for a feature freeze of Patch 1 at the end of next week and we’ll have a full patch note to present in two weeks. They have already finished all the changes we deemed necessary to play test early on and get some meaningful feedback straight away.
The most important changes being a more polished interface and several crucial grind and power gap reducing changes.

What we have done:

• Rethought our download infrastructure. Still needs some testing and polishing, but it should in the end scale with demand.
• Patch 1 polishing and testing.
• Quests now provide meditation points.
• Removed the former attribute “titles” in anticipation of reworking the whole system later.
• Implemented nearly all “advanced features” for the weapon’s bar. All we need now is the “revert back” aspect for single-cast weapon-switches.

What’s next:

• Final pre-flight checks and handle any last minute issues.
• Open stress testing.

Here is a little preview of our placeholder interface to test our quest changes.

As usual, we would rather not give any ETAs we are not certain we can keep, as we can never be safe from an unexpected issue, so please take this with a grain of salt: We expect to be on time for an early June stress test.

See you next week where we’ll discuss in more details our plans to reward players for playing InDev and helping us test the game.

Link to discussion thread.

Also womöglich dann Anfang Juni sobald sie ihren ersten Patch mit wichtigen GUI und einigen New Player Experience Änderungen vollständig implementiert und getestet haben.

Danach steht dann, soweit ich das aus dem Forum entnehmen kann, als nächstes größeres Vorhaben folgendes auf dem Plan:

We will be prioritizing local banking to get it as early as possible, but it won't make it into the stress test.
A promise we've made was that we wouldn't delay the stress test to implement features unrelated to it. As this discussion made apparent, we cannot just implement a basic separation of banks without having to do at the very least some supporting tools regarding holdings and localized resources. This means local banking would very likely put us back over a month, if not more, if we chose to launch with it.

Another thing that came back in our discussions is the bang for buck ratio and what makes the game better for more players sooner.
Local banking is a crucial part of making New Dawn, but our early drive for now has been quality of life and making the return to Agon as smooth as possible for our target audience. We made a list of things we think need to be implemented earlier:

- Alignment system
- Monster scaling
- Meditation system expansion
- Local banking

This should allow for a new player to embrace the game better, and for medium to veteran players to be able to play together as a group and enjoy the game for longer. This moves local banking ahead in priority before watch towers and other systems.
We are hoping to get to work on it very soon, but our philosophy here is that we fix flaws first, then expand the game.

Entsprechend wird wohl Local Banking und dazugehörige Features bereits in den ersten Monaten des Indev Servers implementiert und getestet/balanced werden, während dafür das Titel und Watchtower System weiter nach hinten verlegt wurden.

 

[Nanos]

InDev participation rewards
May 18, 2016 Ubergames

Greetings former and future denizens of Agon.

In this week’s update we go over the reward framework we intend to set up to motivate normal play during the InDev period.
We are also leaving behind the road to release format as now we are mainly focusing on QA and pre-flight checks. So far, we are holding our early June estimate.

As a reminder, our real goal is to launch Darkfall: New Dawn, not Darkfall 2012.
The InDev server is a service aimed at giving something to play while we are completing our work, but must not take away from our budget, so we cannot offer it for free. We will also have actual beta events for targeted testing, which we had planned, InDev is more of a bonus due to popular demand.

Something to keep in mind: the game has exploits both economic and character progression wise. It is capital to wipe the world for Live launch.

That said, we can make the best of it and use the InDev server as more than a waiting room for the real thing.
For those not aware, a couple weeks ago, a discussion started on our forums about InDev motivation and rewards.
The goal was to assess what would be of interest to the community to motivate playing the InDev server as seriously as if they were playing the Live server. Ideally, this should help us determine if our incentives and behaviorism based changes have the desired effects on player interactions, especially regarding the alignment system and the economy.

We took in the current feedback and came up with three layers of incentives:

Out of game rewards:
The first step, and this is something we have been considering from the start, is to reward players for trusting us this early in the process and helping us improve the game. To that end we will reward players with game time:

• Purchasing the game during InDev provides with two months of subscription: 1 straight away, and 1 at Live launch.
• 1 month of subscription purchased for InDev will come with an additional week at Live launch.
• Unique bugs and exploit reported with well described steps to reproduce will be rewarded with in game time both at Live launch and InDev.
• InDev game time will count for long term subscriber rewards, once we design that system.

Individual player rewards::
It is important for us that individual players value the time spent on InDev and have a long term approach to what they do, but whatever reward we provide need to be something temporary that can be lost/consumed and doesn’t provide absolute advantage over a completely new player.
This is why we chose to mainly focus on giving meditation points. They take a while to be converted into something useful and can be lost through our skill up economy features.
We are also going for a tiered approach to have our rewards be proportional to the efforts but not let the results of exploits transfer to the Live server.

Rewards available to all players:

• Character name and appearance reserved. This will also help us transfer all that we need to transfer.
• All left over meditation will be transferred to the Live servers. It was earned and could be lost at any point.
• Tiered meditation rewards based on PvE points.
• Tiered meditation rewards based on PvP points once we implement infamy/patriotism.
• If a crafting mastery was unlocked, it will be unlocked on the Live character. It will still require 100 normal skill and title to craft mastery items, but it is a gain of time and gold. Crafting needs to also be rewarded after all.
• A few low level gear bags to get people straight away out of starting zone to reduce queue time.

Rewards for top players:

• The top 10 most advanced characters will receive an extra meditation reward. We’ll observe them to find what works and what needs balancing in PvE.
• The top 10 richest characters will receive an extra meditation reward. Same than above, they will be useful to find exploits so the yare getting rewarded.
• Top 10 PvP characters will receive an extra meditation reward. This will allow us to study their killing pattern and readjust the infamy/patriotism system.

There may be more rewards that come along, especially purely cosmetic ones, but we’ll announce these once we create our content creation team.

Clan rewards:
This was the trickiest decision to take. In the end we are basing our rewards for clans on two main factor: convenience and having earned it the hard way.

• Existing clans will be created for free at release, with all members already within and with all positive diplomatic relationships retained.
• Holdings owned at the end of InDev will be kept, but razed to the ground at the exception of the bank.
• Clan members will have the option to select a clan holding as a starting city.

The reasoning here is that this is the only way to motivate clans and alliances to actually give their best efforts during InDev.
They will retain part of what they managed to earn and it will serve to balance our features aimed at increasing the logistics difficulty of owning a large empire.

All it does is remove a few hours farming gold and the random aspect of a land grab. As least a clan will start with a holding they have deserved.
It also remains a temporary reward, as holdings will be very volatile at Live launch until the watchtower networks become well established, so it should allow for a form of land grab where homeless clans will try to gain one by attacking holdings before they are built up. Remember that under our planned systems, there are no limitations to multi sieging.

We believe it will be a great source of early conflict for the Live launch, and throughout the InDev server as it will truly matter.

In addition, having players start at a holding is also a great mechanic for us to spread the server load very quickly, it will let actual new players login in starting zones without having to wait on a queue filled with players that just want to get out of it.
It will also give localized banking value straight away as there will be many amenities that holdings will miss that traders should be able to provide early on. Being a respected trader at Live launch should be very lucrative and kickstart their business.

As a side note, we realize that we need to keep the InDev period as short as possible to reduce the impact of these rewards.
We will do everything we can to remain within the 6 to 9 months time frame, but that will depend on how much velocity and what kind of problems we run into over that period. You can read what we consider mandatory changes before Live launch here.
We will also pepper QOL and New player improvements whenever we can spot low hanging fruits in our progress. We’ve already done a considerable effort on that front with our implementation of the weapon’s bar. We believe these are very important to a successful Launch and need our attention during InDev.

Stay tuned next week for a preliminary patch note for what we have already validated through QA as present at the start of the stress test.

Link to discussion thread.

Source: https://darkfallnewdawn.com/2016-05-18-indev-participation-rewards/

 

[Nanos]

About the security breach
May 24, 2016 Ubergames

Greetings,
As some of you may be aware now, there has been a substantial security breach with the Rise of Agon client, and now that it was made public, we can address it openly.
Full disclosure, the Darkfall franchise itself has been dealt an heavy blow, but we will push through and we will do what is necessary.
New Dawn will happen and Darkfall will not merely survive but grow to its full potential.

Here is what happened:
We were made aware of the breach when BPG opened the server for the first time. The exact issue is that they did not follow the recommendations that were provided to them for client packaging and simply rushed to release.
Before you ask, Aventurine has done a great job at providing us licensees with all we needed to do these releases properly. They even answered questions and provided materials that were well beyond their responsibility. We are the ones in charge of the implementation, and any outcome positive or negative is on us.
So let’s make it clear: this whole mess was completely avoidable.
Since then, we have recommended a course of action to reduce the spread of the leak and improve BPG’s next release. We agreed to help because it was the only way to make sure this would be done properly, and it was under the condition that it would not reopen until all three companies would give a go.
BPG reopened without waiting on any approval, with an archive that is still defective.
Please understand that we could not say anything about it. Releasing security details such as these harms us as well, and we wanted to limit the impact to players of all three versions.

Our battle plan:
This will not delay our release further. It does not change our plans of how we will evolve or market the game and for us, it is mostly business as usual.
What it does change is that we will have to grow our team’s resources faster than anticipated. Right now this situation is costing us a lot more than it should, but we’ll manage.
The full InDev infrastructure has been ready to release for over a month now, but we chose to delay in order to prepare a battle plan and start work on refactoring what we could.
We had hoped to have more time to do changes before word got out, but there are a lot more reversers out there than there are of us at Ub3rgames.
It is simply impossible for us to do a complete refactor before releasing, we cannot win this race, so we better make the best of it.
So here is what we will be doing: We will allow hacking for a few closely monitored “hacking weeks” during InDev.
These weeks will be just like our balance betas. We’ll shut down the normal InDev for a while to do some very specific test sessions on targeted issues.
Until we can reduce the issues, please do not ruin other people’s fun. If you wish to experiment with hacks outside of these hacking weeks, do it properly by warning us and reporting them.
In addition, whenever we mention a security update in one of our patch note, we urge the knowledgeable people out there to try and break them and communicate the results with us privately.
Here is our “hotline” for hacking issues: security@ub3rgames.com
Let’s show the world once again that the Darkfall community can come together to defend their game and do positive things.
Help us out, and rest assured we’ll do our part and double down on improving the game on all fronts.
Stay tuned this evening for our weekly update, which should be something much more positive.

Link to discussion thread.

BPG also die Entwickler von Rise of Agon haben anscheinend den Release ziemlich überstürzt gepusht und dabei dann einige Fehler beim packaging/erstellen des Game Clients gemacht. Mehr zu den Folgen davon hier: http://darkfallemu.com/darkfall_emu_update_roa_security/
Das Unschöne daran ist entsprechend sind Ub3rgames mit Darkfall New Dawn nun auch betroffen, da wohl vielfach umschreiben erforderlich ist, bzw ne ganze Menge Aufwand nun nochmal zusätzlich zum bisher geplanten in Refactoring und Anti Hacking Maßnahmen fließen muss.
Was allerdings wohl sowieso geplant war nur das es entsprechend nun noch höhere Priorität ghenießt.

 

[Nanos]

Allerdings auch paar gute Nachrichten mit den ersten angekündigten Patchnotes.

https://darkfallnewdawn.com/2016-05-24-patch-1-preliminary-notes/

Patch 1 preliminary notes
May 24, 2016 Ubergames

Greetings former and future denizens of Agon.

This week, we’ll go over what we have validated through our QA process up until now.
It isn’t everything we’ve done, but what you can be sure will make it for the release of the stress test.
We’ll have a much more detailed patch notes once we open up the doors.

Interface improvements:

• Changed default bindings to something more sensible.
• Default interface layout is no longer random when first connecting and is now cleaner.
• Vital stats window can be resized and has more display options.
• Hotbar slots can now have a weapons + shield + default ability assigned.
• Hotbar slots can be set to auto cast.
• Most of the weapons bar features validated.
• Client side persistence is saved more accurately.
• Clicking ok on UI windows closes them even if there were no changes. (best change on the list)

Performances improvements:

• Upgraded both client and servers to newer version of compilers.
• Upgraded many dependencies to their latest versions.
• Improved audio engine to load sounds asynchronously.

Combat tweaks:

• Made jump casting baseline for all magic spells.
• Made jump shooting and under water shooting baseline for archery.
• Buffed racial skills that impact health and mana to +20 from +5.

Anti-grind and power gap reduction:

• Added the skills that increase vital stats regeneration to all new characters.
• Disable attribute titles and their quests to prevent players wasting time doing them.
• Removed all attributes related passive skills.
• Removed all movement impacting passives and made their effects baseline.
• Removed carry weight relative passives.
• Removed resistance related passives.
• Implemented diminishing returns on Stamina and Mana.
• Adapted attribute buffs and debuffs to diminishing returns.
• Meditation points gained from quests.
• Implemented a loot container to scale loot tables dynamically.

Things have been going smoothly. We are happy with our pace.
The only issue we’ve had is with server side persistence for the duration as a blue player being forgotten in some edge cases. We’re working on it.
We’re also taking our time on the weapons bar interface, and making sure it is as polished as it can be before getting it into player hands.

We hope you’ve enjoyed seeing this global view of our work so far. We are looking forward to see the game being played with our changes and see what you guys make of them.
See you next week!

Link to discussion thread.

 

[Nanos]

Ein interessantes Update mit Bezug zu den Security Issues die vorige Woche erwähnt wurden: https://darkfallnewdawn.com/2016-05-31-reverse-engineering-101/
Dadurch das die Hacking Probleme vom alten Darkfall nun so in den Vordergrund gerückt wurden stehen Updates in der Hinsicht nun bereits früher auf dem Plan. Zumal wenn man die Schritte betrachtet die sie vorhaben, würds mich nicht wundern wenn am Ende endlich mal nen Darkfall steht bei dem sich Hacker schön die Zähne ausbeißen können und die kritischsten Aspekte dann auchnoch Serverseitig verlagert wurden.

 

[Fiona]

Hört sich gut and alles. Hätte es ja nicht gedacht aber freue mich da schon drauf.
Der Teil über die neuen Keybinds etc. zeigt dass sie verstanden haben- sehr gut.

 

[Enrayha]

Das alles hört sich sehr viel versprechend an, aber wann kann ich da endlich Geld reinstecken und zocken?^^

 

[Nanos]

xD gestern hams das Launch Date für den InDev Server bekannt gegeben:
Ho and, by the way, we almost forgot! We’re planning to open the gates on June 28th at 2PM Paris time. See you then!

Der ganze DevBlog:

Meditating on the near future
June 14, 2016 Ubergames

Greetings former and future denizens of Agon.

Since our last update, we have done some good progress on correcting flaws that could impact the economy, but this week we’d like to talk about more positive things than anti hacking.
Before we had to pull everyone to work on security, we were preparing some surprises for you guys and today we’d like to announce what will be in our Patch 2 and more!
Stay tuned till the end.

Patch 2: our first performance update.
Our refactor team has multi threaded more parts of the client, has removed many unnecessary memory realocation and has switched nearly all assets to be asynchronously loaded. This is not yet the end of the load lag, but it should make it a lot less noticeable, and it should improve performances for most players. We are also certain of what is causing the load lag, but that will demand a much more in-depth refactor and it will come later down the line once we can assign resources to it.

In our testing, we’ve noticed that just running around and playing the game normally, we had some FPS gains, and more importantly, more stability.
Of the various computers we have tested on, here are the worst results:

• Maximum FPS has increased by at least 5%.
• On HDDs we’ve seen at least 30% lowest FPS increase.
• On SSDs we’ve seen at least 15% lowest FPS increase.

This means that FPS drops are much less noticeable. And these changes should have a large impact on siege performances as well since they are targeting what caused most large scale combat performances issues. It has also decreased the loading screen duration on our systems.

This has been ready for a few weeks, but we won’t be releasing these changes with Patch 1. We’ll make them their own patch in order to have metrics of how the game runs before and after their implementation.
With this data we’ll be able to know if we have indeed improved average performances for the end users, and by how much.

Coming along these changes, we’ll also patch in some security checks to validate more player actions server-side.
Here again, having metrics before and after with a live population will help us know if reactivity and latency has been deteriorated or if our changes didn’t have a negative impact on the game’s fluidity. This is something where we’ll also need the players’ feedback because it is very much about “feeling” the game.

Patch 2 is, for now, scheduled to be two weeks after the launch of the stress test. This should give us the time to hotfix any issues discovered by a live population.
Of course, we’ll push forward or delay Patch 2 depending on our launch stability. We’re looking forward to see how well it goes!

On meditation balance.
Another thing that will be in Patch 2 is some meditation system balancing.
While we were doing the QA of our meditation system changes, we noticed that the overall system is quite obscure and we would like to balance it with more cohesion. Something that can be easily explained to players and be min maxed effectively to promote game play.

First off, we will unify how much meditation points(mp) gets consumed to 100 per offline hour. This means 2400mp consumed per day per meditation queue.
Later, we’ll add a second queue to allow meditating for a clan or for titles, which means a player will be able to spend 4800mp per day offline.
A daily dungeon quest provides around 3500 -4500 base mp depending on the monsters involved. If we factor in the alignment system modifiers, one daily will provide meditation points for up to 2 days. This should allow casual players to keep up.
There are around 90 starter city quests, with each one providing at least 550mp. This will provide a comfy 50 000mp starting amount for new players to grow

We will also reduce the complexity of how much total meditation points a skill needs to be maxed out to a much simple tier system.
For example, a spell in necromancy will take more mp than a spell in witchcraft which would take more than greater magic which takes more than lesser magic.

Finally, we would like to open a discussion on how long should spells, skills or attributes take to max out using the meditation system alone.
Keep in mind that the goal will always be to keep active gameplay faster than offline skilling, but it still has to allow PvP players to grow their characters in a reasonable time frame.
Please, let us know in the discussion thread.

Ho and, by the way, we almost forgot! We’re planning to open the gates on June 28th at 2PM Paris time. See you then!

Link to discussion thread.

 

[Jem]

June 21, 2016 Ubergames

What is new in New Dawn?

Greetings former and future denizens of Agon,

We confirm that the 28th of June at 2PM Paris time will indeed be the opening day for our InDev server.
We will start out with a free period of 3 weeks while we test load on our server and solve issues that may arise, then we’ll limit access to paying customers.

Darkfall: New Dawn will use a “Pay for what you get” model: Box price will initially be set at 19.99€ and subscription will be set to 9.99€.
A box purchase will come with 2 months of subscription included, one now, and one later once we switch to our final server, which effectively makes the box free for early adopters. Box price will increase as we complete development milestones and get closer to what New Dawn is supposed to become.

Now that you know how and when we will release Darkfall: New Dawn, let’s go over what new features we have already implemented in New Dawn:

Alignment improvements
One of the first thing we wanted to address is the lack of reasons to be friendly in the original Darkfall.
This resulted in a kill on sight mentality and made Darkfall what some would call a “gankbox”. Open world is a great generator of content, but there should also be open world friendships being made. For that, we need player to trust other players of their races and fight together against monsters and racial enemies alike.

In Darkfall, alignment gets lost whenever you kill a friendly players, and it can only be regained by going to a chaos church and donate gold.
These donations can only be done once a day, so recovery is time based but alignment losses can be offset quite rapidly in the grand scheme of things.

As a new addition in New Dawn, we’ve implemented an alignment duration modifier.
Based on how long you have been well behaved, you will increase your modifier. The first use of this modifier is to increase quest rewards. If you cause trouble, you will lose any form of advantages, and it will take a long time before you can recover it. of course new players will start innocent and with the maximum modifier.

This is only the first step of many to make racial allegiance meaningful in Darkfall and to have players find value in keeping others alive.
The next steps are to expand the detection of misbehavior to also include accomplices helping renegades.

Grind and power gap reduction
If there is one thing the early days of Darkfall were synonymous with, it is the word grind.
We couldn’t rerelease the game without at least starting to address this issue. And it goes for the power gap between new and veteran players as well.

Our first step was to remove most of the passive skills that people would end up macroing and exploiting to raise.
Part of them were made baseline, like for instance movement skills like running or swimming. Others were simply removed to reduce the power a veteran gains through grinding, like passive resistance skills.

In addition ,we have applied diminishing returns to health, stamina and mana.
These vital statistics are dependent on player attributes, like strength or vitality, and their growth was one of the longest grind in the game. Rather than reduce the overall player progression ,we chose to make the early points of an attribute provide more advantages than the last. The overall gap between a new and high end character is also reduced in the process.

Arguably, a big part of the grind was due to having to raise everything in the game to even be competitive.
Our solution to this is to still allow player to level everything they want, as it will give them variety of effects and choices, but similar abilities have a single shared cooldown. In this way, we have actually increased the reactivity of the game and kept the feeling of the combat, but greatly reduced the grind to viability.

And finally, we have expanded upon Darkfall’s offline skilling, the meditation system.
This system used to allow players to pay gold to level skills and attributes when offline. The catch is that by using gold it actually favored established players rather than newer players. Instead, we’ve removed the ability to purchase meditation points with gold and made them the result of actively playing the game.
From now on, quests will be the best way to earn meditation points, and as most can be done only once, it will favor new players as a catch up mechanic.

Later, we will improve this even further by adding systems to increase leveling speed based on how hard and risky actions are in the game. We will also add more active ways to earn meditation points, even PvP ones, in order to let players chose to play as they wish and still grow.

Interface improvements
Obviously, we did not have the time to rework everything yet, but our main focus has been to remove the need for scripts that were mandatory in the original run of the game.

To that end we have implemented what we have called the weapons bar.
In short, this features allows new player to play the game as they would any other FPSes, while allowing the customization and power of any MMORPGs.
We will release a set of video tutorials for the new interface elements.

For those more familiar with the game: The weapons bar allows a character to setup his favorite weapons and give them default abilities, or to equip a shield and one handed weapon at the same time. These weapon slots also enable the creation of contextual binds by switching hotbars based on which weapon combination is set as active. Finally, a weapons bar slot can be used as a reference to a weapon combination for normal hotbars. if you assign a weapons bar slot to a hotbar slot, whenever you change that specific combination, it will automatically reapply. (slow staff for rays, for example)
We have also improved the normal hotbar slots, adding the ability to one click cast abilities, to automatically revert to a previous weapon combination and to switch hotbars when called upon.

Part of our interface improvements, we have also made the life, stamina and mana bar window cleaner and resizable, so that you can always know where you are at, and we have implemented auto-sprint.

Later, we will continue our efforts of making the interface clearer, more customizable and reducing the need for scripts.

And much more
We’ve also addressed as many of the small issues we could, with bug fixes, performance improvements, security changes and various tweaks to make the game a much better experience than what it used to be.
You can already read our preliminary patch note for Patch 1, and see what to expect in Patch 2.
A complete patch note will come with the servers opening.

This is only the beginning!

Link to discussion thread.

 

[Tolven]

nur mal so intressehalber , wer ist am 28 dabei wenn es denn wirklich los gehen sollte?

 

[Nanos]

 

[Enrayha]

Warte warte warte. Nix Beta oder so sondern release? Falls ja, geht mal durch alle Ts chan durch und poked die Leuts an, hier wird ja kaum wer reinschaun.^^

 

[Loxley]

 

[Jem]

• 

 

[taltshak]

InDev server, also doch eher Testserver, oder?

 

[Jem]

InDev server, also doch eher Testserver, oder?

ja

 

[Strom]

wird es beim release wieder ein BdW clan geben?

 

[Loxley]

Ich glaube, dass das eher unwahrscheinlich ist.
Aber man kann sich bestimmt absprechen und mal sehen ob man
nicht gemeinsam irgendwo beitreten kann.
Mal sehen was die Zeit bringt.

 

[Loxley]

Weiß jemand etwas genaueres?

We confirm that the 28th of June at 2PM Paris time will indeed be the opening day for our InDev server.

Jeder? Nur bestimmte Personen? Wenn ja wer? Wird man eingeladen? Kann wer näheres berichten?
Internetseite ist gerade offline für eine Umgestaltung. Da ist grad nichts zu lesen.