The sprint presentation took place on Monday and everyone’s work was presented. In the last activity report of 2010, we’ll talk a bit about what we’ve been working on the past few weeks and upcoming changes most of which are coming in the next few patches:

There are massive area redesigns underway. The human area is complete, clan city layouts are being scrutinized at the moment and the world-builders are moving on to the Orkish area. These activities are tied in with tool updates, there are new tools being produced to optimize terrain, road and river continuity and fixing terrain anomalies occurring during optimization. We saw some of the redesigns and optimizations and new tools were demonstrated.

New player characters are in progress, they should be added in the next expansion. Facial textures are done, several problems during the process have been addressed and  new armors are being fitted at the moment. Animation motion capture workflow is complete and we saw 4 new hobgoblin animations, 2 of them were idle animations and 2 were fighting animations.

The Engine team has been working on the dynamic lighting features and we saw several demos of their progress. This work is going in the next expansion and should be very impressive to see in action.

As most of you know, we added the meditation feature in the latest patch. We’ve been looking at feedback and unfortunately many don’t seem to understand that meditation works with diminishing returns and not in a linear fashion. You should also keep in mind  that we’ll be adding a lot more skills and (something we haven’t mentioned yet) attributes, in the next patches. We’ll try to make things clearer on how meditation works by showing you the incremental progression value after tomorrow’s patch. We’ll also give you a better idea on what the future holds for this feature which should be heavily revisited in almost every future patch for a while. Values here are not carved in stone, we’re examining them carefully and we’ll make any necessary tweaks and changes.

As far as the newbie experience goes, we’re going to help that along quite a bit with a total approach to character progression, an example of some of the actions we’ll be taking is increasing drop rate and frequency of attribute consumables and spell books.

We got to see a demonstration of the new political map. We’ve talked about this before but we didn’t mention that the map will also mark locations of player vendors with details on what they sell.

We discussed the new GUI, an exciting development, which unfortunately we cannot discuss at the moment. We’re still working on the current interface however, in tomorrow’s patch for example, we’re adding a default rest key-binding.

The designers are undertaking the massive task of  redesigning the newbie experience and working on a total monster classification, redistribution and localization based on the lore. This is part of an overall strategy of localizing resources.

We’re looking at a lot of upcoming re-balancing changes to many of the issues related to player feedback and these will span every aspect of the game. Our designers have been working on mapping everything for a while now, running statistical analysis and exploring relationships.

There are alignment system changes coming as we’ve mentioned before. These are a complete approach on improving the alignment system and solving certain inherent issues surrounding it like for example a  new approach to improving alignment,  making it more meaningful with changes such as locking reds out of alliance, racial, and trade channels, adding a chaos chat open to everyone.

There are also upcoming changes to sieging and PvP,  like addressing one man clans declaring war on everyone, the one siege limit against one clan, self sieging etc. Some of these fixes are coming in the next patches. There are more changes to improve PvP and massive battles like for example changes to spells like confusion, pungent mist and eye-rot going in tomorrow’s patch.

Ships will get additions and improvements. Fishing boats are coming and ship defenses vs. swimmers are going in the next patches. Finally, you’ll be able to despawn a ship only if you’re at the helm.

Tomorrow is patch day, and there will be several patches right after the holidays. There’s also a dynamic event planned for the NA server this weekend.

This is not all, there are unfortunately a lot more things we cannot talk about yet. We regret this, but it comes with the territory. Whether we are at liberty to discuss them or not however, we always take related player and community feedback into consideration so please keep it coming. We’ll continue working through the holidays and giving updates as needed.

Thank you for reading.