Today, after a couple of delays we finally had our sprint presentation. Several key people are still missing but it was concluded successfully by team members filling in for those that couldn’t be there.

The world-builders have been working long hours and weekends but the hard work is paying off. Their first round of world-building is almost complete. The Dwarven and Mahirim area topology, spawn placement, clan cities, and hamlets are done and the Mirdain area is about 50% complete. The second pass has to do with placement of lights and sounds, plus fixes, some of which are being done in parallel. Along with the terrain optimization, and the redistribution of everything, this is one of the largest development projects we’ve undertaken to date.

There was a presentation by our Art Director Henning on behalf of several members of the artist team. Several new and impressive monsters were presented, new and updated props, the new Chaos churches, new anniversary weapons which are going to be added during a special anniversary patch to celebrate Darkfall’s 2 years of live service. We saw more of the updated character models, new armor types, and new types of robes. It was mentioned that there is a lot of tweaking of the player character models, since the introduction of updated models affects everything that relates to character gear. New monster animations were also presented to the team, the new character prayer animations and more.

The programmers have been working on many things leading up to the next patch and further down towards the next expansion. They’ve implemented the prayer and alignment changes, the alignment penalties for casting debuffs against other players, they’ve added attributes to meditation, a mechanism to deliver meditation points to players in real-time, and there’s been a lot of work on Darkfall’s new information interface. We’ve talked about this interface before, it’s a complete information system which includes an interactive dynamic map, a complete political overview of the world, and much more. This will go into the game before the expansion, in an upcoming patch. It’s very impressive and very practical and improves the current system dramatically. A fix to a very complex bug where lag spikes might notify you of players entering an area, will finally be addressed since all the systems affected by this have been identified and worked on.

The actual GUI, the user interface is now in production. There’s work being done on the way the client works to support the GUI more efficiently, and how performance and memory is  handled.  In the next sprint we’ll get a presentation of the pipeline for this and so we’ll probably have more information for you.

We watched a very impressive demonstration of the new lighting system. I’ve never seen the game look that good, and considering that this demonstration was created by programmers without an artistic bone in their body, that’s saying a lot. We’ll make a proper presentation of the lighting system in the next few weeks to present to you and we think you’ll be very impressed. The new lighting improves the look of the game dramatically for everyone, even at the lowest settings. It’s very atmospheric, but also practical: in the demonstration we watched, the character was hiding in shadows very effectively and very realistically.

The design department had a lot to say about major upcoming changes to the game. A lot of work and design has been put into the crafting system, and how it will affect gameplay.  Crafting Armors and Robes:  Wears will be categorized in three groups. Heavy Armors, Light Armors and Robes. Each one of these groups will block specific skills and magic schools, while enhancing other parts of the gameplay. Mixing up parts of wears from different categories, will result in having all the disadvantages of each type, and no advantages. For example, a player wearing robe parts and just one piece of heavy armor, will result in the player having all the heavy armor and robe’s blocked skills, and the worse effectiveness of both types. The more parts of the same type a player wears, the better the effectiveness of that type’s gameplay. There is also a lot of thought being put in allowing the player to customize each type of gameplay. You can still do everything in Darkfall, but not simultaneously.

The designers are also finished with the spawn and environment layout for Mahirm and Alfar and the complete rewrite of Darkfall’s Quests is about 30 percent complete. We were presented, among many others, a concept art of the largest monster in Agon, a 50 meter long monster which is definitely going to make an impact on the world. This monster is so big that it occupies and controls an entire area of the map.

Another major upcoming change in the game will come as a direct result of the conquest system is being rewritten. We can’t go into details yet because things are not finalized but the direction is to bring a lot more flexibility and options to the players. We just wanted to let you know that we’re working on major improvements, but there are several things presented in this last sprint meeting that we aren’t able to talk about yet and we hope you understand.

We have the anniversary patch coming up, and the patch right after it that we discussed in the last activity report with the changes in alignment etc. On Monday we’ll do the new sprint meetings where new tasks will be assigned to the teams. A lot of what we spoke about here today will be detailed in spotlights in the days and weeks to come.

Thank you for reading.