I would like to thank the Liaison team for collecting the information used in today’s Activity Report:

As you know, our design contest is in progress giving you an opportunity to get your own weapon design into Darkfall. We’re excited to get some of your inspired designs and work with you in creating them for the game. Please keep them coming. If this is successful, we’ll be happy to follow-up with other similar initiatives.

Darkfall artists have been reworking most existing monster models but also adding many completely new ones for quite some time now.  Today we have a brief presentation of the Grungrocs, and next week we’ll have more images and background of some of Darkfall’s new and upgraded monsters:

Grungroc
Until very recently we thought the stories of the boar-like grungrocs were simply tales told to mahirim pups to encourage them not to be lazy, greedy and selfish. “Otherwise the ugly grungroc will come and steal you!!”

However, during a recent expedition deep into the hearts of the Tribelands Brother Vandelay discovered that these fey folk of story are very real!

I remain unseen and watch these wonderful creatures rummage through the detritus of my campsite.  Their long boar-like snouts snuffle through my belongings and occasionally elicit squeals of excitement as they discover something new! “grungroc” seems to be their single unit of vocabulary as they appear to use this word to show, call, cajole, and even reprimand each other!

I truly feel privileged to watch these wondrous little folk who, till now, remained a topic of quaint folk-lore! These diminutive fey folk seem quite primitive in nature; inquisitive, excitable but no doubt equally hostile to anyone that could provide threat, food, or simple entertainment.  In short, everyone…

Along these lines, each continent will have their own unique boss of which we already presented the Ragaizan. There are significant changes coming to boss fights. The damage cap of monster dealt damage will be adjusted/increased  giving us the more capabilities to tune fights making boss encounters more challenging and tactical for the players. Loot tables are being completely redone to keep these changes balanced.

World-builders have been working overtime and have finished rebuilding the racial areas, Wasteland and Niflheim and are moving into the Central area. There’s a major dungeon redesign effort underway which is being augmented by the addition of completely new dungeons. According to the Design and AI teams,  the Mirdain Area redesign/redistribution activities are progressing as planned. As we’ve already reported  the Human and the Ork areas are complete, and other areas like the Dwarven and Mahirim areas are in the process of testing and optimisation.  In this overall redesign and redistribution project, spawnpoints and quest hubs have been completely redistributed in a more balanced, convenient and logical manner. This massive redesign effort is coming along nicely and we’re very excited and pleased with the results so far.

Apart from the PvE, we’ve been working on PvP related content:  One of the new features being added are land based PvP objectives, along the lines of the Sea Fortresses. PvP objectives like Villages and Trade Routes are getting more incentives through the redesign process, in an effort to take better advantage of existing Darkfall features. There is a lot more we’re doing with PvP that we unfortunately need to present at a later date, given the size and significance of the related project having to do with Darkfall “Arena”.

An addition to the upcoming patch after next week: Ship Captains will have a defense mechanism to damage an area around their ship. The power level of these defenses vary depending on the size of the ship they command. Some changes are going to make it into the meditation system as promised as well, attributes and crafting skills,  as well as increased drop rates for stat consumables and books/scrolls. Every Darkfall account  has been gifted 25,000 meditation points for Darkfall’s 2nd year anniversary, don’t forget to claim yours by logging into the account management system and pressing the CLAIM button. To answer a related frequently asked question: Even those with inactive accounts are eligible for the points if they renew their subscription this month. There’s also a lot more we plan to do with meditation points in the near future.

We’d like to thank our community for its input on the latest Spotlights and for all the feedback we’ve been getting in general. It has been very valuable in determining consensus on a couple of features we’re debating, the clanmate/enemy visual cues and another where you turn rogue upon entering a clan city when there’s no political stance towards the clan. Thank you for the constructive discussion and for the many great points you’ve brought up. We will continue soliciting your direct feedback on many more features and changes in the near future.

We’re still working on outstanding issues detailed in the last sprint presentation activity report. After the next patch we’ll plan the next sprint and we’ll come back with more information as we enter into more expansion-specific tasks. We will also follow this report up with several spotlights.

Thank you for reading.