As work continues on quite a few ongoing tasks, today we would like to share with you some specifics about low level magic as well as some information on balancing magic in general.

Minor Incantations is a mixed intelligence and wisdom based school available to all characters no matter what they are wearing. It contains 5 utility spells that are useful in a variety of situations. Spells belonging to this school require no reagents to be cast.

Mana Missile – Your typical low level damage dealing spell. There is a thought of assigning Mana Missile as the default magic attack.

Heal Self – The standard self healing spell for all characters.

Light – Can be cast on enemies to illuminate them or on allies to illuminate dark areas. Our differed lighting system is what makes this possible.

Slow Fall – Falling damage is quite perilous in Darkfall 2.0. The cap for fall damage has been increased quite a bit and you will take such damage for shorter drops than in the current game. Also falling damage will leave you incapacitated if it exceeds your current hit point total. If you are out alone or with friends that is a minor inconvenience as you will either recover on your own or get revived. If you are being chased by an enemy though, a gank is more likely to follow. Slow fall will be life saving in such situations but it needs to be timed quite accurately to be effective.

Beacon – A spell for marking targets.

A lot of work has been done in balancing magic and making the effectiveness of spells make more sense.

The primary factor when determining spell effectiveness is the governing attribute. Intelligence and Wisdom levels will play a major role on how much of an impact you do while casting spells. Of course Intelligence based spells only take this attribute into consideration with Wisdom based ones doing the same.

The second factor is the actual spell level. Something to note on spell levels is that damage scaling has been redone for all spells. The aim is to have higher tier spells be more useful, even at low levels, than lower tier spells that have been maxed out. To give you an example, Mana Missile at level 90 will be doing roughly the same amount of damage as, let’s say, Fireball at level 20. The reason this is being done is so that you do not have to rely on a lower tier spell for long, once you have acquired a new shiny spell to play with.

The third factor is the staff type and rank. All staffs have been rebalanced and their rank now plays a more prominent role in the effectiveness of the spells you are casting.

The fourth factor is the level of the magic school with options like intensify following as the fifth and final factor.

We will be presenting other magic schools as soon as we have all the information.

Tasos and a couple other team members are attending GDC, checking out the latest developments in the industry, so we have prepared a short update for you.

Another sprint has been concluded and the teams have progressed on their assigned tasks. As always, there are tasks that will carry over to the next sprint and we will provide more information next week, after the teams have held their individual meetings.

As you have noticed, there was an attempt to address the server delay issue. Our monitoring tools have been providing useful data for a while now and fixing this issue is of the highest priority. While there has been some improvement we will continue working on the delay until it’s completely fixed. This has proven to be quite a persistent and complex problem and we appreciate your feedback and patience on the matter.

We would also like to follow up on some of the feedback you provided on last weeks ship update. We have read your concerns about naval warfare becoming unbalanced with the introduction of the Coastal Runner and there have been a few discussions about this. For one, as we mentioned in the last update, this type of vessel will have a very low number of hit points, even lower than the launch if it needs to. Also, the idea about bigger ships being able to push smaller ones is under consideration although whether or not it’s technically feasible is not certain yet. Finally, we are exploring alternate ways for the repair mechanics to work.

As we have already covered all the tasks of this sprint in previous updates, we will try to make up for this short update next week, when more information will be passed on to us from the team.

We will close this update with some renders provided by our art department, including a render of the highest tier robe. Also, the Fish Trawler cannon has been moved to the rear of the vessel and the Launch has been re-textured.

Widowsilk Robe

Fish Trawler

Sea Scraper

Launch

Coastal Runner

A short update, Tasos had to be absent today so we took his prep info for this update and posted it:

Second week for this sprint finishes today and work continues at a good pace. Many Darkfall 2.0 development tasks are ongoing, others we presented last week.

Implementation of the Market System continues. The developers have paid close attention to your feedback on this feature both in favor or against it and they do understand some concerns about the courier system. As a matter of fact your concerns have spurred quite a few heated debates in the studio. When we have more information on this we will make it known.

Other ongoing tasks include the back-end storage and persistence implementation, updates to the graphics engine, modeling and animating monsters, world building tasks and the new training areas.

The design team is now working on the crafting system. Changes, improvements and additions have been planed for the entirety of the crafting system which in conjunction with the market system will provide a self regulating economy, more opportunities to profit even for new players and accessibility to items without the need to be a crafter yourself. To give you an idea of the direction design is headed, this week we would like to talk about boats in relation to crafting.

First of all, the workbenches in all NPC holdings now provide more options to anyone that has the appropriate skill to use them. At the same time, we have introduced a new category of sea vessels that we internally call utility vessels. This category includes some ships you may recognize from the current version but also two brand new ones. A beginner ship crafter will be able to only create a simple Raft. More advanced ship builders will have the option of creating the famed Launch which will serve as a small boat for small parties and clans that want a taste of naval warfare.

Fish Trawler and Coastal Runner

Higher up the list is the Fishing Trawler. This vessel, as the name suggests, is used for fishing. The single canon at the front provides some defense in case of unfortunate encounters with pirates or sea monsters.  In Darkfall 2.0 you can fish only with a fishing boat and fishing equipment has been removed from all other ships. Another all new boat is the Coastal Runner. This sleek vessel bears no canons and cannot boast an enduring hull but makes this up with speed. The Runner is the fastest ship that sails the waters of Agon and is mostly aimed at transporting personnel across the sea as fast as possible.

Finally, a ship builder that has maxed his skill, even if he has yet to obtained the mastery version of it, will be able to create the Sea Scraper. Sea Scrapers are towards adventurous types of characters that want to try their luck at sea. As apparent by the name, this ship scrapes the bottom of the ocean, while moving quite slowly, bringing to the surface objects of variable worth. From treasure maps inside bottles, to ship building materials and even the odd boot of some unfortunate sailor, the Scraper does not discriminate. Just make sure you can defend it against would be pirates that covet the treasure in its holds.

All these ships will be craftable in all NPC holding workbenches.

The ship building mastery will open up all the ships aimed at naval warfare. There will be changes in these ships as well in terms of speed, armor, maneuverability and other features giving each one an area of expertise.

Hopefully you can see the direction we are taking crafting in and there are already designs for similar changes to siege equipment and mounts.

We would also like to thank you for all the constructive feedback on the forums.

As we mentioned last week, our sprint was concluded and good progress was made on all tasks assigned to the teams. This week the teams held their meetings and laid down the schedule and tasks for the next 3 weeks. This sprint contains some ongoing tasks from the previous sprint, also new ones that are just commencing. In any case, we’ll keep you informed on the scope of our current activities throughout this sprint period.

The ongoing tasks mentioned above include final testing of the new lighting system which is a great improvement towards the look and feel of the game world, robe design finalization and fitting for all races/genders,  world building tasks as we finish up building the new world; these will keep going till the launch and even beyond the launch of Darkfall 2.o.

In Darkfall 2.o we’re paying a lot of attention and dedicating a lot of resources to improving the player experience, redesigning it, understanding it better, and on processes to constantly keep improving it. In this sprint we’re working on several aspects of the new player experience, also on creating systems that allow us to quantify it in order to understand how to better improve it.

Programming work for all the new training areas is close to being done. The training areas consist of a series of chambers where new players can train before they move on. Training starts with basic movement and progresses all the way up to spellcasting and combat. This training process is actually a nice adventure with an epic ending, before new players earn their pass and are transported to the actual world. The goal is to ensure that, before entering Agon, new players become familiar with the basic mechanics, as well as the essence of Darkfall, and they can do this at their own pace.

In this sprint we’re working on another one of the numerous small changes in the new game, this one is an improvement on mount ownership. In the current game players are weary of dismounting in crowded areas as anyone can hop on their mount and ride off. In Darkfall 2.0  mounts will “remember” their owners for a short time. This means that from the moment you dismount, any other player that  jumps on your mount will be flagged a criminal and you’ll be able to attack him without penalty. In tower protected areas the horse thief will be also shot at by guard towers.

The two features mentioned above, along with many others, are mainly aimed at new players and will provide a smoother, more rewarding and more entertaining experience, while at the same time preparing them for the harsh life in Agon’s lawless areas. In the current version of the game, we’ve had many occasions where the steep learning curve and initial unforgiving experience, unnecessarily kept people out of the game.

A rather important new feature for the economy that has moved on to the implementation phase, is the Market. Markets exist in all racial capitals as well as in chaos cities. Players are able to buy and sell any item in the game but also place buy and sell orders. Browsing any marketplace will reveal all buy and sell orders currently available all over Agon. If  an item is located at the market you are at, you can buy it right there and then. If the item is located in another marketplace you have two options: You can either travel to the market and buy it there, or you can pay a courier cost related to the item’s price, and have it delivered to your location. Placing buy and sell orders can only be done for the marketplace you are at. This design allows the market to self-regulate and provides many opportunities and interesting gameplay options for enterprising traders.

We’ve also been making modifications to the back-end storage. These allow us better and more efficient monitoring of live game data and while this is functionality developed for use by the administrators and developers, it will impact the game very positively in the sense that system and player activity feedback will be understood better allowing us to make optimizations, changes and improvements a lot quicker and more on target. We’ll be able to control the game world better and faster, understand what the players enjoy doing in the game most, and this gives us the opportunity to expand and enhance these experiences.  It  also gives players faster and broader control of various aspects of the game that have to do with persistence and databases, in certain areas it could also improve performance.

We’re also working on the live game on systems that the new game will inherit: We’ve deployed a monitoring system on both servers that will help us identify any issues that exist now or appear in the future that affect server stability and performance – such as the sync issue. We initially deployed this system a while ago but  results where not satisfactory so we had to modify and redeploy. The system is currently gathering data.

Internally we have also fixed two instances of the stamina bug. One caused your stamina to stop regenerating and the other caused it to regenerate even in situations it should not. We will patch this in as soon as possible, right after the monitoring process I mention above is concluded.

Thank you for reading.

Our sprint was concluded today and progress has been made on the tasks we spoke about in the previous updates. The teams will have their individual meetings on Monday to decide on the tasks for the next 3 weeks. We will provide an update next week to present the teams sprint goals.

There was a lot of heated discussion on the Limbo state feature this week and we would like to thank you for all the feedback. We will keep you up to date with any developments on this.

Apart from the sprint tasks we had announced, there was also work done on the new GUI. We are working on redesigning the whole GUI visually but most importantly functionality wise. Some initial mock ups have been created and we are happy with the new direction. While functionality is still in the preliminary design stages, we can say that we are aiming for a much less intrusive GUI that will be context sensitive and highly customizable. You will be able to have a different set of shortcuts, be it in a hot bar or hot keys, depending on what you have equipped to make sure that everything you need is there but what you don’t does not get in the way. We are also exploring alternative ways to switch between weapons, spells and abilities to the standard hot bar.

While on the subject of the GUI, this past week we also held a series of meetings and discussions about the chat system. The new chat system of Darkfall 2.0 will offer more flexibility and customization while at the same time being less intrusive and more user friendly.

Our graphics engine programmers are also working on deferred lighting which will allow us to use unlimited numbers of lights in the world without affecting performance. This means spell projectiles can have proper lights and the world can be lighted essentially without limitations. Once this is implemented we will be sure to provide some screen shots.

We’ll follow-up on the new sprint cycle in next week’s update.

Thank you for reading.