The sprint meetings took place the last couple of days and the teams have their work assignments for the next three weeks.

In addition to the new features we’ve announced that are going in Darkfall 2.0, we’re also introducing new paths for character and clan progression, based on many gameplay activities including PvP and clan warfare. We don’t want to go into more details at this time but these are significant and exciting changes to the way the game is played because they add more purpose to player freedom. Right now, teams are working on the many parameters of these new features.

The art team is finishing up a lot of work in progress, wrapping up armors and robes, and completing a lot of monster animations. The graphics engine programmers are updating game shaders and adding environmental effects.

The world builders are on the NPC cities, having finished with Human and Ork areas, they are now working on the Mahirim. Other tasks include dungeon lighting as well as tweaking and adding props. A dedicated artist has been assigned to the world building team to help them with custom work that they may require.

Introductory dungeons are being added to the game, the places where new players will start the game from. This is part of the effort to make the starting experience a bit smoother than Darkfall players are used to. The starting dungeons will allow new players to get accustomed to the controls and their characters. Starting area protections have been increased so new players have the opportunity to figure things out without being harassed. Other than these starting areas, the rest of the world is lawless.

Another issue that we felt needed to be addressed is the downtime from the moment you are killed until you can rejoin the battle. Darkfall is a PvP game  and we do want to make sure that the experience is fun and satisfying just as it is ruthless and intense. A task for the following three weeks is to explore alternatives to player respawn at their bind stone. We should have more information about this once the current sprint cycle is concluded.

Another task has to do with laying down the foundations of a new market system where players are able to sell and buy any item in the game. Trading will be upgraded in Darkfall 2.0.  This is still in the initial implementation phase and there are still quite a few things to consider but we can say that players will have a limited amount of slots that they will be able to use for placing both buy and sell orders for any item in the game.

There’s a lot more going on than the above, but they’ve already been covered in previous updates. This sums up our development activities for the next 3 weeks.

Other than development we are working on human resources and filling up some much needed positions to improve the team composition. We spoke of this in our last update, since then we have been very fortunate to have attracted some excellent prospects. We hope to have more on this very soon.

Thank you for reading.