08/11/2008    |    Devlog    |    Misha    |    Discuss

We will soon push 1.7 to Testbed and I wanted to give you an overview of some changes it contains.

First up: As I’m sure you know, September 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day. To celebrate, find Cap’n Slappy and Ol’ Chumbucket in Tortuga or Marsh Harbor and take some new missions from them. These will only be available for a limited time around TLAPD so check ‘em out while they’re around! :)

As long as we’re talking about missions, we also have a new sort of mission that is repeatable up to once per day. (They reset at 11a GMT daily.) As we take steps to make other missions less farmable, we do understand that sometimes you like to have predictable tasks with predictable results. While doing random missions or sinking random NPCs is fun, it’s not always what you want to do when you want to earn the last chunk of change needed for that new ship or upgrade. This build contains only the first few of several missions along this line that we expect to provide. Look for them in Orleans. Even though that town is French owned, these missions are available to all nations.

Missions at level 11 and higher now offer more XP. The change to missions at levels 11-19 isn’t huge but missions level 20 and up double your XP reward. This is to help balance the reward for doing missions vs. fighting NPCs.

We’ve also made some changes to the Tutorial. There’s new UI with better instructional text. There’s also an option to skip the tutorial if you’re an experienced player rolling a new character, for example.

Another new feature: Luxury clothing. You can show off how rich you are by buying the most expensive ship for your level but that’s not always the best battle strategy. Now you can show of your wealth while walking around town without affecting your ability to fight. An exclusive few new clothing items are available from a salesman in the tailor shop in this build; more will become available in future patches.

On a slightly more subtle note, we’ve changed the way the camera works. It’s smoother now – Rusty calls it “cinematic.” We think you’ll find it a happier experience overall.

The biggest change, however, is in the way PVP ad hoc encounters work. Snap has written a devlog on this since he made most of the code changes. One down side to this change is that it requires changes to every ship encounter file in the game. ConCo changed two so far and we’ve turned off all the others until we get them changed. So there will be little variety in scenery in ad hoc battles until the next build. We think that the change in game mechanics makes for a much better experience, however, and that it’ll be worth the wait to get the other encounters done.

Naturally, there have been some smaller, less noticeable changes and we’ve fixed a number of bugs as well. We look forward to your feedback on these!

-Misha

08/11/2008    |    Devlog    |    Misha    |    Discuss