Mortal Online

Focus Group Update #7

Hello Folks! Theia here, I will be taking over writing up the FG Update for the next few weeks and try to help out MoMo and Arfy as I can.

This week we have mainly been testing pet balancing in-depth, so careful checking against all types of attacks from Mobs / Pets vs all types of armour.

There are more types of attacks now so if you multiply Pets x Attack Type x Armour Type, you can imagine how complex and large a number of tests that will have generated; however, we (GM Martialis and the team) are very close to finishing this now. .
I sat down with GM Martialis who is cheerleader in chief for the testers and leading on a lot of the detailed (minute detailed) testing, Arfy has now taken over from MoMo as RL (that pesky thing) has interfered with his efforts. Huge thanks go to MoMo who is still very much involved and doing a superb job, but I’ll do my best to carry on with the FG Updates to free him up to do the important things.

So, GM Martialis, what’s the most exciting feature that you have tested so far, from your perspective.
Some of the most interesting stuff has been some of the glitches and bugs we have seen. We now have small baby bears, who level up and age and grow in size. One of the spawns didn’t have a cap on it and it kept growing and it became so huge that it blocked out the Sun, I am not kidding. Interesting to note that even though I saw several animals large than mountains, bigger than Meduli, there was no performance hit... So pets now level up, change size and appearance and become more powerful with age, you will be able to nurture your pet –general creatures in the world level up over time too! You can imagine how important balance is here – there will be some unique control features coming with pets – what we have on Live right now are just place-holders.
Can you tell us about any new features that have entered the Test Build?
The new UI is coming along in leaps and bounds, it is one of the most striking changes, so that’s great, we’re also having multiple weapon and armour balancing updates (server side), we looked at blunt weapons from really early on, we’re not going to drastically change the face the of PvP but I think you‘ll see people using maces now to tear up other people’s armour as a strategy, however we’re still mainly working on Creature Control. Also there’s a new Ecumenical Spell called Dominate, works on a different system to taming and you can dominate things that you can’t tame, for example; Spiders!
Pets getting stuck on Live is a big issue can you update us on whether this is the same on Test?
They seem to be much less sticky, Guards for example, in the first couple of builds were warping through buildings, that’s much better now; you can see pets are tracking the terrain much much better, out in the open. So more work to do but we’re very hopeful that we’ll see the back of a lot of the current issues with AI, be it a mob or your pet.

So is The Awakening going to introduce a drastic change to combat?
No, we’re very careful that as SV are putting new things in that nothing is over-powered, there will be new and more ways to fight, but it’s important that new content is used but doesn’t make something already in-game useless. We have a much more intelligent creature control system, which will be much more rewarding to use than just spamming ‘attack’, but it will take some thought and finesse to get the best out of the system, you’ll be treating pets much more like a weapons.

Thanks GM Martialis, much appreciated!

Then I popped in to check on the testers themselves:
Hi Arfy, Kia, thanks for taking the time out to answer a few questions, how’s it going what are your thoughts on the latest build.

Frustrating but rewarding when we make progress, definitely taxing the brain to try to find ways to beat / exploit the system and find any holes before launch, before the community does – there are some very imaginative people working with the team and we have spotted and fixed many issues.
Testing can be surprising at times where we thought we had the balance on a pet attack right but then found a way to beat them so that’s being worked on around attacks and defence. Won’t say more on this.
We’re finding issues with the levelling of pets, and this is a really complex issue that we’re still drilling down into and have been for some time, confident it will be resolved soon as are most of the bugs we find.
The Guards seem to be functioning very well and when we accidentally flag either ourselves or our pets in town, it tends to end quite painfully, it’s also surprising how large the range of these guards is too – get too close and pay the price.

Herds
Here’s an image from Sebbe – from a version about to go onto Test (I think) – this is one of our Herds. As you can see there are pigs here at several ages / strengths. They are freely roaming!! (thanks Sebbe)

And some fun ....
So as you know Mobs age, grow in stature, change their appearance and some herd. When they first appear on the Server their ‘level’ is set very low and then they age – we did spot a lovely bug where the cap was not set on certain mobs as they were being introduced... so after a couple of days they got large.. really large! This is fixed now but the Focus Group thought it was a good idea to share with you and so do I. It’s also an interesting demonstration...
Remember that whilst the caps are now set, this is something we can change at will...

We also decided to do an internal caption competiton on this, (some testing is repetitive in the extreme) and came up with the following. I’ve left a couple at the bottom that are awaiting a good caption – discuss the update and have a pop.

"Whatchu lookin' at?" "No Bug Too Small" Caption needed Caption needed Finally, also worth noting that this is hardly impacting frame rate.
Next week: I will interview our esteemed Testing Group Leader GM Athanas! So another interview / FG Update and I hope more juicy info and screens!

Thanks All!

T