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Skalski outlines redesigned city sieges coming to Warhammer
Warhammer Online producer Jeff Skalski has shared another Producer's Letter, and this one's a doozy! Sounds like the team at Mythic have heard the community's complaints loud and clear, and they're dramatically revamping the city siege experience.
Hey Everyone,
It’s that time again for me to share my thoughts on WAR. I hope you’ve been enjoying your summer and the improvements we introduced in 1.3.0b last month. Draw your weapons and get ready for another round of action-packed goodness with our upcoming 1.3.1 patch, aka City Invasion.
One of the biggest enhancements going into this patch is the new approach we have made with our end-game city siege experience. After months of feedback from you, the players, and our own personal experience playing the game, we realized we needed to step back and reevaluate the city siege mechanic from beginning to end. Specifically, how can we make the city siege experience something players will strive for? How can we reinforce RvR in the endgame and not RvE?
Now, before diving too deep into the changes we made, I want everyone to know this is really just step one. We simplified the flow, removed barriers, and most importantly refocused the gameplay on killing your opponents. We set up the city end-game experience so we could easily expand it down the road to make them even more epic.
So, what exactly changed?
Right off the bat, once a capital city becomes contested and you and your Realm start to flood into the streets looking for your enemies, you’ll notice the new main city PQ. Now, each side will be in a race to see who can get to 1,000 Victory Points first. How do you gain Victory Points? It’s easy—simply kill your opponents and hold any of the three Battlefield Objectives scattered across the city. Winners will then push the PQ to Stage 2 and the race begins again, but this time with a twist. The Hero-con encounter will appear like before, but now players can complete the main city PQ by dominating their enemies. In an instance that has lots of enemies? Kill them to win. In an instance that has no opposition? Take out the Hero General and his guards to complete the PQ to help your Realm capture or reclaim the city. The option is yours, but now there is no PvE content holding you back from razing your enemies’ capital city and getting your shot at their fearless leader.
Now, should the city be pushed from contested to the next stage, several new things will occur. First, players will notice that there is no longer a pillage stage. The city will now progress from contested straight to captured. Second, the Warlord PQs open up, which are now balanced for a single warband to complete. Also, it’s worth noting that the Warlord PQs are now time-stamped and are open the whole time the city is in a captured state. Gone are the days of the one-hour time window to experience this content! Second, the King instance is immediately available! It is no longer gated by the completion of the Warlord PQs, but be warned—this encounter is still one of the most challenging in the game. Without proper gear and wards, most players won’t stand a chance.
Lastly, city defenders are never kicked out of their city during an assault! The Tier 4 campaign may be in lockdown, but the fight will carry on for 18 hours as attackers continue to try and hold the city to allow their Realm-mates enough time to complete the Warlord and King encounters. Defenders, on the other hand, will be fighting back to complete the capital city PQ to push their enemies back out of their city. For every time the defenders complete the capital city PQ, the 18-hour timer will decrease by 30 minutes, giving the defenders the opportunity to push out their enemies and reset the Tier 4 campaign at their own will.
Alright, enough about city siege—let’s talk about open-field RvR! In the last patch, we adjusted how we were incentivizing players to fight in the RvR campaign by immensely increasing XP and RP rewards around Keeps and Battlefield Objectives. This time we’re adding a little more spice into the RvR lakes with the introduction of a second ramp to all Keeps found in Tiers 2 through 4. These ramps help widen the play space and give players new tactics to leverage in both offensive and defensive positions. On top of that, we’ve added additional icons and timers to the map to better communicate the current status of the RvR campaign and specific objectives. Now, players will clearly know if a Battlefield Objective is dominated, defended, or both. In addition, players will see the timer status of city stages. All this will be viewable, at a glance, from your map screen or mini RvR tracker.
In my last letter, I mentioned social improvements and we have a dedicated team pushing forward with that initiative. Two items made it in for this patch, the Friends List and Summoning Stones, with plenty more to follow.
The Friends List is much like what you would expect from any Instant Messenger window. It gives you quick access to your friends and even suggests new friends based upon your adventuring. This is just one step to helping bridge the gap between social relationships among our players.
The second item we have in place are the new Summoning Stones. These crafted items will allow players to summon group-mates to their location from almost anywhere in the world. (Of course, not into RvR lakes. No porting in reinforcements on your crumbling Keep before it’s taken over.) ;)
So, I know you’ll enjoy those improvements, but what about bugs? What’s Mythic doing to fix the lingering bugs that some say we’re always too busy to address? Well, I’m happy to say that in this patch we’ve decided that, rather than rushing the Player Systems team, it would be better for them to catch their breath and just focus on bug fixes for 1.31. I’m not going to call out any specifics other than suggest you go take a look at our patch notes here to see all the great fixes they have in store for us.
And last but not least, what about 1.3.2?
Well, I’ll share a little bit with you, but please remember this may not be 100% in-place and ready for live in time. Stuff happens and we adjust as needed, but here are a few things the team is hard at work on.
1. Data has shown us not enough players have experienced a city assault. With the new improvements, we want to make sure that happens, so we’ve decided to decouple the Fortresses from the Tier 4 campaign. They still exist, so don’t worry—they are not disappearing, but they are also no longer required to capture in order to claim the pairing. We have other ideas for the Fortresses, but I would be showing our hand a little too early with those thoughts right now. =) It’s cool, trust me.
2. New User Journey Experience – New recruits come to WAR everyday and many of us roll alts from time to time, so we are taking a hard look at the beginning player experience and exploring how we can make that introduction experience to WAR even more memorable.
3. Apprentice/Hireling System – Wouldn’t it be cool if you could play with anyone at any time regardless of Rank? I think it would. ;)
4. Continued Crowd Control balancing! In patch 1.3.0b you saw some of our first adjustments to Crowd Control, and in 1.3.2 you'll see the next steps as we begin approaching some CC abilities directly. These changes will help to continue shifting Crowd Control to be more strategic and purposeful on the battlefield.
5. The Daemon moon will rise.
Alright that’s a lot to take in, but before I head out I just wanted to say thank you to all of our players for helping us sculpt the world of Warhammer into what it is today. It’s hard to believe that in one month WAR will hit its 1-year anniversary! We’re excited and have a lot of fun events planned for the month, and one of the biggest Live Events we’ve made to date—The Wild Hunt—which boasts a new 6-man dungeon called The Hunters Vale, to help celebrate this great milestone. The Wild Hunt will usher in the new Live Event equip slot on all characters, and is something we plan to continue to leverage for many more Live Events to come. Oh, and before I forget, enjoy the new load times getting into the game. We went from 52 seconds to almost 20 seconds! That’s at least a few extra player kills for everyone a day. ;)
I’ll see you in your city,
Jeff Skalski
WAR Producer, Mythic Entertainment
Twitter @Jeff_Skalski
Some interesting changes to say the least. The "displacement" of Fortresses in the T4 campaign was quite the shocker to read. What do you think of these changes?
STO Dev Chat
The Star Trek Online dev team hosted a developer chat this past week and shared some interesting insights in to the game.
All the juicy details:
It has been said that when you beam down it is only to a specific area. Can I fly to any of the canon planets, like Trill or Bajor and explore, or can I only do it if I am on a mission?
That's a good question. The answer is really a bit of both. There are an awful lot of planets in the game and some of them are tied directly to story lines or missions so you can't always get to them. But we absolutely have planets that you can (and will want to) visit whenever you want. You should definately expect to be able to walk around on familiar...
...starbases and planets. (that was worth a continue line wasn't it?)
Can you explain a little better how personal shields work? Do they stop everything or only energy weapons? Do they completely stop damage or only reduce it by a certain amount / percentage? And will they ever get so tough that we'll see characters tank repeated phaser hits?
Personal shields stop most incoming energy damage. About 10% bleeds through and the rest is absorbed by the shield. However physical attacks, like punched and knives, will penetrate shields more - so they can be more dangerous.
Some energy types can bypass low level shields entirely, so if you expect to go up against polaron weapons, you will need better shields. This is more or less how space works too.
when you beam down to a planet would your ship still be in space or would it disappear?
Your ship will clean up, so other players would see it disappear. We want to make sure nothing bad can happen to you when you're actually on another map.
Cryptic_Continuum - Disappear How? Fade out? Warp out?
Force Fields are more like walls with HP. You don't ware a Force Field but you can place one on the ground.
We've been trying a number of different things to see which one reads the best Loekii. Honestly I don't think we've picked for certain.
Do kits provide all of the defining capabilities of our characters?
No, kits are about a third to one half of your characters abilities. Your weapon is very important responsible for much of your DPS, as are devices (consumables). You profession also grants you specific activatable skills as well as passive skills that affect all of the above.
I'd like to know about bridge officers during away missions and howthere xp is earned. I've read a cpl times that our bridge officers will lvl jus like our character. During away missions where you have other player characters will the bridge officers not used get xp...or will we have to flip flop what BO's we use in order to lvl them up if we're grouped more than soloing. Or are there xp/lvls earned a different way than our ma in character?
You will earn skill points for you Bridge Officer. These skill points are a pool that you can give to any of your Bridge Officers - even if you don't take them on missions. A Bridge Officer must have a certain amount of skillpoints in order to be promoted.
In the shows all we saw on the Fed side were essentially 3 types of phaser from a small handheld to a phaser rifle. Will be limited thusly, or shall we have an Elite force type range of weapons?
There are hundreds of handheld weapons in STO. From standard issue pistols and rifles, all the way up to exotic anti-proton arcwave heavy assault cannon. There are 6 energy types (Phaser, Disruptor, Plasma, Tetryon, Polaron, and Anti-Proton), each have pistols, rifles and heavy assault. Each weapon has a different type of alt fire and procs. Starfleet weapons. Each weapon has a different type of alt fire and procs. Starfleet weapons, however, issue only phaser weapons, but there are high end phasers.
How many BO's are availible , is it based on ship size , rank ? and how many can you have max ?
The number of Bridge Officers in your roster is based on your current rank. The number of officers you can have active at one time is based on your ship. Bigger and more advanced ships have more seats so more officers can get involved.
<[BOK]Deyvid> In an Away Mission, if one of our BO's is defeated or incapacitated, will we be able to beam them up and beam down a replacement, or will we be one-man short for the rest of that Away Mission?
No one dies in an MMO. A defeated Bridge Officer will need to be resuscitated, and then they can rejoin the mission.
You are only short the man for the individual encounter, unless you team-wipe, then you have to e-transport back to a re-spawn point.
Everyone can use CPR. CPR is slow, is very hard to use in combat, and comes with a res penalty. Medics/Doctors have Cortical Stimulators which essentially is a better rez.
Cryptic_Geko, what if you "the captain" (and all other PCs) dies, do your BOs keep fighting and try to win that encoutner?
Yes, your Bridge Officers can keep fighting without you and they can rez you. You ca, however, choose to respawn at a respawn point if you don't want to wait.
is the mission clear up to the spot you wiped? do you restart the mission from the start? is there checkpoints in each mission and you go back to the last checkpoint?
Yes we make sure that the respawn points are clear and safe, or aren't active until they have been cleared out. For longer content there are always several places you can go back to if you wipe, or even if you have to log out and log back in, so you don't have to start from the very beginning again.
Will there be ranged heals in the game, and if so, how will they work?
Yes, your Bridge Officers can keep fighting without you and they can rez you. You can, however, choose to respawn at a respawn point if you don't want to wait.
There are also melee heal items like a dermal regenerator. At first we tried melee healing only, to be more like the show, but it was just too limiting for healers and it simply was not fun.
Yes, you can heal at range - about the same as typical weapon range. All Officers have bio suits that the med officer can activate with their medical tricoder. There are also melee heal items like a dermal regenerator. At first we tried melee healing only, to be more like the show, but it was just too limiting for healers and it simply was not fun.
Only Med Officers can heal. Anyone can carry consumable heal items. Engineers can repair shields. This applies to Bridge Officers as well as Players. So you could go on an away mission with only a Tactical, but you will be limited to consumables.
10 minute warning, folks. Be sure to PM your questions to me
There are all types of heals.
When you heal, you turn to face them.
What kind of melee weapons will we see on the Fed side if any?
Fed only uses Martial Arts, but they can pick up and use melee weapons, like a Bat'Leth or a Jem'Hadar Pole Arm. But the Federation is not melee weapon focused.
Can characters fire while moving? And if so does movement lower your accuracy?
Yup, you can move around during most attacks and it doesn't affect your chance to hit.
Will there be ground based PvP?
You bet, we love the fact that the game is focused not just on your ship and space but also on your captain and what happens on the ground. So our PvP designs cover both space and ground combat. (Does anyone else hear Amok Time music right now?)
That's all we have time for today, folks. Thanks for coming out! We'll see you next time at our next dev chat.
Dev Diary: New Keep Designs Coming
EA Mythic's Russel Chamier has posted a developer diary on the Warhammer Herald regarding new keeps that are coming soon(TM).
WAR's keep design has always been a little flat, unfortunately if you've seen one you've seen them all.. It sounds like that stands to change!
From the horse's mouth:
Today, Russel Chamier walks us through the upcoming keep redesign effort, from start to finish. Read on, as Russel delves into the deeply interwoven inner workings of this epic effort, and shows off some of the new Keep designs at the end!
Well here we are again. The last time we chatted we were in the Reikland Factory, searching for cake. This time the search for more cake leads us to open RvR, and Keep ramps.
Keep ramps! This update to our open RvR is a good example of live development on WAR. All games ship with items that will get criticized. In a subscription-style game such as ours, we have the opportunity (and responsibility) to make changes to the product after it goes live to meet these criticisms, and improve the game. With this change to the Keeps, we’re addressing one of those concerns. Specifically, the Keeps are getting a bigger footprint and we’re adding a second set of stairs leading from the first floor to second floor.
PLAN OF ATTACK
Okay, brass tacks. This issue was, at its core, one of space. The single ramp was not offering any sort of interior strategy in terms of attacking the lord. Warbands were essentially just zerging the stairs and it was a fairly limited space to begin with. So, we knew right away the change would be extensive to the existing structure. Because of the space involved, we didn’t want to cut into our Keep’s play space with the new ramp geometry, so we opted to expand the structure out instead.
BUILDING THE FIXTURE
First on the deck was the actual Keep fixture itself. We started with a prototype (imagine very simple shapes outlining the basic volume). You always want to start with simple shapes since, in the beginning, these shapes are fluid and very subject to change. We tried several ramp sizes, for instance, before we settled on the “double original ramp” width. As the prototype progressed, it coalesced into early working geometry.
Here, you can see that we blew out some of the side/back wall and wrapped the new stairs around the rear corner of the Keep. (The delete key is the ultimate wrecking ball for virtual buildings, I would like to add.) As I mentioned before, the new stairs were twice the width of the original ones, and in the new position they did not jive with the original tower already occupying the space. Spatial issues like this are common when you go back and apply significant updates to existing assets. In this case, the rear-right tower exists in this corner position on all the square Keep-types; so, we had to either delete or redo that tower as a function of our ramp addition.
As you can see from the image, we chose to redo the tower. Since we knew we were going to be adding divine altars to the Keeps, we reworked the back right tower to have a chamber/space/gazebo dedicated to the altar, further extending the playable space inside the Keep. At that point, we had two reasons to redo the tower: a new ramp run-through at the base, and the divine altar room at the top. So, the decision to commit was easy. Quick note: The divine altars will move to the new location atop the tower when these Keeps go live.
For the round Keep-types (the Elves/Dark Elves), the new ramp was one long set of stairs with no landing. They also have the “gazebo” space at the top of their back-right towers dedicated to the divine altars. The new ramps for the round Keeps were, like the square Keeps, twice as wide as the original ramps. In all, it was a good analogue to the changes we made for the square Keeps.
While we were at it, we took the opportunity to correct a few other spatial issues in different areas of some of the Keeps; see below for more details.
Anyhow, the entire framework was in place, and we began fixture construction in earnest. That’s where more of the art team was brought in. There were six Keeps to perform surgery on, and in every case where it was possible, we assigned each to its original builder in order to aid in both consistency and workflow.
FUN FACT! Only two Keeps were not made by their original artists, but I’m not telling you which ones unless you can come up with a suitable bribe. Hint: It is a bakery confection often featuring candles.
We didn’t delete the original ramps! So, don’t forget they are still there when everything goes live. They offer a shorter, more direct route to the lord than the new ramps. It was fun to see the core testers flanking each other within the structure of the Keep itself by drawing attackers up one ramp and running in behind them using the other one.
PLACING THE KEEPS
About the time the artists were finishing up with the fixtures, one of our terrain guys (Hi Mike!) was starting to position the Keeps within the game world. The first step was simply replacing the old with the new to see what kind of changes we’d have to make. Since the new Keeps were bigger than the old ones.
Oops! Again, this was not unexpected considering the bigger footprint. The process then became massaging the terrain across the game to accommodate the increased size of the Keeps. That’s 30 Keeps across 21 zones throughout Tiers two, three, and four. We knew going in this would be the case, since each Keep location is unique, but it’s worth noting here so people see the full impact that adding stairs has on game construction. Fortunately Mike was still on the job and not trying to kill anyone. After all, he has a Rank 40 with an interest in all this.
FUN FACT! Our art updates always incur downloads, since you can only see our work if you download it to your client first. Hmmm. Maybe that’s an unfun fact upon reflection.
While we were at it, we corrected some nearby terrain bugs since we were already forcing a download of the zone data to the player.
A few of the Keeps had to be moved because of how they interacted with the surrounding PVE terrain or another portion of the RVR lakes. Of course we didn’t want to intrude on them, so that meant a change in the location of not only the art but all the mobs and other spawned items that are placed by the content team. It also meant we needed to update the icon positions and map image files in a few cases.
LIGHTING THE KEEPS
Since some new exterior and interior lights were added as a function of increased surface area, we had to redo a portion of our lighting as well. That’s where the lighting team comes in. We use light maps, which means the lighting solution you see (if you turn on light maps) is pre-baked by us on the back-end and not rendered at runtime (dynamic). I was especially pleased with how the Chaos Keep looked after it was lit.
Once the lights were placed and baked, the bulk of our work was done. (Well, after we delivered all this stuff to the client building team, I mean.) I like to call it the BDD. Big Data Dump. Read into that whatever you want.
FINAL RESULTS
At this point, the art was done; however, the work on the Keeps continued after we artists passed the baton since there were quite a few changes still to be made by our content developers (including things such as updating the positions of the mobs, and pathing, et al). After that it moved into the testing phase as the data moved through our internal servers. In order for there to be time for these dependencies, the art is done months in advance before it’s finally seen on live. In the case of our Keeps, we finished the work back in June.
And now our tale is finished. I do hope you guys enjoyed seeing how it all took shape on our side. Farewell!
- Russell
Classless TF2 Update Goes Live
The latest, greatest and classless Team Fortress 2 update is now live on Steam. While there aren't any new class unlocks, there's still a plethora of goodies here to explore;
New Content:
- Added King Of The Hill game mode.
- Added custom animations played by the losing team during the post-win state. They are moved into third person camera to enjoy them.
- Added lots of new hats.
- Added koth_Viaduct.
- Added ctf_Sawmill
- Added community map Arena_Offblast
- Added community map Cp_Yukon
Additions / Changes:
- Added "Auto Reload" option to the multiplayer advanced options.
- Clip-based weapons that reload a full clip at a time can now have their reloads aborted by firing.
- Pistol now fires at a fixed rate, not based on the speed at which you press the firing button.
- Added a color blind option to add a Jarate icon above enemies who are busy accepting a terrifying existence where they have no dignity.
- Significantly reduced the amount of network traffic being sent.
- Capturing the flag in a CTF game mode gives the entire capturing team 10 seconds of critboost.
- Sappers attached to a teleporter automatically place another Sapper on the other end of the teleporter, if it exists.
- Engineers wrenching a teleporter will repair the other end as well, and remove Sappers from both if they exist.
- Disguised Spies no longer trigger On-Hit effects (like the Blutsauger's heal).
- Removed self-inflicted minicrits. Fixes Jarate'd Soldiers/Demomen having ineffective rocket/grenade jumps.
- Added an item panel to the spectator cam that shows non-standard items being carried by the player you're spectating.
- Added an "Inspect" key that allows you to look at items being carried by your team mates.
- Backpack improvements:
- Added drag & drop to move items around. Item positions are maintained on the backend.
- Added multi-select, allowing you to delete multiple items at once.
- Added a new key to the key binding page that opens your inventory directly to your backpack.
- Fixed mouseover panel being incorrectly position when the backpack first appears.- Cloaked Spies standing in valid backstab positions no longer raise their knife.
- Added current map name and gametype to the bottom right of scoreboard.
- Added class icons to tips on the loadout and loading screens.
Improved visuals around flags when they're being carried by a player.
- Improved critboosted visuals, making it much clearer when an enemy has critboost.
- Updated the loading panel to show the game type under the map name during level transition.
- In-game chat dialog now supports full Unicode characters.
- Added BLU main menu background.
- Added response caching for some server queries to help reduce the CPU load from DOS attacks.
- Teammates no longer block friendly radius damage. Prevents nearby teammates causing rocket/grenade jumps to fail.
Map Changes:
- Update PLR_Pipeline
- Increased the starting advantage in the third round if a team has won the first two rounds.
- Fixed carts not continuing to the second round if they're capped at the same time in the first round.
- Fixed being able to shoot pipebombs over the starting gates in the first round.
- Fixed being able to open the doors in the first round before the setup time was finished.
- Fixed players getting stuck in some doors.
- Fixed players being able to get onto rooftops and out of the map boundaries.
- Fixed other minor bugs and exploits.- Update Arena_Sawmill
- Fixed DirectX8 bug where some models would not be visible.
- Fixed exploit with building teleporters outside of the map.- Updated CP_Granary
- Made a few changes to improve balance based on competitive community feedback.
Item Reworks:
- The Force of Nature
- The enemy knockback now only `works in close range and behaves more like the Pyro's air blast.
- Enemies cannot be juggled by the FaN's effect.
- The self-knockback has also changed to respect the firer's view angle. Looking up while shooting will no longer propel the enemy upwards.
- Knockback is now scaled by damage done.- The Sandman
- A Scout will receive 1 point for stunning an enemy and 2 points for a long range stun.
- Stunned players now take 75% of all incoming damage instead of 50%.
- Ubercharged players can no longer be stunned.
- Heavies spinning their mini-guns will continue to spin when stunned (whether the left or right mouse button is pressed).
- The minimum distance to stun a target has been reduced.
- The negative attribute has changed from "no double jump" to "-30 max health".Fixes:
- Fixed various issues around layout & presentation of items inside the Backpack and "X is carrying" item dialogs.
- Fixed an exploit that allowed players to work around sv_pure.
- Particle files are now protected by sv_pure.
- Fixed critboost effect getting stuck on when you die while critboosted.
- Fixed Timer HUD element backgrounds not being the correct color if you change teams during waiting for players.
- Fixed a couple of issues with the way critboosts affected The Huntsman and the Spy's knife.
- Fixed an exploit where you could reload The Huntsman faster than intended.
- Fixed Heavy "civilian" exploit.
- Fixed a set of exploits using the DXSupport config files.
- Fixed r_screenfademinsize and r_screenfademaxsize exploits.
- Fixed sentries firing at a fully cloaked Spy if they're still the closest target.
Community requests:
- Added a HUD element for hybrid CTF & CP maps.
- Added custom kill server log text "train" and "saw" for deaths caused by these environmental hazards.
- Added new "medic_death" event for server logs
- Added "func_respawnflag" trigger entity. It will remove & return the flag if a flag carrier touches it, or if the flag falls into it.
We'll be checking out some of this content on the Knight's own dedicated Team Fortress 2 server this weekend, so be sure to join us!