The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The whole bestiary starts thinking four times faster
• Wounded creatures break off and run
• Cast bars, ground warnings and interrupting a spell
• Battle Fatigue shipped and retuned in one day
• Eastreach Gap keeps escalating past wave eight

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British here, with word of what thy makers were about yesterday. The beasts of the wild have woken, and they think four times faster than before. The wounded among them have learned, at long last, to run. A creature that means to lay a spell upon thee will now show thee the spell, and a hard enough blow will knock it out of his head entirely. Thy own body keeps a fresh tally of how long thou hast stood about with steel in hand. And the gap at Eastreach has stopped being polite. Sit thee down. We begin with the beasts.

I want to start with the one that made me put my coffee down. There are creatures in this world that you cannot hurt. Not because they are tough, but because the creature loses its own footing on the ground, decides it has no route to you, and goes on strike. You swing, and the game politely informs you that you are out of reach and dealing no damage, while the thing stands about a metre away, looking at you. There was supposed to be a grace period before any of that happened. The grace period never ran. Not once, in years.

Here is why, and it is the smallest possible reason. The code measured that grace period against a timer that nobody ever started. So the very first failure to find a route counted as the last straw, and the creature simply stopped acknowledging your existence as a threat. And the cause was almost never where you were standing. It was the creature having slipped off the walkable ground under its own feet. It now picks itself up, re-seats itself on solid ground, and has another look at you before it gives up. Which is what any of us would do.

That was one of about a dozen things that landed on the creature side yesterday, and the biggest of them is the one you will feel without being told. Every creature in the game re-reads the world on a heartbeat. It looks around, decides who is the biggest problem, and acts. Nearly the whole bestiary was set up by its designers to do that eight times a second. The game was running them at twice a second. So for years, a creature you stunned, or a target that died, or an ally that shouted for help, could sit there for as much as half a second before the creature noticed anything had changed.

They now run at the speed they were always asking for. Four times more often. In practice a creature turns onto a new target, reacts to a death, and comes out of a stun up to a third of a second sooner than it did on Sunday. That does not sound like much written down. It is enormous in a fight, because a third of a second is roughly the gap between a creature that feels like a machine and a creature that feels like it is paying attention. Town folk, and creatures deliberately built to be slow and lumbering, kept exactly the timing they had. Nobody wants a snappier innkeeper.

And underneath that, a lovely piece of dead machinery came back to life. Creature senses are sorted into three tiers, so the cheap ones run constantly and the expensive ones run rarely. On nearly two thousand creatures, all three tiers were set to intervals shorter than the heartbeat they had to wait for. Which means every sense ran on every beat, every time, and the tiers had never once thinned anything in their entire existence. With the heartbeat at its proper speed, the three tiers separate for the first time and actually do the job they were built for.

Two more efficiency notes and then I will stop being an engineer at you. A creature's awareness radius was doing two entirely different jobs: how far away it can notice you, and how much of the world it sweeps up and remembers every second. Those are now two separate numbers, and the scenery sweep is capped at thirty metres. The handful of creatures set to notice you at a hundred and twenty-eight metres had been quietly memorising the whole scene, over and over. Meanwhile a creature working out who to attack was building and throwing away up to sixteen small scraps of memory eight times a second. That is around a hundred and sixty pieces of garbage per second, per fighting creature, for the machine to sweep up. Which is a good part of what you have been feeling as a stutter in a crowded fight.

Now the part I have wanted for a very long time. Wounded creatures run away.

Before yesterday, seven creatures in the entire game could break off a fight. Seven. Some wolves, a fox, and a fish. Everything else in the world, from a rabbit to a bandit to a kobold with a grenade, would stand in front of you and fight to the death with no more thought than a fence post. That number is now about seven hundred and twenty. Animals turn tail at roughly a fifth of their health. Human, elf and kobold enemies at roughly a sixth. On top of that, a creature rolls its nerve as it passes half health and again at a quarter, so a coward can break early and a brave one can hold on past the line.

Some things do not run, and that matters as much as the ones that do. The undead do not run. Elementals, mechanical things, plants, slimes, mimics, demons, obsidian creatures, dragons and trolls all stand their ground, and so does anything that has been corrupted into one of those. An obsidian bear will not flee. It stopped being a bear. That distinction is doing a lot of quiet work for the mood of this world, and I am glad we drew the line there. A creature that does break covers about fifteen metres, turns, and stays inside the ground it was set to guard, so nothing goes sprinting off into the next province and out of your evening.

While wiring this up, the team found something wonderful. A hundred and twenty-three tamed pets have carried a setting, for years, saying they should run at fifteen percent health. It has never worked. Not once. The part of a creature's mind that picks a thing to run away from flatly refuses to do it for a pet. So all those numbers have been sitting on all those pets, doing absolutely nothing, while everyone assumed pets fleeing was a solved and shipped feature. The paperwork was immaculate. The wiring was not attached.

And the wounded ones that do not run get angrier instead. Dragons now enrage below a third of their health, stopping for a one second cast and coming back with a hundred more strength, dexterity and intelligence for the next minute. Their fire breath at half health is unchanged, so a dragon fight now has two escalations instead of one. Trolls could always enrage at half health, but the game only checked their health when something unrelated happened to the troll, so the rage arrived late, or never at all. It follows their health properly now. Do let me know how that goes for you.

Next, the thing I think you will notice within about ninety seconds of logging in. Creatures show you what they are casting.

Until yesterday the only cast bar in this game was your own. Which meant that a creature winding up a two and a half second spell and a creature taking an ordinary swing at you gave you precisely the same warning, which is to say none. Now a creature casting a spell draws a bar under its floating name with the spell written on it. Spells only, never plain melee swings, and that restraint is the whole trick. If everything drew a bar, you would stop reading them by Tuesday. It reaches three hundred and sixty-three of the creatures you actually meet: elves, humans, liches, skeletons, trolls, elementals, satyrs, zombies and kobolds.

The best part is that it cost nothing on the network. A creature already announces which spell it is beginning before it waits out the wind-up, so every machine in the scene already knew the spell, its length, and when it would land. The plan had budgeted a whole networking change to carry the spell name across, and the name was already sitting there, having been sent this entire time and read by nobody. The most satisfying work in this industry is the work you discover you already did.

Alongside it, a creature winding up an attack that covers an area now paints the ground it is about to hit. The ring is the true size of the blast, and it follows the creature, so stepping out of it works exactly the way your instincts say it should. Eighty-seven abilities draw one. Stun the creature or knock it down and the ring drops instead of running on toward a blast that is never coming, which is the first time in the history of this game that interrupting something has looked like anything at all.

And now you can interrupt them properly. Hit a casting creature hard enough and the spell is gone. The bar is one blow taking off more than six percent of that creature's health, which is a proportion rather than a fixed number, so it works the same on a rat and on a dragon with no per creature fiddling. Which attacks are good at breaking concentration was already written into the ability data and had never been read by anything. Crushing Blow, Body Slam and Blinding Shot count double and clear the bar on half the damage a plain swing needs. Fire arrows, meteor showers and burning fields count for nothing and can never interrupt anybody, which is correct. A creature that has just lost a spell gets five seconds of protection before it can lose another, so a caster stays dangerous when a whole group is chewing on it.

And here is a related confession. Creatures have been carrying area attacks around for years and almost never using them as area attacks. The check that asked whether several of you were standing in the blast only looked at abilities that a human had marked by hand as area attacks. There were eight such marks in the entire project, and not one of them sat on a creature that could ever reach the check. It now reads what the ability actually does, which reaches four hundred and two creatures across seventy-two abilities. Troll ground pounds. Lich whirlwinds. Dragon tail bashes and wing gusts. Kobold grenades. The big cats roaring. And when it did count how many of you were in the blast, it was comparing your distance against the range the creature likes to fight at rather than against the size of the explosion. So a fireball with a five metre burst was counting everybody within thirty metres as being inside it. Optimistic. Very optimistic.

Now, Battle Fatigue, which is the largest new system of the day and which had the most interesting twenty-four hours.

The idea is simple. Fighting with your weapons drawn wears your character down. A meter fills as you fight, and at the top of it your health regeneration, your focus regeneration and your critical hit chance are all halved, sliding smoothly between the two ends rather than snapping. Only positive regeneration is slowed, so if something is draining you, it drains at full speed. Your pets and the creatures are untouched. You can see where you stand on a new gold Vigor bar sitting under your health and focus. You get it back by going to town, faster if you stand and listen to a bard perform, and faster still if a bard in your party plays Melody of Mending, which repairs fatigue at a rate set by their skill in that song. At skill one hundred, a bard cancels out the buildup completely while you fight.

It shipped at lunchtime. By late afternoon our testers had it measured, and they reported about fifteen seconds per point with weapons out, and said that standing there or actually fighting did not seem to make any difference. They were right on both counts, and their numbers matched the shipped values exactly, which is the good kind of report, because it means nothing is broken and everything needs tuning. So it was tuned the same evening. The bar now takes an hour of fighting to empty rather than thirty minutes, and it only drains while a fight is really happening. Weapons out with nothing landing for twenty seconds costs you nothing, so walking through a dungeon between fights is free.

And bards got a proper toy out of it. Every player's Vigor now travels to everyone in the room the same way your health does, and a bard's client draws it as a third bar on the party rows and on the target frame. Two ways in: a trained Bard Specialization shows it all the time, and any bard at all can see it while their Melody of Mending is playing, so the person doing the healing can watch the repair land on each member of the party. Nobody else sees the bar. That is a real bard doing a real job, and it made me happy.

One more piece of the day, for the people who like to be hurt. The control point at Eastreach Gap used to run eight waves and then repeat the eighth forever, with the same ten creatures on the same clock, until everyone got bored and went home. Any group that could hold wave eight could hold it all night. The waves now keep counting. By wave sixteen you are facing two creatures at every spawn point, forty levels higher, a quarter faster and a quarter larger, with a hundred more of every attribute. By wave twenty-four it is three per point at eighty levels, half again the speed and size, and two hundred more of each. Past that the climb doubles. It ends when the creatures take the flag back, because at some point they do.

And the fight now knows what it is. The wave number existed before yesterday, but only down in the plumbing where nobody in the actual battle could read it, so the capture meter now tells you which wave you are on. Finished runs are written down, with how deep the group got, how long they held it, and who was there. There are two leaderboards ranked on wave, with the faster run breaking a tie. And if a group loses a control point at wave eleven or deeper, the whole shard hears about it: the place, the wave and how long they held. No names in that announcement, only the deed. I think that is the right amount of glory.

Three quick things that will improve somebody's specific evening. Single player offline play now has a difficulty setting, in its own tab, running from Easy through Medium, Hard, Challenging and Impossible. It scales the level of hostile creatures between half and one and a half times. Hard is the default and is exactly how offline has always played, so if you touch nothing, nothing changes. Because a creature's level drives its health, its attributes and the damage of everything it casts, the effect is far larger than the percentage suggests. A level thirty creature at Impossible arrives at level forty-five with about six hundred and fifty-five health instead of three hundred and fifty-three. Experience does not move with it, so nobody is grinding on Easy or buying levels on Impossible.

Second, thirty-six creatures in this game made no sound whatsoever. No noise when they spotted you, no attack sound, no death cry. Between them they stand at eight hundred and thirteen spawn points. The whole Underdweller family, every mushroom, five spiders including the red spider queen, an offering reindeer, one miniboss, and the doe. The doe stands at three hundred and one of those points and is very often the first animal a new player ever sees, and she has been utterly mute the whole time. She shares a skeleton with the stag, so she picked up eleven proper sounds in a single edit. The mushrooms were the only family with nothing that fit, so they now use the carnivorous plant sounds, refitted and pitched up, so that no one mistakes a mushroom for a flesh flayer. A sentence I did not expect to say today.

Third, your house. A lot owner can now turn on thinner fog indoors. Outdoor fog exists to hide the far horizon, and a room does not have a horizon, so walking inside has always filled your lovely dining room with the same haze hanging over the street. Tick the box and the fog is pushed back to two and a half times its distance as you step in, and it returns in about a third of a second as you step out. It is pushed back rather than switched off, so an open door or a window still shows you the weather. It is off on every lot until an owner asks for it. And in the same spirit: a placed blacksmith station used to start its bellows at scene load and work them around the clock forever. If you have been living above a forge that breathes in its sleep, it now only works while you do.

The lightning round, which this week is mostly our interface apologising. The worst of them: closing the Options window while dragging a slider left that slider stuck to your mouse. Reopen Options and it would follow every movement of your hand with no button held down, clicking would not release it, and the only way out was to log out of the game entirely. It was letting go of the mouse after the window had already come down, at which point there was nothing left to let go of. Fixed for every slider in there. Elsewhere, your own name plate had been climbing higher and higher above your head as you zoomed the camera in, far enough at full zoom to leave the top of the window, because we were measuring your height from the wrong place and getting an answer that depended on your trousers.

Beyond that: drop down menus that cut their entries off mid word, a repair message that named your item and nothing else, a vendor list with a blank vendor column, a skill panel clipping the top off its own celebration, and a couple of spell tooltips that had never mentioned how big the explosion was. Nineteen tracker bugs went down, and our testers signed off forty-six separate verification tasks, which is an unreasonable amount of volunteer labour to give a game. Oh, and Eris, the Master Chaos Magic Trainer in Etceter, has apparently spent a very long time standing in the blank pose a character holds before anyone teaches it how to stand, arms straight out to the sides, twitching occasionally. Master of Chaos. Honestly, she was committed to the theme.

Two of you get named tonight. Traveller13 asked for a pinned character sheet to survive changing scenes, which it now does, and also reported that the single planting squares on the ornate elven and viking beds could not be clicked, because the bed itself was leaning out over the soil and stealing your cursor. And Garfunkel Humperdinck reported the blurry storm cloud over Quel Shardfall, which took us three attempts, because two earlier passes confidently adjusted the wrong cloud entirely. It draws at full resolution now, and the sky is none the wiser.

That is Monday. What I am looking forward to is the first evening a group holds Eastreach past wave twenty and gets announced to the whole shard for losing it, because that will be a better story than any victory. Go and find a wounded wolf and watch it think about its choices.

And remember, every mushroom in the game can now make a noise, which means one of them can finally scream at you. I am told he is a fun guy.