The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Fire elementals no longer burn in lava
• Douse no longer buys a moment in the fire
• Twenty-six tester verifications closed in a day
• The Faerie Belt and the shrinking potion stacked
• Dungeon reverb was echoing your menu clicks

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British, bearing word of what thy makers were about upon Thursday last. The fire elementals of the Hilt Fortress have ceased burning themselves upon the very lava that bore them. A belt and a potion have been persuaded to stop shrinking thee twice over. The songs of the deep places no longer echo off walls they were never standing near. And six and twenty tasks were struck from the board in a single day, every one of them proven by a hand that was not our own. That last is the true shape of the day and we shall come to it. But the elemental first, because the elemental is funnier.

Picture a fire elemental. It is made of fire. It lives in a fortress full of lava. By any reasonable reading it is the most at-home creature in that entire building. And until this week, when it walked into the lava, it caught fire and took damage. Every time. As far as the lava was concerned, something was standing in it, and things standing in lava burn. It never asked what that thing was made of.

So we had a creature of pure flame, hip deep in molten rock, on fire and losing health, in what should have been the most comfortable bath of its life. That is fixed. And a tester went and stood in the lava beside one to prove it.

The lava is worth staying with for a minute, because there were two problems in that room and they were cousins. The second one is about Douse. Douse is how you put yourself out. You are on fire, you cast it, the fire goes away, and you get on with your life. That is a fine spell in almost every situation, and there is exactly one situation where it ought to be close to useless, which is when you are on fire because you are standing in lava. Put the fire out all you like. The lava has not gone anywhere. It has no opinion about your spell.

What was happening was a small gap. You would douse, and the flames would take a moment to notice that you were still in the fire. Not a long moment. Long enough, though, that the punishment for standing in the worst part of the room arrived with a pause built into it. Now the burning comes straight back. You douse, and the lava reminds you at once why that was optimistic. I want to be clear that this is a fix which makes the game meaner, and I am delighted with it. If a room is going to have lava in it, the lava should mean something.

And then the other half of the same argument. Once you have decided that lava hurts whatever stands in it, you have to answer the harder question, which is whether it should hurt absolutely everything. Every good rule in a game needs its exceptions, and every exception is a place where a bug can sit down and get comfortable. A creature made of fire is the obvious exception. It was not exempt. It was being cooked by its own habitat.

That is the kind of thing that can live in a room for a very long time without anyone reporting it, because a fire elemental losing a little health while standing in lava does not look wrong. It looks like a fire elemental. The animation is fire. The ground is fire. Everything about the picture agrees with itself. You have to actually watch the numbers to see the joke.

And then you have to check the other direction as well, because the moment you carve out an exception you must be certain you have not carved out too much. A fire creature should shrug off the floor of that fortress. It should still be perfectly killable by a sword, an arrow, a spell, and by fire of the sort that comes out of a wand rather than up out of the ground. An exception that reaches one step further than it should does not look like a bug either. It looks like a monster that has become a little unfair, and nobody spots it until somebody spends four minutes hitting the thing with everything they own and wondering why the health bar has opinions.

Now let me tell you about the real shape of yesterday, because it was an unusual day and I think the mechanics of it are worth explaining.

When we fix something here, we do not simply tick it off and walk away. We write a task for our testers that says, in plain words, here is what changed, here is how to go and try it, and here is what you should see if we got it right. Then that task sits on a board until somebody who does not work here goes and does it. They tell us it passed, or they tell us it did not. Quite often they tell us it did not, and that is the entire point of having them. A fix that only its author has ever tried is a rumor with a commit attached.

And when a tester says no, that is the good outcome, whatever it feels like on the day. A failed verification arrives with a person attached to it, somebody who has just done the thing, in order, with the game running in front of them, and who can tell you which of the five steps stopped behaving. That is worth a hundred reports that say it is still broken. It costs us nothing beyond the mild indignity of having been wrong in public, and we are extremely used to that.

Yesterday, six and twenty of those tasks closed. Twenty-six, in one day. Some of them were the same fix checked from two directions, so call it twenty-three distinct things that moved from we believe this is fixed to somebody has looked. I have been doing this for a very long time and that is a splendid day.

It is also a kind of good day that is nearly impossible to show anybody. There is no screenshot of it. Nothing new appeared in the world. No new sword, no new room, no new spell. What happened is that a large pile of claims turned into a large pile of facts, and if you log in tonight the difference is invisible to you and enormous to us, because it is the difference between a build we hope is right and a build we can hand you with a straight face.

And I want to say plainly that we did not do that part. Our testers did. They went and stood in lava. They shrank themselves on purpose. They opened the same window for the fortieth time to check whether a number in the corner had stopped lying to them. That work is unglamorous and it is precise and it is the reason any of the rest of this is worth announcing.

Speaking of shrinking yourself on purpose. The Faerie Belt makes you small. There is also a potion that makes you small. Two entirely separate ways to be small, written at different times, by people solving different problems, and neither of them had ever been asked whether the other one might already be running. So you could put on the belt, drink the potion, and be small twice.

I would love to tell you the game handled that with grace. It did not. The two effects piled on top of one another and you ended up a good deal smaller than anything in the world was built to accommodate. Doorways stop being a problem. Everything else starts being one.

This is the same family of bug as the fire elemental in the lava, and I find that family fascinating, so forgive me a moment of shop talk. Both are cases where two pieces of the game are individually correct and have never been introduced to each other. The lava knows how to burn things. The elemental knows what it is made of. Neither was written to ask. The belt knows how to shrink you. The potion knows how to shrink you. Neither was written to check whether you had already been shrunk.

Every one of those pieces is small, sensible and well behaved, doing precisely the job it was given. The bug lives entirely in the space between them. That space is where most of our bugs live, and it is why a tester who does two odd things at the same time is worth a great deal more to us than one who does a single odd thing very thoroughly.

Now, one that was insulting your ears. Dungeons have reverb. That is deliberate. A cave should sound like a cave. Footsteps should come back at you off the stone, a corridor should feel enormous and unfriendly, and half the point of going underground is that it sounds like being underground. We are rather proud of it.

The trouble was that the room applied its acoustics to everything that made a sound, and some of the things making sounds were not in the room. Your interface is not in the room. When you opened your backpack, the small click of the window opening bounced off the cave walls. And the music, which is a recording, made in a studio, by musicians who were nowhere near a dungeon, reached your ears sounding as though it had been performed in the cave alongside you.

Once you have heard it you cannot stop hearing it. A menu click with a tail on it. The soundtrack going damp every time you walk down a flight of stairs. The interface and the music now sit outside the room's acoustics, where they always belonged. Your footsteps still echo. Your swords still echo. The creatures very much still echo. Your inventory does not.

While we are on the senses, a matched pair on the seeing side. There is a new set of skill icons in the game, and until yesterday that set had reached most of the places where skills are drawn, but not all of them. So you could have the new art in one window and the old art in the window beside it, for the same skill, which reads less like a style and more like an error, because it was one. It reaches everywhere now. Separately, item, consumable and emote icons were soft. Not broken, just faintly fuzzy in the way you would never file a report about and would feel every single day. They are sharp.

Here is a small one with a real question underneath it. There is a tool that resets a character's quest progress and wipes their story back to the start. It exists for testing. When you use it, the game must answer something that sounds trivial and is not, which is where that character now stands.

Because the character is somewhere. In a town, in a dungeon, halfway up a mountain, standing in a doorway they walked to for a reason. And you have just erased the reason. If the whole of your story is gone, the world has no particular claim on the patch of ground beneath your boots. The answer we settled on is the overworld. Reset your story and you are placed out on the map, which is where a person with no current business belongs. Perfectly reasonable. And exactly wrong for one specific character.

The brand new one. A character who has just been made has not earned the overworld. They have sailed nowhere. They are on the Isle of Storms, at the beginning, where every one of you began. Resetting the story of somebody whose story has not started ought to leave them precisely where they are. So the same tool now gives two different answers depending on whether there was anything there to reset, and both of those answers are correct. Both were checked yesterday, separately, by a tester who made a fresh character for no other reason than to see where they landed.

A few smaller things now, grouped the way you would meet them rather than the way we filed them. Three about your home. If you clicked a lot sign to read who owns a place, you used to be nailed to the ground until you closed it, which is a peculiar punishment for reading a sign. You can walk away with it open now, and long house names fit inside it instead of running off the edge. Placed decorations were showing you their backpack weight and their sale value, which is information a chair has no business volunteering once it has become a chair in a room. That is gone. And wall flags now turn into the wind, which nobody asked for and everybody will notice.

Two about crafting and shopping. At a crafting station, when you have enough of an ingredient, the number is green. That sounds tiny. It is the difference between reading a recipe and checking a recipe, and you do the second one about nine times an evening. And wax cylinders, which is our recorded music, were not appearing under the Music or the Decoration filters on vendors. So if you shop the way a sensible person shops, by category, they did not exist. They exist now.

Two about the things that follow you around. Recalling your pet was dropping it on a spot chosen at random near you, which is fine right up until the random spot is on the far side of a fence. And the health bar on a damaged summon was sitting on top of its own name and owner line, so the moment your creature was hurt you could no longer read what it was, which is precisely the moment you most want to know.

Right. Everything else, at speed. A run of interface fixes landed in the places you touch most, and they are best described as things you will not notice, which is the highest compliment an interface fix can receive. Slots in the combat hand bar and the deck builder sit correctly after last week's tidying. The catchphrase bar refreshes when you switch characters, instead of presenting you with the previous character's opinions. Salvage components are listed on item tooltips, so you can see what a thing breaks down into before you break it down. A major repair can be paid from more than one stack of crowns, which had been failing at the counter for people who were in fact perfectly rich enough. The divider you drag to resize your backpack columns now tells your cursor what it does. And new characters begin trained in Dash and Air's Embrace rather than Gust, which makes for a better first hour for anyone who has only just arrived.

Our testers received a small gift of their own. There is a button that grants them every skill at once, for testing, and it had been making their character powerful in name only. The tooltip promised one thing and the character delivered another. It now does what it says on the label, which I am told improved several afternoons considerably. And overnight, the forum sweep filed one new wishlist entry about archer balance and added a note to a standing request about cursor art. Both are on the board. Neither is forgotten.

That is Thursday. A day on which almost nothing was built and a great deal was proven, and I have come to like those days rather more than I used to. Tonight I am looking forward to the next batch of verification tasks going up, because there is a particular pleasure in watching somebody find the one thing we were certain about. Take care of one another out there. And stay out of the lava, unless you happen to be made of fire, in which case, as of this week, help yourself.

One last thing before I go. We spent good hours getting that elemental to stop taking damage in the molten rock, and afterwards somebody asked him how the whole ordeal had been. He said it was the worst burn he had ever received. Good night from New Britannia, and I am not sorry.