The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Forty-three tracker items closed in one day
• A failed verification became a same-day bug
• Automatons, guards and townsfolk get their right voices
• Pets keep their buffs and summons cross the zone line
• Four crafting table irritations put right

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British, bearing word of what thy makers were about upon Friday last. Forty and three matters struck from the board in a single day, and near every one of them proven by thy own hands rather than by the hands that wrought the fix. The automatons speak at last with the voices of machines. Thy pet now carries its blessings and its wounds through a zone line, as ever it ought to have done. And two good folk of Blood River were caught greeting travellers with the wrong words entirely, by a tester who went and looked. We begin there, for that is the finest story of the day.

Somebody walked into Blood River Outskirts on Friday to check one small thing. Two characters there had been given new opening lines, and the job was to stand in front of them, say hello, and hear the new words. The new words did not come. They said the old thing, precisely as they had said it for a very long time, with tremendous confidence. So the tester wrote it down and marked the task failed. That failure became a bug of its own with the verdict sitting right there in the title, and before the day was over that bug was closed too.

That is the sound of the whole machine working, and I want to spend a few minutes on why.

Here is how a fix reaches you. Somebody on the team changes something. That change is written up as a task in plain language, the kind a player can read, with numbered steps and a list of what you ought to see when you follow them. The task goes to the testers on our test shard, and one of them runs the steps and says pass or fail. Only then is the thing considered finished.

I want to be clear about why we bother with that last part, because it costs real time and real patience. A fix that works on the machine of the person who wrote it is a rumor. It has been tried by the one human being on earth who already knows how it is supposed to behave, who runs the exact steps that exercise the change, and who will forgive it a small oddity because they know what caused it. That is a fond hope with a spreadsheet attached.

On Friday, forty-three items closed. Forty of them were verification tasks. The other three were bugs reported by players. Almost no new code went in that day. What went out was proof.

The tasks that closed carry numbers running from very old to very new. Some had been waiting on the board a long while for somebody with the right character standing in the right place to go and try them. Others were written this week and answered within days. Both kinds got the same treatment, which is rather the point of keeping a board at all.

And one of them came back failed. That single failure is worth more to me than the other forty put together, because a verification pass that never fails is a verification pass that is not being run. Somebody stood in front of two characters in Blood River, heard the wrong greeting, and said so plainly. The board caught it, the fix followed, and the day ended with both the failed check and the bug behind it settled.

There is a small piece of bookkeeping in that story worth admiring. The failed check did not simply get reopened and handed back to whoever wrote it. It became a separate bug carrying the tester's verdict in the title, so the record now says two true things at the same time. On this build, in this place, the wrong words came out of two people's mouths. And here is the work that followed. A year from now, when somebody asks why those greetings changed twice, the answer is sitting there in order, written down by the person who actually stood in the room.

If you are one of the people who ran those steps, I would like you to know what that day looks like from where I sit. It looks like a wall of green. Somebody spent their Friday walking down into a stone basement to find out whether a stairway would accept a decoration. That is unglamorous work, and it is the whole difference between a build we hope is good and a build we know is good.

Now, the voices. We have been working through the speaking parts of this world for a while, and Friday brought a cluster of them home at once.

The automatons now speak with machine voices. Before this, our clockwork servants held forth in ordinary warm human tones, which is a small thing until you notice it, and then you cannot stop noticing it. A construct of gears and brass sounding like a pleasant fellow from the next village over. The illusion held for about half a second, which is roughly how long it takes to look at one.

The gate guards at Estgard are grown men and now sound like grown men. There is a sergeant in Harvest who is meant to sound like a child, and does. I will let you go and meet the sergeant yourself, because working out why is a great deal more fun than me standing here explaining it.

Then my favorite of the group. Our characters have learned to take turns. If you have ever stood in a busy square and had three people greet you at the same instant, in three different voices, over the top of one another, you know exactly what that sounds like. It sounds like a choir that skipped rehearsal. There is now a floor rule that one of them speaks at a time and the others wait, which is both more polite and considerably easier on the ears.

Voice work is unforgiving in a way that surprises people. You can carry a scene with a rough line reading if the voice belongs to the character. Put a perfectly good line in the wrong voice and the scene falls over, and the player usually cannot tell you why it felt wrong. They only know they stopped believing the person standing in front of them. We have an enormous number of speaking parts in this world, and every last one of them has to be told what sort of throat it has.

The Oracle also got a proper guide to the Virtues and a catch-up on what has changed recently, and both were verified on Friday. She is the first voice a great many new players hear. Having her able to explain the Virtues without hedging is worth a good deal, and it is, after all, rather the point of the place.

Let us talk about what happens when you walk through a door.

For a long time, crossing a zone line was a small reset for anything following you. Your pet went through and came out the other side as a slightly different animal. Blessings you had spent focus and time to put on it were gone. Its wounds went with them. Which means that for a long time, you could heal a badly hurt companion by taking it for a walk.

I would call that a feature if I thought for a moment anybody would believe me.

Now the animal that arrives is the animal that left. The blessing you put on it holds. The damage it took holds too, which is the less pleasant half of the same fix and the honest half. This is the sort of problem that only shows itself if you play across several zones for hours with the same companion, which is to say it needed a tester willing to do exactly that, on purpose, while watching a health bar.

Summons got the larger change. A summoned creature now follows you between scenes, so you no longer stand at the edge of a zone dismissing and recasting your own elemental like a man rebuilding the same shed every morning. In exchange, keeping a summon out now costs focus over time. That is a real trade and it is meant to be one. A companion that follows you across the world ought to cost something to keep, or it stops being a decision and becomes furniture.

I will defend the focus cost, because I know some of you will not love it. A summon that follows you everywhere and costs nothing to keep is a permanent extra character you never have to think about again, and that changes what a party is. An ongoing cost keeps the summon as something you choose to have out right now, for this fight, in this place, and it gives you a thing to weigh when your focus is running thin. The creature got more useful and more expensive on the same day, which is usually the mark of a change somebody thought hard about.

And the summoned Air Elemental's name now floats above its head. It had been sitting somewhere around the middle of the creature, which for a being made of moving air raises a philosophical question I did not care to get into. The name is above the head. The matter is closed.

Four separate things about the crafting table closed on Friday, and taken together they describe one long irritation.

Start with the worst of them. If you laid your materials out on the table and then chose your recipe, choosing the recipe cleared the materials. That is the natural order for a human being. You get out the ingredients, then you decide what you are making. Doing it in that order emptied the table and you began again. Now what you have placed stays placed.

I want to stay on that one a moment, because it is the kind of bug that trains you out of your own instincts. Nobody files a report saying the table ate my reagents. They simply learn to pick the recipe first, forever, and they never mention it to anybody, and the whole activity feels a little stiffer than it should for a reason nobody can name out loud. Those are the hardest ones to find, because everybody affected has already built a workaround and stopped noticing.

Second, the Escape key. Cancelling a craft with Escape used to close every other window you had open along with it. You would back out of one craft and find your inventory shut, your storage shut, your whole working setup swept off the desk. Now Escape cancels the craft and leaves the rest of your evening where it was.

Third, lot storage. Crafting straight from your lot storage worked, right up until you closed the crafting window and opened it again, at which point the storage stopped answering. Reopen it now and it answers. Fourth, repair kits report how much durability they gave back. That sounds minor until you are trying to work out whether the kit you just burned was worth what it cost, and a number turns a shrug into a decision.

There is a common thread in all four, and it is state being thrown away when nobody asked for it. Your materials, your open windows, your connection to your own storage. None of these is a headline. All four decide whether an hour at the crafting table feels like craft or chore.

One more piece of Friday, and this one comes straight from you. Every night there is a pass over the forums that turns player posts into tracker entries, and Friday's pass filed three.

One is a request for pools and lakes on player-owned town plots. Water on your own land. I have many opinions about water, most of them expensive, and it is on the board now where opinions can be argued with properly.

One is a Hedge Archway whose collision box is considerably larger than the Hedge Archway. An archway has precisely one job, which is to be a hole you can walk through. This one had developed a firm sense of personal space.

And the third is an inconsistency in the failure rate on a tier three alchemy enchantment. The numbers there do not line up with what a crafter would reasonably expect at that tier, which matters enormously when you have spent an evening's materials to find out. I mention these because the sweep ends in a tracker number rather than a drawer. A post becomes an entry with an identifier, and an identifier is what turns a complaint into a piece of work.

Three things about your house and your garden. Planting barrels take seeds again, which they had stopped doing, and a barrel that refuses seed is just a barrel. Planting beds now name the plant growing in them and tell you whether it wants water, right there when you hover. And cloth rugs will hang on your walls, inside and outside both, which had been a fight for longer than I would like.

Two more about the property itself. Stairways in the five story stone basement will take decorations, so all of that vertical space is finally yours to work with. And the For Sale banner sits clear of the lot sign instead of lying across it, so you can read what a lot is before deciding whether you want to live there.

Then a handful about windows and buttons. The bank window keeps its refresh button visible when you squeeze the window down to its narrowest. Your gold total shows on the inventory, container and vendor listing windows, so you are not hunting the number down. The quantity prompt puts Okay on the left and Cancel on the right, and stays that way. Named artifacts remain visible when you have hide quest items switched on, because an artifact you cannot see is an artifact you will sell by accident. And hidden quest tasks stay hidden across a logout and a character switch.

And three about moving and looking. Hold Shift to sprint. The camera zoom sensitivity slider does what the slider promises. And night vision looks the way it is supposed to look again, which it had not for some time.

The rest went down in a heap. Several quests came unstuck. An elf in Blood River Outskirts would not speak to anybody and had a quest locked up behind him. A wax cylinder was not where the Isle of Storms said it was. Asking for directions to the Helpful Automaton is now helpful. And the window you use to hand items over to a character got three separate passes, which is fair, since every delivery quest in the world runs through it.

Then a pile of small world strangeness. An arena at the Kobold camp had been fighting on its own with nobody in it. A wagon in Central Brittany moved when you backed away from it, which is the sort of thing you see out of the corner of your eye and then decide never to mention to anyone. And the castle gates at Ardoris make a sound when they open, having previously performed the whole business in total silence, like an enormous mime.

On the combat side, another handful. Judgment ends when you move or take a hit and bursts only at the end. Charged skills stop firing early when your mouse twitches. Water magic gains from rain and standing water the way it should. Vendor search across all zones returns player vendors and keeps decorations and containers filed where you filed them. And the crystals of the Blessing of Atos drop to the pool floor and glow brighter at night, which sounds like set dressing until you have spent twenty minutes looking for one in the dark.

That is Friday. Three commits and forty-three things closed, which is a shape I have come to like very much. Somebody out there is going to walk up to a character this week, hear the wrong words come out, and write it down. I am looking forward to that more than is probably healthy.

Before I go. We found an archway with a collision box far bigger than the archway itself, and I have been thinking about it all day. Why can you never get a straight answer out of a shrubbery?

Because it will always be hedging. Good night from New Britannia.