The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Frostgeists refused spells because they were shopkeepers
• The launcher, the boot time, and the emote list
• The Cabal gets voices, music and loot at last
• The bard rework and what a performance now pays
• House pets and the phantom floor over the water
• The lessons a new player was never given

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with an account of what thy makers were about this Saturday past. Nine Frostgeists in a ruined steeple could be struck by no spell at all, for the world had them written down as merchants. The Cabal has found its voice, and the towns it besieges have found a darker music. Your bards are rebuilt, from the coin in the hat to the meter over thy head. And a power cut in the night could leave thy game broken until thou didst ask it for repair. We begin with the ghosts. The ghosts are the best of it.

There is a ruined steeple in Highvale Outskirts, and in it, Frostgeists. For years, players have climbed those stairs, put a crosshair on the ghost on the landing, pressed a spell, and been told the target is invalid. Every glyph on the bar goes grey. The sword, meanwhile, works perfectly. And the pair that ambushes you inside works perfectly too, which is why it was always the second ghost that refused you and never the first.

Nine of those spawn points had the ghost marked, in the scene data, as a shopkeeper. The game will not let you throw a fireball at a merchant. It assumes you are trying to browse. That flag had been sitting in the file for years, and a sweep of all four hundred and forty-eight scenes says these nine were the only ones anywhere in the world.

Now, I want to open the proper show with the least glamorous item on the list, because it was doing real harm. If your power went out shortly after the game had patched itself, you could be left with a game file that was half written and a launcher that believed the update had finished. Every launch after that crashed at start-up. Not once, and not sometimes. Every launch, forever, until you found the Repair button, which a lot of people have no idea is there.

The launcher now writes each patched file all the way down to the disk before it swaps that file into place and marks the update as done. If the lights go out in the middle of it, the update simply is not finished, and the launcher knows that. Crash reports also carry two new facts about the install: whether the last update completed, and which build the game's main code came from. Before this, a crash on a half-updated install got filed under the old build number, which hid the cause entirely. A new launcher went out today for Windows, Linux and Mac.

While we were down there, we went after something we have all learned to live with, which is how long this game takes to reach its own title screen. On a fast machine, with every file already sitting in the cache, thirty-seven and a half seconds. So we measured where all of it goes. Nearly fifteen seconds is the engine opening around two hundred content packages and reading their headers, one after another, before a single piece of game data loads. Another six and a bit is five hundred and eighty-eight spell effects being built one per frame. Two and a half seconds is one frozen frame parsing book text and creature behaviour. And two thirds of a second goes to starting an analytics service this game stopped using years ago.

But the find of the day is the emote list. The emote list holds every emote, and for each one it holds the animation, the props and the tools. So loading it reads three hundred and forty megabytes and builds about forty-nine thousand objects. Among them, two hundred and fifteen complete character models, because a full body is packed inside each animation file. Two hundred and fifteen fully modelled human beings, loaded before you have laid eyes on the title screen, so the game would be ready in case you felt like waving at someone.

Three other lists load exactly the same way. Between them they read a little over a gigabyte before the title screen, and a hundred and fifty-eight of the two hundred and one content packages we open at start-up are only open to serve them. The emote list now stores what the game actually reads out of it, which is which animation each emote uses and how long it runs. The props load after you press Play. On our test machine that one list went from about five thousand loaded objects to about five hundred. Emotes should look and behave exactly as they always have, and testers are checking precisely that.

There is a memory half to this. A player with sixteen gigabytes of memory and a four gigabyte graphics card ran out of memory twice walking into Haven Ridge. Pressing Play was loading about three and a half thousand pieces of shared scenery and then holding all of it for the entire session, roughly a gigabyte and a half before you reached your first zone. On machines with that much memory or less, the game now loads only what each zone actually uses, and the heavier decoration loading starts switched off. If you changed that setting yourself, your choice stands.

Now to something with rather more theatre in it. The Cabal of Obsidians. Nine Cabalists, the great villains of the age, and eight of them had been speaking to you in bright, friendly voices originally recorded for tutorials. Vitium, their leader, had no voice at all.

All nine have their own voice now, pitched low and shaped to the vice each of them carries. Dolus, deceit, speaks with a second deeper voice running a beat behind the first, so you are never quite sure which of them is addressing you. Nefas echoes as though he were holding court in a hall. Indigno sounds as if you are hearing him through poisoned air. And Vitium speaks through a hollow ring of echoes. Their kill taunts and their death cries go out to the whole zone at full volume now, the same as the text always did. The name of the player they killed stays in the chat log only, because no recording can pronounce a name chosen at play time.

Then the music. A siege already changes the sky, the wind, the shadows and the street lights. The music kept right on playing the town's ordinary list, so a besieged Jaanaford still sounded like market day. There are six darker tracks now for as long as the siege lasts, and the town gets its own score back when the siege lifts. The timing was the fiddly part. Music crossfades in two seconds and the sky takes fifteen, so switching at the moment the siege lands put the score a quarter of a minute ahead of the town it belonged to, and on the way out it handed a still-black town its cheerful playlist. The score now turns over halfway through the sky going dark. And while a town is besieged, the siege holds the music against anything else that would take it, including a phonograph somebody has parked nearby.

And then the part I am obliged to own up to. The final siege at the Cabalist Stronghold dropped no loot. Not thin loot. None. Vitium and every cultist and lich in his army refused every roll. The list of scenes that receive siege loot was baked from the eleven besieged towns, and the stronghold is the one siege in this game that does not land on a town, so it was baked with nothing at all.

We built a war, wrote a villain, armed him with a cult, and then let him keep all his things. That reaches the test shard after the next nightly bake.

The bards. Our designers have been working through a long list on them and most of it landed yesterday. Start with Vigor, because everything else hangs off it. Vigor comes back more slowly on your own now, and considerably faster with a bard in the room. Sitting in a town takes you from a fifth of a bar to fully rested in about twenty minutes. Watching a performance halves that to about ten. And about five, if the bard keeps working at it with Flourish or a Dance or a Group Dance. Time spent logged out follows the town rate at a quarter, as it always has.

What went away is the fortification. Watching a bard used to stretch and strengthen the buffs you were already carrying, with a multiplier per family and a Fortified mark on the readout. All of that is gone. What a performance pays you now is the Inspiration conversion and your Vigor, and that is the whole of it. Buffs already stretched keep the time they have. Voice Training went out with it, since it closed a gap for a bard singing without an instrument and every bard song requires one anyway. Every point you ever spent on it comes back to your adventurer pool the next time you log in.

Two lovely small ones on top. Tipping a bard is something the room can see. A tip prints a line in local chat naming the tipper and the bard, and plays the coin sound for everyone nearby. Tip anonymously and it reads that someone tipped and names nobody, and the amount stays between the two of you. And while a bard is performing in town, everyone close enough to watch wears their Vigor bar over their head, your own character included, so a crowd can watch itself filling back up.

Also, a bard who stood and played to an empty room had their performance closed after two minutes of silence, and then Watch Performance refused to work on them at all until they put the instrument away and got it back out again. The game's review of your set was rather harsher than the audience's. The client now tells the server every thirty seconds that yes, thank you, this is still happening.

Here is one I enjoyed more than I should have. Decoration pets placed on water lots walk off the dock into the sea and then rubber-band back to where they started. We have fixed this three times. Three separate passes, each one tightening the pet's wander picker against the town's navigation. Each one perfectly correct, and each one entirely beside the point, because a placed pet does not walk the town's navigation at all. It walks the navigation of its own lot.

And every water-lot bake in the game ships with a walkable floor stretched flat across the whole lot at deck height, with nothing under it but open water. We read the bake from the tester's own galleon home at Beran's Reach. A hundred and fifty-nine of its four hundred and ninety-seven triangles were that phantom floor, and seventy-six percent of the pet's wander picks landed on it. The dog was never confused. We had paved the bay and then acted surprised. That floor is now removed wherever the probe finds nothing underneath it. Docks, ramps, decks, the shore strip and your placed floor decorations all stay exactly where they are. In the same family, a placed Conversationalist set to patrol in Owl's Head had been strolling onto the neighbour's lot and making himself at home, and he now stays on the lot that owns him.

Something closer to my heart, now. For a very long time this game has been rather quiet with people who have only just arrived. A new character gets short lessons in the Next Steps list now, at the moment each one matters, one at a time. Die for the first time below level ten and the game tells you that a normal death at that level costs you nothing, which it has never said anywhere before. Because until yesterday, a new player died, and the game said absolutely nothing at all, which if you have just died reads as judgment.

The first time a skill goes up, it explains that skills grow by being used. At level two it points you at the Oracle, and clicking asks the Oracle what to do next. Wherever a Helpful Automaton is standing, a line mentions the short lesson it gives on backpacks and hotbars, which is the one finished tutorial in this game that nothing has ever pointed at. A first fizzle brings a line. A spell refused for want of reagents brings a line. Around five thousand gold earned brings one about merchants, and your second day of play brings one about combat decks.

And the whole thing knows when to stop, which is the part I like best. At level ten, a character who has had these lessons is asked once whether to keep the tips coming. A lesson you leave unclicked for two days of play goes away on its own. Any character already at level ten who never saw one will never see one, so your veterans and your high-level alts are left in peace. There is a window listing every suggestion you have, including the ones you put away, and the Oracle will read any of them aloud to you. And the list of places where it can point out trainers, crafting stations and things worth gathering went from six scenes to twenty-six, taking in the early scenes of all three starting paths, the five districts of Brittany, Kingsport, Solania, Etceter, Kiln and Jaanaford.

Three things for anglers. The bobber is twice the size it was, which the testers asked for once the dip became the bite cue, and it takes a colour from the theme editor, so you can have a bobber that matches your interface. The bigger trophy fish now require the mini-game, also a tester ask, and the server handles that by removing the higher trophy tiers from the table before it rolls, so a passive cast catches everything else exactly as often as before and nothing gets away from you. And fishing rods can be masterworked at a carpentry station, up to five times, from a pool of six effects with names I am rather fond of: Steady, Stout, Wearying, Lulling, Keen and Durable. They make the fight easier and they never touch the catch roll. A top Steady at the highest tier widens your target zone by about twenty percent, which is roughly what Fishing eighty-five buys you.

Two for your house. Flipping a house is one click. The lot sign has its own Flip House button sitting next to Move House, and it goes straight to the confirmation. Until yesterday, mirroring your house meant entering placement mode and pressing a key that nothing on screen had ever named, followed by Enter, followed by a confirmation button that still said Move House. And building blocks tucked hard against each other no longer weld themselves into one group, so picking up the block you placed first no longer lifts its neighbour along with it.

Two for the vendors. The Vendor Listings window was keeping rows from a search that a filter change had already replaced, which is why a search for chest with two stat minimums could still show you a piece that met neither of them. Six automated passes measured the search service and found it right every time, because the leak was on your side and only in a built game. Reported by Wishdragon. And reclaiming a listing from a vendor could lose the item outright, because the server took the listing off first and only then ran the checks that can refuse the reclaim. Those checks run first now, and if the write into your bag fails, the listing goes back, unlocked.

Town bans have been retired from player-owned towns. A governor or steward could put an account on a list that the town gate then refused, and a player banned while standing inside was walked out of it. With sieges now bringing real content into player towns, the designers decided that a town has to be open to everyone, which was also the original promise: a ban on a lot, never on a town. The tab is gone, the server refuses that role from every direction, and the bans already on the books are lifted. Keeping a player off your own lot works exactly as it always did.

Opening the Recipe Book with the B key cost you about half a second of frozen client, and it had earned every millisecond. The page was being built twice on every press. Each recipe card searched your entire backpack once per ingredient, so a page of six cards was around thirty full searches of a pack that can hold thousands of items. And building the book asked every crafting category whether it held every known recipe, a check that loaded every item in the category to compare names. One build, one search per page, no loads. The backpack itself is next, and the first step there was measurement, which went in yesterday.

Two wax cylinders also came back within reach of solo players. A cupboard on the Isle of Storms and a chest in the Frostgeist Victim Camp were both set to refill only in multiplayer, so anyone playing alone got one roll per visit and then had to leave the zone and come back to try again. Both refill on their timers now in private and party instances. Reported by belladonnarose.

Beyond all that, a hundred and thirteen tracker issues went down yesterday, and a fair number of them are the sort of thing you would not believe if I read them out one by one. A witch's hat on a skeleton in the Castle Atos cellar vanished when you stood close and faced north, because the real hat was sitting three point nine metres away inside a wall and only its distant stand-in was on the skull. Forty-three clusters of tall mossy rock in the Shardfalls had been swaying in the wind, because they were built as trees. A flat dark shape at the foot of a waterfall in Paladis was two centimetres of swell poking up through a foam disc.

On Linux, the Windows key typed an invisible character into whatever text box had focus, which in the password field is masked, so your login failed with no explanation whatsoever, every single time, if you used a clipboard manager to paste it in. Heraldry casks and thrones and banners had been showing a blank front on the test shard, because the crest layer was being stripped out of the shipped build. A thin white line around the edge of the map at four K took a purpose-built capture harness to find, since nobody could locate it by reading. And a corpse nameplate is a brighter grey under Night Vision, so you can read the body under your feet.

In combat, Judgment locks out every other skill for the length of its beam rather than the first two seconds, and its damage per tick came down to three quarters of a Searing Ray. The jump key cancels a movement-locking cast again, after a change in July swallowed it for most of you; that swallow is its own option now, switched off by default, which is what the request behind it actually asked for, and that came from Barugon. Turning auto-attack off can mean no basic attacks at all, if you want it to. The Dungeon Builder will sell you several dungeon points in one click, requested by Rinaldi. Arabella had been cast as six different women in six different places and is one woman everywhere now, one of several voice corrections reported by Gravidy. And a storehouse container has stopped opening a conversation window and bidding you farewell when you close it.

That is Saturday, and it was a substantial one. I am looking forward to the map window learning its circular form, which is most of the way built, and to finding out what a properly masterworked rod does to a large fish. My thanks to the testers who pushed on the bobber and the trophy gate until both were done, and to all of you who file these reports with the patience of saints.

And now the joke, which you have earned. Nine ghosts in a steeple, written down in our own files as shopkeepers. We have taken the sign off the door and sent them back to their haunting.

Pity, really. Business was dead.