The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• A trophy cabinet that brought down the shard
• Twenty-one parts of dragon and wyvern rebuild
• The raise spell that never once worked
• Trolls could never be stunned, and now can
• Eight languages learn to say Britannia
• A round minimap that walks beside you

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British, come with word of what thy makers were about on Wednesday. The dragons have learned to fly, and I use the word properly. Skeletons may now be broken past any mage's power to raise them. The trolls, who could never once be held in place, can be held. A small round map walks at thy side. Eight tongues have ceased mangling the name of this realm. And the trophy cabinet I boasted of on Monday brought the whole world down on Tuesday night. We begin there, since that one is mine to answer for.

On Monday I stood here and told you, with some excitement, about a new thing at every banker in the world. Say "trophies" to a banker and the banker checks the roll, and a window opens listing every boss trophy in the game. Splendid feature. Very pleased with it. On Tuesday somebody used it and the shard fell over. All of it. Players across the world watched their zone load stop at fifty-two percent and tell them the server was full, which it was not, because at that moment the server was not anything at all.

The trophy list had just grown by the bronze, silver and gold framed boss trophies I was so pleased about, and that made the reply larger than the biggest single message the server can send you. The reply failed. The server went with it. The list always fits now, your client fills in anything left off, and a reply that will not fit gets written to the log and answered with an error instead of felling the building. The repaired server has been running since Tuesday evening. Forty years of making these things and I have finally ended a world by asking to see a trophy cabinet.

Now. Dragons. The dragon and wyvern rebuild landed yesterday in twenty-one parts across a single day, which tells you how much of it there was. Start with the part I find funniest. Adult dragons have always had a sky phase. It has never worked. The take-off and the landing had animations and height curves written for them, and the pauses that let those animations play had been compiled out of the build, so the dragon jumped into the air and back down with nothing in between. And the run-up before take-off was set to about a hundred and forty-four meters. A hundred and forty-four. Your dragon needed most of a zone to get airborne, so it sensibly never bothered.

There is more. A dragon standing in melee reach of you, with a melee attack ready to swing, would consider its options, choose a fireball, and hop into the air to cast it. And when you knocked a dragon down, it played its death animation. Every knockdown looked exactly like a kill. I have no idea how many of you have cheered a dragon that was about to stand up again.

That is all repaired, and behind live switches. An adult now takes a short run, takes off with the animation playing, fires three to five bolts of its own element, then dives and lands with a shockwave. Every colour breathes its own element as a cone that can catch up to eight of you, where before every colour breathed the same single-target fire. Red breathes inferno, Orange magma, Yellow searing light, Blue lightning, White frost, Green venom, Black withering and Purple chaos, each leaving something behind on you. Each colour also has a signature move. Orange erupts the ground under your feet. White roots whoever stands in its rime. Blue calls a lightning rod down on your spot. Black drags you in. Purple opens a rift that leaves you confused. All of them warn you first, with a ring on the ground, a cast bar, or the dragon needing to see you.

The Ancients are a two-part fight now. Kill one and it gives a death cry, then rises about ten seconds later at full health with five minutes of harder, faster attacks and a cataclysm it unleashes when badly hurt. Health per life came down so the two lives together match the boss curve. The clockwork dragons got my favourite piece of design in the whole pass. If you are bleeding, the clockwork's oil sticks to you, and the oil lowers your resistance to fire and air right before it breathes lightning at you. That is a proper bit of craft and I am delighted it is in my game.

Babies and wyverns. Baby dragons had one ranged spit and nothing else, and the game counted them as flying at all times, so Root, Trip, Knockdown and every other ground effect passed straight through them. They bite and claw and keep their feet on the floor now. Wyverns had not been touched in years. All eight colours fought identically, they stunned on every bite, and they knocked you down every two seconds, which is not a fight, it is a waiting room. A bite stuns a quarter of the time now, the tail lashes once every ten seconds, and they take to the air and swoop at you. Also, every dragon in the game had been carrying a fifty meter echo on all nearby sound. That is off, so dragons no longer make the countryside sound like a cathedral.

Next. There is a spell in this game called raise the fallen. Skeleton mages have it. Liches have it. The Lepus Zombies have it, and so does the Pumpkin Head. Seventy-seven creatures carry that spell. It has never worked. Not once, in the entire history of this game.

Two things were wrong. A body at zero health was never counted as a valid target for a raise, and with no valid target, the spell landed on the caster. So for years a skeleton mage has been standing over his fallen comrade, gathering his power, and resurrecting himself. He was already up. He was fine. Creature summoning had the same shape of fault: a creature casting a summon got nothing at all, which is why the lich summons written into this game have never produced a single skeleton. Both are built and working now. A raiser walks to a waiting body and stands it up at full health, and if you loot the body first, nobody is getting raised.

Which is the whole reason the undead pass matters. Now that they can come back, you need a way to end the argument, so skeletons shatter. Finish a skeleton with a mace or a hammer, or with Sun or Life magic, and it bursts apart in bone. No mage can raise it and you can loot it at once. Kill it any other way and it is still on the table. The weapon in your hand decides, and an enchantment does not count.

Sun and Life. Skeletons were always meant to be weak to both. They never were. Their general resistance to magic was cancelling the weakness out, so Sun landed at half of normal damage and Life somewhere between a third and two thirds. The two schools built for putting the undead back in the ground were the two worst choices you could make. Both land at about one and a fifth now, before your attunement, while Fire, Moon and Death still meet the wall.

Then the lich comedy. Lich area spells reach about five meters, and liches were casting them from anywhere on the field, so a Lich Mage fighting you at range spent the afternoon setting fire to empty ground. The Lich Mages and Sharpshooters out of the bigger totems in player dungeons had been handed a fighter's axe and were wading into melee with it. The most common lich in the game, the ordinary Lich Fighter, introduced itself to you as the Malefic Lich Lord. And Elrin Nayer, the named lich of The Rise, was also serving as the template for twenty-five ordinary lich mages, so one dungeon had ten of her standing about in it. She is one lich again.

A piece of bad news I would rather tell you than let you work out. Undead that can be raised were paying their kill experience twice over, every time the roll to stand back up kept them down. That is about half of weapon kills and nine in ten spell kills. Each kill pays once now, so experience from skeletons, zombies, liches and ghosts is going down. I am sorry. It was never meant to be that high.

Trolls. Sit down for this one. You have never stunned a troll. Not you, not anybody. Body Slam, Stone Fist, Charge, Leg Sweep: none of them has ever landed on a troll, because each troll's resistance to being controlled was being counted twice over. It is counted once now, and a control lands about four times in ten.

Here is the other half of it. While you could not hold a troll for a single second, a troll's Swipe stunned you for ten seconds and came around again every six. Read that back. The stun was longer than the gap between stuns. The ground pound knocked you down for five seconds every three, and then scrambled your movement for fifteen seconds afterwards for good measure. Swipe is three seconds every twelve now, the pound is two seconds every ten, and the scrambling is gone entirely.

Magic was no better. Troll resistance sat high enough that Air, Earth, Water, Life and Moon did almost nothing, and Death did about a sixteenth of its damage. Fire and Sun, which are supposed to be the family weakness, cancelled out to plain ordinary damage. Those six schools now land a third to a half, and Fire and Sun do about one and a fifth to every troll at every level.

And the tells. When a troll enraged, it played the stamp from its ground pound. A pound tell with no pound behind it. So every one of you has thrown yourself out of the path of an attack that was never coming, over and over, and learned to distrust a warning that was telling the truth the rest of the time. It roars now. Separately, when a troll's blow actually connected with you, the game played the sound of a miss. A dying troll also falls on whoever stands underneath it, about two seconds after death, with a ring on the ground so you have fair warning.

Elves and kobolds went through the same mill on the same day. Vertas fighters answer a parry with a counterstroke, their archers pin you in place, their mages root and cleanse their wounded. Obsidian fighters make your weapon hit softer the longer you fight them. The Underdweller elves shriek as they die and drain the focus of anyone close. The kobolds fight as a camp now: fighters hold the line and enrage at half health, leaders rally, mages heal, and archers back out of melee instead of firing a bow into your chest from arm's length. And K'Racket the Exiled, the kobold boss of the Mysterious Swamp, was level nineteen, had no abilities, and gave no experience whatsoever. He is a level one hundred and twenty boss fight now.

Here is one that was sitting in plain sight. Our own help window, the one that introduces you to the world, has been spelling Britannia wrong. And Arabella, who reads that text aloud for you, read it exactly as written. Brit-AY-nia. The game has been mispronouncing the name of its own world, in the tutorial, out loud. The same misspelling was in a chapter of The Stone Dragon and on a bank note, and five translated languages had copied it faithfully into a hundred and sixty more places.

That is the small version. Underneath it was something larger, and it affects every one of you who does not play in English. When you type a word to a character, the game matches it against a list of topics. Those lists were being built by forcing one translation onto every line a topic appears in, whatever the line actually meant. The results are, I am afraid, very funny. In Japanese, Wellington the dog was called "dog". Shops and merchants came out as the verb "to buy". The virtue Courage was carrying the name of a Titan. "Please don't be mad" translated as insanity. Binding yourself to a recall point read as tying somebody up. And "I hail from Kingsport" was rendered as a greeting.

Europe did not escape. In French the Foreign Minister quietly became a person's name. In Spanish the verb "to love" arrived as the noun. In German a carved wooden duck became a live mallard. In Italian, the farmer was "the farm". On top of that, more than two and a half thousand of those topic word lists had stayed in English in some towns while other towns had the translation, so typing the right word at the wrong character did nothing at all. If you are playing in Japanese, that looks exactly like being ignored.

New tooling went in for it. A pass found a hundred and sixty-seven topic words being used in more than one sense, and about four and a half thousand Japanese lines were repaired line by line, then eleven hundred and fifty-nine more across Japanese, Chinese and Portuguese, then eight hundred and ninety in Russian, Spanish, French, German and Italian. Anaïs has her diaeresis back in every language and her lines were voiced again. And Esmeralda in Highvale Outskirts, who is a ghost, had been reading her spooky hush aloud as the separate letters. S. S. S. H. H. H. She says "shh" now, and three more shouty lines were re-recorded alongside it.

The minimap. You have asked for this for years. Press the map key and it steps through three states. First a small round map in the top right corner of your screen that stays up while you walk, north at the top, you in the middle. Press again for the full map window you already know. Press once more and both are gone. The disc zooms on the mouse wheel or with its own plus and minus buttons, a click opens the full map, and you can drag it wherever you like and it stays put. Anywhere you are heading, a beacon you have set for instance, rides the rim of the disc pointing the way while it is off the edge.

The small details took the work. Escape does not close it. Zoning does not close it. It never takes your mouse cursor, and its hit area is a true circle, so a click just past the rim reaches the world behind it rather than being eaten by a square you cannot see. Three settings sit under Options, Interface: Keep Minimap Up swaps the key between small and full without ever hiding the map, then Minimap Size, then Minimap Opacity at full, dimmed or faint. And if the disc proves troublesome out in the wild, there is a shard switch that puts the map key back to a plain open and close without patching anybody. While we were in there, the full map now stops at the edge of the map, where you used to be able to drag until half the window was empty. There is a Find town box under the location readout as well: type part of a name, pick a town, and the map pans to it, circles it and drops a beacon.

Three things about selling. The first search in the vendor listings after you walk into a big market used to run at about ten frames a second for several seconds and then freeze solid for a second when the results landed. A town with thirteen thousand listings took seven to nine seconds of that. Item details now load while the pages are still arriving, rows build a few milliseconds at a time, and the finished list gets sorted once where it used to be sorted five times. A loading ring and a progress bar sit over the table while it works. My Listings also has a Reclaim All button, with one confirmation that tells you the count first.

Crafting got three as well. Every craft now prints the producer experience it paid at the end of its chat line, which matters more than it sounds, because batch crafting had been paying half what the live shard pays since August and there was no number on screen to notice it with. That is back to parity. The twelve-scroll Recall batch was paying twelve hundred where its two sibling recipes pay seventy-five hundred, and it pays seventy-five hundred now. Barugon asked for the third one: an ingredient you know a recipe for is underlined in the Recipe Book, and clicking it turns to every recipe you know that makes it, with a Back button to walk your way home.

Your hotbar had a rough time of it too. Knightrider reported that glyph tooltips were covering the fight, and they were. The card is narrower and smaller, it stays in the lower third of the screen, there is a hover delay you can set, and a glyph you click no longer throws its card back in your face. Taunt, Body Slam, Provoking Shout and the extra threat from a pet were only counting for the first player who entered the zone, so in a group, everybody else's taunting was decoration. And Light and Night Vision can be cast while swimming, because until yesterday the hotbar vanished in deep water, and anyone who fell in a lake at night simply could not see.

One about riding. Jack SinAssist noticed that every horse, stag, reindeer and big cat in the game was showing a wolf's head on the hotbar. They show their own animals now. Horses also toss their head and whinny if you press jump while standing still, and rear up on a hard stop out of a gallop, using animations the wild horses have always had.

Lightning round, and the theme is things that were never working at all. Every town map marker had a guide wisp attached that was meant to lead you there. What it did instead was flash a sigil over your head and stop, because the wisp borrowed a spell effect that ends itself after four seconds, and its route came back empty for most destinations. It is a blue orb that stays out and walks you there now. Braemar had no ambient sound because all seven of its sound loops were out of earshot, the market chatter shut inside the inn with an eight meter reach, which is why the ambient volume slider seemed to do nothing in that village. There was nothing there to turn up. Four Ravenswood forests had only music, and nineteen scenes had their forest wind pointed at a sound file that had stopped existing.

Three releases failed in a row yesterday and every one of them was the build machine. It restarted itself to install updates four minutes into a two hour client build. It replaced its own tooling twenty-three seconds before a deploy. Then it ran out of memory an hour in, because it doubles as somebody's workstation and two editors were left open on it. All three now check before they start. I would like to tell you I am above laughing at this.

Then the sweep. Two hundred and thirteen tracker issues closed, a hundred and twenty-five of them bugs. The Twitch Drops reward path that necronut asked for is built and sitting dark until the first campaign. The Oracle read her own log of every question she could not answer, seventeen hundred and thirty-six of them since June, and came back with an atlas of six hundred and thirty-seven places, five hundred and fifty-nine creatures and fifteen hundred and ninety-five people, so she can tell you where a thing lives and which way to walk to it. Besieged towns sit at the top of your teleport list now, and a freed town is attacked again in about two hours instead of eighteen. And the conversation camera had been focusing about fifteen meters behind your head since we changed our post effects, which is why light hair looked doubled with a see-through copy of itself floating in front of the face. It focuses on the two of you again.

That is Wednesday. Twenty-one parts of dragon, a family of trolls that can finally be held still, and eight languages that can say the name of this world. What I am looking forward to is the first group that walks into an Ancient's lair, kills it properly, and then learns what "properly" costs when it stands back up. Send word of how that goes, and bring a mace.

One last thing. We taught skeletons to shatter when you strike them with a hammer, and I asked whether any of them wished to lodge an objection. Not one of them spoke up. They simply haven't the guts.

Good night from New Britannia.