The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• The siege Cabalists finally fight properly
• Dragons breathe and sound like dragons
• Ardoris stops counting its houses one by one
• Dungeon decorations learn where the stone is
• A gentler first hour on the Isle of Storms

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British speaks, with word of what thy makers were about on Thursday. The Cabalists who hold thy sieges have been taught at last to bleed like honest villains. The dragons breathe now in their own colours, and roar while they do it. The gates of Ardoris open a great deal faster to the first soul through them. And our own camera, in its wisdom, went swimming in the river and could not find its way back to the air. We begin with the camera, because it is the finest sort of mistake. Ours, recent, and entirely deserved.

On Wednesday we fixed the camera. Low ceilings had been shoving it about in cellars and cave mouths, so we taught the camera that certain surfaces push back. Water is a surface. You can see where this is going. Wade into the river at Solace Bridge and the camera sank under the water and stayed there. Our water does not draw from underneath, so you did not get a pleasant underwater view. You got the water simply being gone. Zooming out did not help. Turning did not help. One player reported it from that river, another from the swamp at the Ruined Keep. Water now pushes the camera up, and only up.

Now. The Cabalists. These are the seven who drive the town sieges, and a player asked us to take a hard look at them, so we ran an audit of every curse they cast. That audit is the reason most of Thursday happened. Each Cabalist was carrying an invisible curse field a little over fifty metres wide. It reached through floors, so you could be standing on an upper storey, in a different room, taking a curse from something you could not see and had never met. It hung about for up to a minute after you left. One of the curses never applied itself to anybody at all. And one of them, and I want to be precise about this, stealthed the players it hit.

Yes. One of the villains besieging your town was casting a curse that hid you. From everyone. For years. Somewhere in a design document there is a note explaining what that was meant to do, and I would dearly love to read it. All seven of those invisible fields have been replaced with a coloured circle drawn on the ground in each Cabalist's own colour, with effects named for the Cabalist, so you can see exactly what is chewing on you and where it stops. That work sits behind a switch until it has been checked with two clients side by side, so for the moment the Cabalists carry no curse at all, which is still an improvement on a curse that hides you.

It gets better. Corpus had no weapon. None. Not a bad weapon, not a weak weapon, no weapon, which meant every blow Corpus landed did one or two points of damage no matter what the siege meter said. Corpus now has bare fists that hit like the rest of them, about a hundred and sixty a blow, and two hundred and eighty-eight at a full meter. Four more Cabalist weapons were resolving as spells rather than swings, so Avara's flail and the halberd that Indigno and Vitium carry could not be parried, could not be blocked, and made no sound when they hit you. Fastus's spear could not be blocked either. Stuns, knockbacks and knockdowns never landed on any of the seven, which also meant one player could keep a Cabalist mesmerized all day. Those land at about half their usual chance now, and it takes four controls inside about three seconds to hold one, six for Vitium. None of them runs away at low health any more.

And the settings that are supposed to tune Cabalist health, damage and regeneration had been overridden by fixed numbers sitting in the client, so every adjustment anyone made to them did precisely nothing. Those are live. A kill in a second copy of a besieged town used to pay no experience at all, and now pays. Vitium's throw is a small comedy of its own. He is meant to hurl you away from his throne at a quarter health, but the landing spot was drawn from anywhere in the Stronghold, and the crowded ground right beside him came up far more often than its size deserved. A tester standing next to Vitium got thrown twenty-nine metres and barely noticed. You now land at least forty metres out, with a view.

Then the dragons. This was one commit across six hundred and forty-one files, and it is the sort of pass you feel the moment you see one. Every dragon breathes in its own colour now. The Green breathes venom green, the Black a dark purple, the Yellow a pale gold, the Purple magenta, and the White an icy blue, and the young dragons' colour spits match their elders. A glow gathers at the mouth while the dragon winds up, so you get a moment of warning, and the breath roars the whole time it is flowing. The bolts a flying dragon fires take that colour too, and so do the bursts where they land. A dive shakes the camera if you are near it. Only the fiery breaths burn now. The Green poisons you and the White chills you, which is what those colours were promising all along.

Ancient dragons have eyes that glow in their colour, a soft light around the head, and a coloured rim along the body. The White Ancient stands in a ring of frost, and it is worth the walk. The wyverns got bodies that match their size, so a small wyvern flies lower and carries its name closer to it, and a Huge one takes up the room it ought to. Dragons and wyverns bank into their turns. Wyverns follow you with their heads. And a dragon killed on the ground collapses where it stands, which sounds like a small thing until you remember what it used to do instead.

The sound pass is my favourite part. A dragon's bite played a roar or a burst of fire four times out of five. So the animal leans in, takes a piece out of your shoulder, and the sound you hear is a roar. When you hurt a dragon, it made a human pain sound. A dragon. Making the noise of a startled man. All of that is gone. Bites bite, hurt sounds come from the dragon's own scale hits, small hits that made no sound at all now make one, and the young dragons have their own higher voice. And because the same team noticed that mages on the test shard were taking dragons down in about thirty seconds, the attunement curve came down the same afternoon. A caster at two hundred net attunement deals about sixteen percent less spell damage, and at four hundred about twenty-two percent less. Casters with little attunement are untouched. We spent the morning making the dragons beautiful and the afternoon making them last long enough for you to look at one.

Here is a number I did not expect. When the first player of the day walked into an empty Ardoris, the server read that town's lots out of the database one lot at a time. Five reads for an empty lot, fifteen for an owned one. For Ardoris that is roughly twenty-six hundred separate reads, for one person walking through a gate, while that person sat watching a loading screen for close to a full second longer than they needed to.

Those reads are now a handful of queries that fetch the whole town at once. The deeds, the sale listings, the auctions, the lot records, the owners, and for each owned lot its house records, its storage and its interaction log. The same change fixed a background check that runs once a minute in every loaded town. In Ardoris that check was making about eight hundred and ninety database reads a minute. It now makes about fifteen. The server also starts loading a town's lots the moment the town is reserved for an arriving player, a second or two before that player's game even asks for them, and it has stopped building lot updates for towns nobody has entered.

What I like here is the order of the work. The first thing that went in on Thursday morning was not the fix. It was the measurement. They taught the server to log how long a cold town load takes, and taught the client to log how long the loading screen sat waiting, and only then went and did the optimisation, so the improvement could be proved instead of asserted. There is also a shard switch that puts the old behaviour back without a new build, which is how you ship anything that touches every town at once.

Now, for those of you who build. Every dungeon piece carries invisible surfaces that tell the game where a chandelier may hang or a painting may sit, and nobody had ever checked those surfaces against the stone you can actually see. On Thursday forty-five pieces were measured against their own geometry, and three hundred and eighty-six decoration surfaces were moved, trimmed or removed. Chandeliers in the great halls had been hanging as much as a metre and a half below the top of the vault. In the lich room at Ravensmoor the ceiling surface sat just above the ceiling, so chandeliers would only attach over a few stray open patches and refused everywhere else. Floor surfaces over the open shaft in The Rise let you place decoration out over nothing, and have been pulled back to the bridges.

My favourite is the hall with the secret door. When you dock another piece against that hall, the wall closing off the doorway goes away, as it should. Its decoration surface stayed. So you could hang a painting in an open doorway, held up by a wall that no longer existed, and then walk straight through it. The surface now leaves with the wall. Anything you have already placed stays exactly where you put it. And there is a new automatic check that remeasures every dungeon piece against its stone on every test run, with the handful of known exceptions listed by name, on a list that is only allowed to get shorter.

The same team then measured every doorway in the player dungeon kit and the six starting areas. Three hundred and forty-nine doorways, sorted into eighteen distinct shapes, from a four metre cathedral vault in the stone halls down to a prison cell door barely over a metre tall. Eighteen shapes means a hundred and fifty-three ways two different doorways can meet, and every one of those meetings wants a proper piece of stonework between them. The builder for that stonework is written. Given two measured openings it sets a wall back into the larger one, carries the smaller opening through it, and adds a lintel or an arched frame with plinths and a keystone where there is room, plus a flush step where the floor beyond sits higher. Every shape's floor agrees with every other to within four centimetres. So when you set a cathedral arch against a cell door in a dungeon of your own making, it will look as though a mason intended it.

And then there is Anaïs, who has been shouting at people. On the Isle of Storms the inventory lesson has an Anaïs who calls you over with "We need to talk", and she kept calling long after her lesson was finished, which was at its worst if you logged out beside her and came back. She has been told the lesson is over. Her counterpart on the virtue lesson had the opposite fault and was staying quiet when she should have been waving, and now she waves until you come.

The much larger piece is that Anaïs now tells you what you still have to do, at every step, every five to fifteen seconds while you stand near her. Jump the rubble. Drag the health potion into your hotbar. Lock your gear. Pick up the sword. Switch your combat decks. Step into the lunar rift. Each reminder stops the moment you do the thing, and she keeps quiet while her conversation window is open, because being nagged mid sentence is nobody's idea of a tutorial. That is forty-seven new lines, recorded and translated into all eight languages. The lock your gear step now tells you to press C for your character sheet, in the popup, in the journal and in her reminder, and players outside English get that task in their own language again after a renumbering earlier this month left its translations filed under the wrong entry.

The rest of a new player's first minute got the same treatment. You used to arrive to a full task list, a warning that the Isle is meant for level ten, a nudge to spend producer experience you had not earned yet, a combat tip before anybody had mentioned combat, and a hint pointing at the task list that landed on top of the movement hints. Now you arrive to two lines, the task to go and talk to the woman, and the conversation lesson. The rest of the list fades in once the hint that explains the list actually shows up, and that hint waits until you have finished talking to Arabella. Four pieces of advice arriving at once, one of them wrong, is no way to greet anyone.

A few things for your hands. There is a new Pin Tooltip key, unbound until you pick one, and pressing it over any tooltip keeps that card on screen as a small window with a close button. Up to eight at once, and Escape clears them, which is a fine way to compare two swords. That was requested by Gravidy. The harvest swing meter has a Swing button under the ring you can click instead of hitting a key, and Harvest Swing has default keys at last. The hotbar starts a quarter larger for anyone who never set their own size. And Barugon spotted that the coloured cursors had a thin bright line of their own colour running outside the artwork, left over from a black outline we added in July to make them readable against snow. At double cursor size it read as a ring. The ring is gone.

Some things you hear. Parry, block and dodge play at one and a half times their old volume so they carry over a noisy fight, and a dodge always makes a sound now, because most weapons had no dodge sound of their own and simply played nothing. There is a Combat Text Size slider for the floating numbers, which scales them from three quarters up to double without touching the rest of your interface. Background music steps aside when an NPC near you speaks, including the parting advice after a conversation closes, and fades back over about four and a half seconds rather than slamming back in. And Fitz Gaeaf at the Aerie has a male voice after months of a soft female one. His ninety-four lines went out to the voice server, so you will hear it without patching anything.

Some things about finding your way. On the Path of Truth, the Artifice marker on the overland map turns blue the moment Notus in Xenos sends you there, and so does the entrance once you are inside, and the journal now tells you to head out to the overland and look in the hills a short walk away. Thank you to Knightrider for that one. Town teleporter sign posts appear on your town map as blue signpost markers, each named for the part of town it stands in. And resetting a quest now closes the private areas you were just in, so walking back into the Halls of Artifice gives you a fresh copy with every door shut, rather than the one you had already unlocked.

And some things about creatures behaving like creatures. A tester reported the satyr guards in Tartarus fighting for ten or fifteen seconds and then wandering off, which was their nerve check firing far too eagerly. A wounded creature now has one chance in ten to break and run as it passes half health, and gets its proper nerve check again near a fifth. Skeletons and liches have stopped taunting you while stunned, which they have been doing for a very long time and which rather undercuts the stun. A large melee pet told to attack a large creature used to bite once, stop just out of reach, and give up. It now walks in close enough to keep biting. And casting Sacrifice on yourself during Revenant Stance is refused with a message before it costs you anything, because the stance blocks all healing, so the self heal did nothing whatsoever while the price, half your health, landed in full. It was a healing spell that killed you. That is a bold design choice and we are not going to take credit for it.

A hundred and sixty-nine tracker issues went down on Thursday, so most of what happened is not in this episode. A cluster of them were Chinese set names, where one armour set had been spelled five different ways, and searching for the set found about a fifth of it. A placed telescope no longer shows you the telescope when you look through the telescope. The chimneys on twelve of the Village Tudor homes had a solid stone cap across the top and now open into a proper flue. Eight emotes were playing the wrong animation while seated, which meant the bartending emotes rolled dice and breathe leaves breathed hearts. Seated blood tears used to start in the air above your head at standing height, weeping down onto the chair.

Elsewhere, a gate that would not open, a boundary at Highvale that let people climb a brazier and run off the edge of the world, offline reward claims that had been answering with an error, player kills on the test shard counting twice, translated creature names splitting the leaderboard into two rows for the same beast, snow in Jotungrund that had broken into a grid of white and grey squares, cliffs at Solace Bridge that smeared when you stood against them, and Night Vision, which was fixed in the morning, fixed differently by lunchtime, and is now correct. Our own build machine also let its licence lapse and took down a nightly release, so it now renews itself and warns us five days out, which is the sort of thing you only automate after it has embarrassed you.

That is Thursday. What I am most looking forward to is the day those Cabalist switches come on, because for the first time each of those seven will fight like a different villain instead of seven flavours of the same invisible cloud. But I want to go back to those chimneys. Twelve houses, a solid stone cap, no opening, nowhere at all for the smoke to go. Which means the good citizens who bought them have been living all this time with absolutely no flue.

Good night, friends. Be kind to one another, and mind the water.