The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Human enemies fight as crews and shake off stuns
• The whole game is playable in Ukrainian
• Scalable scenes finally scale every creature in them
• Fifteen tamed pets restored from an hourly backup
• Chum slicks bring sharks, and a coral reef

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with word of what thy makers were about on Thursday. The brigands and the pirates have learned a trade at last, and the hardest men among them will no longer lie meekly upon the floor while thou beat upon them. The whole of our world now speaks Ukrainian, every line of it. Chum upon the water brings sharks to thy hook. And fifteen tamed beasts, lost through our own clumsiness, have been fetched home out of a backup. We begin, though, with a flying carpet, and with a halberd that was not a halberd.

Somebody went looking for a halberd. What they got was a castle wall. The game keeps one long list of every item name in the world, in order, and the Magic Carpet went into that list last week with its name line left blank. An entry with no name does not hold its place. So everything filed after the carpet slid up a row, and about ten thousand items spent the week wearing their neighbour's label. Search for a halberd, get a wall. It hit the search box you use and the item pickers our testers use. One missing name did all of that. The carpet has a name of its own now, in every language we ship.

Right. The big one.

For years, the correct way to fight the scariest man in the room has been to never let him stand up. A stun, a knockdown, a mesmerize, a root, and then another stun before the first one wore off. A level eighty Berserker could spend an entire fight on the ground, and the fight was not interesting, and we knew it.

That is over. About a second after a hold lands on one of the toughest human fighters, he shakes it off, and he cannot be held again for five seconds. It comes back around every thirty seconds, and while it is up there is an icon on his nameplate, so you can see exactly what happened and why your rotation stopped working. It covers the Swashbucklers and Privateers, the Ebon Cultist Champions, the Berserkers and the Drakserkers and the Isberserkers, and the Elite Skull Cutter.

The pirates got the best of it. A Privateer now throws a boarding hook that grabs a player standing ten to twenty meters off and drags them into melee, which is a rude surprise if you have built your whole character around standing still at range. Ravagers drop powder smoke when you close on them and then step back out of it, and anyone left standing in the smoke starts missing. Ravagers will also mark you with the Black Spot, and once you are marked the rest of the crew comes for you specifically. Relic Hunters lob a fire pot that sets the ground alight and blink out of melee. And the senior pirates, at a quarter health, take a Swig of Grog. It is a two second drink. A stun stops it. You can interrupt a pirate's drink. I am not sure I have ever been prouder of a small design detail.

Each of the three pirate camps in Lamech's Bazaar now has a Plunderer Captain. Pirates near a living captain never run. Kill the captain and about one in three of them loses its nerve and bolts for a few seconds before coming back for more. The barbarians got a bull rush, so a caster who kites is going to get charged from as far as eighteen meters, and from about level eighty, a barbarian's death makes its kin within forty meters swear a blood oath and come at the killer harder and faster for fifteen seconds. Barbarians have families. The Ebon Dawn raise a shield line that blocks more from the front and nothing whatsoever from behind, their marksmen line up a slow, telegraphed shot at anyone under half health that misses outright if a healer tops you up in time, and their high wizards fire an instant bolt at anybody they catch casting. The brigands wind up a haymaker you can step out of. They got no extra health and no extra damage, and experience and loot are unchanged. They simply fight better. Every one of those families also has a switch that turns its new tricks back off without a patch, because we have been wrong before.

Next, a boss who was the least dangerous thing in his own building.

Spindelskog, Lamech's Bazaar and Myrkur each come in Easy, Hard and Extreme. Only some of the creatures in them were ever scaling with the version. The Episode Two creatures scaled. The bears, the crocodiles, the small spiders, the black dragons in Myrkur and the boss waves all stayed exactly the same whichever version you walked into. So you could fight your way through Extreme, past bears that sincerely wanted you dead, arrive at the boss, and find he was softer than the wildlife in the corridor behind you.

Here is the part I like. We have a tool that audits every creature in the game and plots it against the curve the whole roster is balanced on. It was not evaluating the formulas that scale a creature's stats by its level. So all one hundred and forty five Episode Two creatures came back reading about thirty health and no experience at all, and those rows dragged the baseline everything else is measured against forty five percent low. It was also measuring creature abilities as though the creature were punching, with no weapon in its hands. We had been grading a swordsman on his fists. That got fixed in the morning, and the balance pass in the afternoon had a real baseline to work from for the first time.

With that baseline, the numbers came out. Episode Two creature weapons were making Easy creatures hit more than twice as hard as anything else their level, so they hit softer now. Zombies were paying less than half the experience their health deserved, and they now pay about two and a quarter times what they did. The Myrkur ghost scorpions were paying more than double and have come down to the line. Extreme kills were paying about a third more than the effort was worth, so an Extreme kill pays less than it used to, around three quarters. In exchange, every hostile creature in those zones scales with the version now, ten levels a tier, on the same curve as the rest of the game. Hard and Extreme finally roll their own tier's gold and artifacts, where every version used to hand out the same tier ten loot. The wagon teleporter inside each zone prints the real tier beside each version, coloured by how dangerous it is for you. And Skarde, who hands out the Spindelskog runestone quest, now stands in all three versions, so you can run that quest wherever you choose to fight.

Now something I have been wanting to say out loud all week. The game is in Ukrainian. All of it. Every NPC conversation, the journal, the item names, the loading tips, and six hundred and ninety six of the seven hundred and three books on the shelves. A hundred and twenty eight thousand lines of text, ninety nine point four percent of them done. There was no earlier Ukrainian work to build on, not a word of it, so the first job was a glossary of more than six thousand terms, because you have to decide what a kobold is called before you can write a sentence with one in it.

And then the interesting failure. Our NPCs are keyword driven. You type a topic, they answer that topic. Two different English topics can land on the same Ukrainian word, and when that happens the NPC has no way to tell which thing you asked about. Job and help both came out as "robota". Eighteen hundred and sixty five conversations had a collision like that buried in them, and a repair pass went through and sorted every one. A hundred and fifty three topic word lists had also kept only their English forms, which meant that to get an answer out of a Ukrainian speaking farmer you had to type at him in English. Those speak Ukrainian now.

A few more touches on the same work. Window titles and the handwriting faces on books were missing the Ukrainian letters they needed, so those swap to faces that have them. The player is addressed informally, as "ty", which was a deliberate choice: this world is on familiar terms with you. And there is a new switch on the Language tab that keeps place names in English on a translated client, so you can read the game in your own language and still find Owl's Head when your guild is shouting about it.

Thursday also had some cleaning up after ourselves. If you listened yesterday, you know a label in Wednesday's build drifted one line out of place and left every Resurrect spell shouting into an empty room, and that some tamed pets came off their necklaces as a result. Fifteen Taming Necklaces had been emptied. Every one of them got its creature back out of the hourly database backup taken just before it was emptied. Two owners had already gone out and re-tamed, so thirteen were written back, and all fifteen hold a pet again. The underlying fault is fixed too. A pet whose resurrect never arrives now keeps its creature on the necklace when the window runs out, instead of the collar being emptied.

The lesson was in the silence. A message sent from the server to your client with nothing on the other end to receive it used to vanish with no record anywhere. Nobody got an error. Nothing was written down. That is exactly why a build full of broken resurrects went out and sat there. Those lost messages are now written to the server log, at most once per message every ten minutes, so the next one announces itself. The check that runs before a commit was also doing a partial job, and it now reads every place in the game that declares one of those messages, in about six seconds, with a twin that inspects the compiled game to be sure. A new build went out to the test shard yesterday carrying all of that, and with it the change where a kill only pays when the players on it did at least as much damage as the other creatures involved. Anyone denied a kill now gets a line in chat telling them who took it.

Two more pet items, both of which made me laugh. In The Obsidian Panopticon, people's pets were trotting around the ground floor hunting something nobody could see. Pets now leave alone anything they cannot actually reach or fight: a creature on another floor, one walking home to its spawn point, one that is fully hidden, one they have already failed to catch once. And if you resummoned a pet while a Game Master was possessing it for an event, the possessed one stayed exactly where it was and you got a fresh one that could not be dismissed. Again and again. A small standing army of pets belonging to nobody. That is refused now, with a chat line explaining why.

Fishing got a new thing to do, and it is sociable. Chum is a butchery recipe. Five of any fish meat and one salt make three chum. Throw chum into fresh, swamp or salt water and it leaves a slick about six meters across for five minutes, and everybody standing nearby can see it and cast into it. Bites come faster in a slick, and the catch skews hard toward sharks and big trophy fish.

The numbers are worth hearing. Casting herring in salt water, a Tiger Shark goes from about one cast in three thousand three hundred to about one in three hundred and forty. Trophies of tier two and up turn up roughly four times as often. Waterlogged armour, which I know you all treasure, comes up a quarter as often. The server works the catch out from where the angler is standing, so a slick cannot be faked, and that also means a slick one person throws is a real favour to everybody fishing beside them.

Also, a player told us the sound of landing a fish was like a bathroom sink. They were right. It was a short, thin little clip, and it has been replaced with three proper open water splashes picked at random, with the Clean Catch chime over the top. Salt water brings up a reef now as well: twenty seven rare finds, corals, sea fans, tube sponges, a scallop shell, a spiral seashell, an orange starfish and a reef stone, each of which places as decor indoors or out. Fished up corked letters finally place as a bottle with a rolled letter in it rather than a piece of alchemy glassware, and the Moon Pearl sits in an open clam shell.

Smaller things now, the ones that quietly improve somebody's evening.

The dead can talk again. Guild, party, universe, trade, roleplay, zone and whispers all work while you are a ghost. Local chat still comes out as a ghostly OoOo over your head, because some traditions are worth keeping. The chat moderator had a rework in the same pass: it has stopped removing swearing, and it leaves a single insult in an argument alone. That much is already running. What it will remove, once the next server build reaches the shard, is a campaign. One person hammering the same player over and over, carrying on after being asked to stop, piling on with others. To do that it has to read the last few lines of the channel before it judges a message, which it never did before. Over the last two weeks it handled about forty two thousand messages and answered each one in about a second.

Three things about your stuff. Any container, your pack, your bank, chests and lot storage, can now sort by type: click the blank heading over the icons and weapons stand with weapons, reagents with reagents. Inventory lists scroll while you hold an item near the top or bottom edge, faster the further out you push, so a long drag into the bank is one motion. And player written books sort by the title on the row, which they did not when a title carried invisible characters, so your library has stopped filing copies of the same book in two different places.

This next one is eight years old. Terrain in about a hundred and eight zones has not been drawing the surface detail of its ground textures since twenty eighteen. The rock, dirt and gravel layers all carry the maps that give them cracks and ledges for light to catch on, and an engine change back then switched those off for every terrain using a particular shader. Hillsides have been reading as flat paint ever since. They are back, for under six tenths of a millisecond a frame on a fast card, and places like Superstition Canyon change the most. On the same theme, the sigils and blood splashes on the floor of the daemon chamber in northwest Blackblade Mountains were projecting nearly eight meters up into the air, so walking across the big summoning circle left you wearing it. Twenty one of those were refitted down to the floor.

A handful of conveniences. The login screen remembers which accounts have signed in on your machine and offers them in a list under the user name field, and there is a Remember Password tick if you want it, encrypted and tied to your user on that machine, with a warning the first time you use it about shared computers. That one arrives with the next build. The launcher can start the game by itself three seconds after it finishes updating, with a cancel button for second thoughts. There is a new More Windows menu listing fourteen windows that previously opened only if you knew the chat command for them. And there is now a single switch that turns off every camera shake in the game, from Ice Field to a collapsing cave, because some people's eyes do not enjoy any of it.

Two player reports that made good fixes. Barugon noticed that Instant Unlearn could not stop a skill where it already was. Ask it to leave Mining at a hundred and it took you to ninety nine, because the prompt topped out a level low. It can now hand back just the progress inside the level you are on. And Rinaldi noticed a shelf of boss achievements that nobody could possibly earn, because the bosses are not anywhere in the world: the Spider Queen, three Ancient Dragons, twelve Ancient Undead lords, and, I regret to report, the Bunny of DOOM. Those eighteen are hidden in the journal now, and each one reappears by itself the first time somebody actually kills that boss.

The Oracle learned about fifty answers this week to questions players had asked her that she could not handle, from where you can fish in lava to which nine people in Owl's Head will actually give you a quest. Her answers can be selected with the mouse and copied now, and each one has a Copy button beside its heading for pasting into Discord or the forums. She also has an hourly limit, which I would rather be honest about: thirty questions an hour for subscribers, sixty for players who are still finding their feet, six for veterans without a subscription. Bug reports never count toward it and are never limited.

The lightning round, and I will be brief, because a hundred and fifty six tracker issues were closed yesterday and that is not a number you read out one at a time.

A good chunk of it was housing and lots. The short version: if you give up a lot in an NPC town, by unclaiming it or by moving your deed somewhere better, you now have twenty four hours to take it back out of the auction, bids or no bids, and every bid is refunded by mail. A tester lost a lot that way inside a few minutes while trying to swap in a tax free deed, which is the sort of lesson you only need once. Lot outlines stop at the edge of the town map rather than hanging off into nothing, and governors cannot place a marker that would reach past it. The Crown Store got a training dummy whose defences you pick from a menu, twelve profiles from plain cloth up to a fire dragon, and a Conversationalist in mage robes who will teleport your visitors to a town of your choosing.

Crafting had a run of small indignities put right. The alchemy table now hands you a mortar as well as a pestle, which it had not been doing, leaving the pestle nothing to grind into. The forge says plainly that jewelry cannot be masterworked instead of complaining about a missing recipe. Recipe tooltips show what you are about to make, including a dish's buffs and how long they last. Brewing fills every empty cask on your lot in one batch. The rest ran across vendors, achievements, wax cylinders that you can now stand and listen to without picking them up, pet sheets, about a hundred skills whose fractional bonuses finally apply exactly as their tooltips always claimed, and a torch that was looping with a gap in it, which is now seamless and, after a second pass, back at its old volume.

Yes. We did two passes on a torch. I would do it again.

What I am looking forward to is standing on a beach somewhere out on the salt water with four or five of you, one slick of chum in the surf, and seeing what comes up out of the dark. Bring a rod. Thank you for playing our strange old world, and thank you for telling us when it is broken.

And one last thing, because I have been holding it in all episode. We added a recipe that grinds spare fish up into bait. So from tonight, for the first time in the history of New Britannia, you can walk down to the water with your friends and truly go fishing with your chum. Goodnight, Avatars.