The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Every bear in the game gets a new kit
• Wolf packs flank, drag down and follow an alpha
• Parties of four or more lost experience on every kill
• The player-town loading screen that never ended
• Dungeon maps that drew the ceiling instead of the floor

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British, come with word of what thy makers were about upon the Sabbath. The wolves of this world have learned to hunt as a pack, and the bears have learned to give chase. The experience thy company earned and never saw is restored unto thee. A loading screen that would not end has been laid to rest at last. And thy dungeon maps have ceased to draw thee the ceiling. We shall begin with the bears, who until yesterday suffered in perfect silence.

So. Picture a bear. A proper one, head about the height of your chest, coming through the trees at you in Jotungrund. You hit it with everything you have, and it says nothing. Not a grunt. Not a whimper. For a very long time we have shipped bears that take a two-handed sword to the ribs and react like a polite dinner guest.

And the reason is wonderful. Every bear's hurt sounds were in the game the whole time. They were filed under a name the game never asks for. So the game never asked. Years of bears quietly absorbing punishment out of what I can only describe as dignity. The koala and capybara pets had the same fault, which explains a few quiet afternoons as well.

Once they could be heard, they got the full pass, tier by tier. The first thing you will feel is that bears come after you now. Stand just out of reach of one and it bluff charges: it runs at you, stops a few metres short, and does absolutely nothing, which is pure theatre and I love it. Actually turn and run, and from the ferocious brown bear up you get Run Down, a charge that connects, shoves you back and stuns you for about two seconds. Both of those show a cast bar, and a bear only does it to whoever it is actually fighting. So a tank holding a bear in melee still keeps everyone else safe.

The grizzlies got the nastiest kit. Pounce cannot be blocked or parried and knocks you flat. Maul is two heavy swipes they use only on somebody already down or stunned. You can see where that is going. And Crushing Slam puts a ring around the bear that knocks down everyone standing in it, which you can jump. Here is the part I think is lovely. The animal tells you when. The bear rears up onto its hind legs to wind the slam up, and the slam lands as it comes back down onto all fours. So the moment to jump is the moment the bear drops. No add-on, no timer, no bar to read. Watch the animal.

The elemental bears fight with the weather. Polar bears raise a winter coat that cuts the damage they take until a fire or sun hit burns it off, and it cannot grow back for a few seconds after that. Obsidian bears raise a glass hide that water cracks, which leaves them brittle, and the big ones shatter a moment after they die and cut whoever is standing next to the body. Bear Patriarchs hold their dens together now, so the bears around a living Patriarch stop running away. And a ferocious brown bear that is badly hurt will stop to gorge and eat back a quarter of its health, unless a heavy hit lands during the three seconds it takes. You can interrupt a bear's lunch. I have waited a long time to say that in a sentence about our own game.

Three dens, in Solace Forest, Deep Savrenoc Timberland and Jotungrund, now hold a mother bear with two cubs. The cubs trail after her and run from anyone who comes close, they are worth no experience, and they are far too young to tame. Kill one and she comes for you, hitting harder and moving faster, for thirty seconds. That seems fair to me. Three legendary bears roam Mistrendur as well: Scarhide in Myrkur, Cinderglass in the Obsidian Panopticon, and Hvitr the Pale in Jotungrund, each with a signature move, each returning three hours after it falls, and each one's head tanning into a rug or a wall trophy in its own fur. Kill experience moved to par across every tier, so the strongest bears pay roughly double what they used to. Some middle bears now pay less, because they had been paying well above their difficulty. The ordinary polar bear went from seven hundred and fifty down to four hundred. I would rather tell you that myself than have you find it. Two Animal Lore passages had to be rewritten, because the bears no longer behave the way the lore described them. The lore now tells you to hold your ground when a bear warns you, which is excellent advice, given the alternative.

The same day, the same treatment for every wolf in the game. They howl with a real howl now and snarl when they spot you, and a wolf that has only been knocked down has stopped playing its own death. From the elder wolves up, a wolf that knows how will circle round to your back, because its new Flank Bite tears about a quarter deeper from behind. Blows from behind are already harder to dodge, block or parry, so the counter-play is the old one. Keep the pack in front of you, put your back to a wall, or let a tank turn them.

From level eighty up, the pack hunts properly. Hamstring slows you and stacks three times from any wolf in the pack, and with three stacks on you and a second wolf beside you, one of them can drag you down for two seconds, behind a short cast that a hard hit will break. Try to kite them and a wolf snarls and leaps at you and leaves a bleed, and the obsidian ones step through shadow to do it. Arctic wolves from level one hundred up breathe an eight metre cone of frost that chills everything caught in it, and the cone is drawn on the ground before it lands, so you have a moment to leave.

Then the alphas. Twenty-eight of the biggest packs in the world, from the Jotungrund patrols down to Tanglemire, now follow a larger wolf that leads them and is the first one back when the pack refills. While it lives, the pack holds its nerve. When it dies, they may scatter. It howls a rallying howl that speeds up the wolves near it, it hits harder when a packmate falls, and it marks out the most wounded or most isolated player in the fight so the rest of the pack turns on them. That is what a wolf pack has always done in the stories. Yesterday somebody wrote it down.

And at the Giant Bones in Jotungrund there is a den now. The Rime Mother is the old she-wolf the Red Ice packs were whelped from, and her mate, the Rime Sire, dens with her. She grows stronger every time one of her own wolves dies near her, which makes clearing her escort a decision rather than a warm-up. Under a quarter of her health she howls into Winter's Hunger, and a hard enough hit will break it. Her corpse holds her head, which a tanner turns into a mount or a skin rug larger than the arctic wolf's, and Animal Lore has a passage for each of the pair. Wolves above level eighty leave loot on the body as well now, with pelts for tailors and ears that butchers pay the full bounty for, and there is a wolf-fur winter cloak that takes a dye in two places. The Red Ice Snarler's kill experience went from eighty thousand to a little over two hundred thousand, which is closer to what she is worth.

Now the one that stings. If you have been adventuring in a group of four or more, you have been short-changed, and we did it to you. The server puts a ceiling on how much experience a single kill can pay out. That ceiling was built assuming a smaller group bonus than the game actually pays. So every kill made by a party of four or more was trimmed back to what a party of three earns. A fifth member, a sixth, a seventh, and your party total barely moved. Solo play was never touched. The ceiling now includes the full party bonus for everybody credited with the kill, so each extra friend raises the total again.

While we were in there, Deep Ravenswood. Certain zones were not reporting their kills properly, and that one was the worst of them. A two-hour hunt of around five hundred and fifty kills was credited to the board as fifteen. Fifteen. And the same creature in that zone paid a quarter of the experience it pays everywhere else. Both of those are correct now.

There was more bookkeeping of the same kind. When the server refused a skill save, it still took the pooled experience you had spent on that training, so every refusal shaved a little off your pool. The free skill a new character learns in the opening lessons could vanish at the next login and take its experience with it. Offline characters could watch a mastery in training climb for a minute and then fall back to exactly where it started. And if you crashed or force-closed and came straight back, the last minute or so of your progress went with the old connection. That connection now writes down your experience, your inspiration, your battle fatigue and your kill counts before the new login loads your character.

None of that was a feature. All of it was work you had already done, sitting in a drawer nobody had opened.

Here is the bug I least enjoyed reading about. You walk into a player-owned town. The loading screen comes up. And it stays up. Not for a minute, not for five. Until you close the game.

The client was waiting on the decorations for its own lot, and it had never asked the server for them, because an earlier request, the one for the town's doors and crops, never got its full answer back. So your game sat there politely waiting for a reply to a question it had never finished asking. A request like that is now given up on after twenty seconds, a lot whose decorations stall gets asked for a second time, and the log records what the load is actually waiting on, which matters more than it sounds.

There was a second cause of the very same endless screen, found arriving in Finchfield by recall. A decoration that spawns a creature, left behind by the previous scene, broke the step that reads the town's details, and so the town never finished loading. One leftover flowerpot with a spider in it, taking down an entire city. That step can no longer be stopped by one broken spawner.

And there was a near-miss version of this that had been costing people their evenings. Two safety timers, one on the client and one on the game server, were counting the seconds a loading client spends frozen on a single large piece of scene content as time the server had stopped answering. So a load that was working perfectly well got abandoned, and you were thrown back out to the overworld, or in some cases all the way to the login screen. Both of them now measure the wait the way they were meant to. On the gentler end of the same family, your lot's doors, chests, lamps and planters come up in the state you left them, because the client had been asking for their saved states a moment before the connection that answers them was ready.

My favourite piece of work yesterday was a map. The three-dimensional map of Understorm Gold Mine has for years drawn that cave as a handful of rough shapes floating above a big flat sheet. Everybody assumed it was broken. It was perfectly accurate. The flat sheet was the terrain underneath the entire cave, and the rough shapes were the tops of the rocks the cave is carved out of. The map was showing you the outside of the cave, from inside the cave. A beautiful map, if you happened to be a bird.

A dungeon map now keeps only floor a player can actually reach, worked out from the entrances and from where the creatures, the chests, the harvest nodes, the ladders and the teleporters are. If nothing in the dungeon can stand on it, it does not go on your map. Fifty-four maps were rebuilt that way, and Understorm shows its tunnels and its chambers at last.

The East Longfall Wetland map had the opposite problem. Once a Surveyor's Chart cleared the fog, about three quarters of it came up as open sea, because the forest past the swamp's tree line was being drawn as ocean. It reads as mud now, like the other swamp maps, and the real channels inside the tree line are still water.

The same shape of mistake was hiding in combat. Ground-targeted spells, Meteor Shower and its relatives, put a circle under your cursor that goes red when the spell cannot reach the spot. On open rolling ground that circle went red constantly, and it was worst out on the sand flats of The Breach, where a low ridge of sand between you and the target was enough to refuse the whole spell. The line-of-sight check was running along the ground, where a ridge of sand is a mountain range. It now checks one metre up, the same height the spell travels at when it lands. At the spot players reported, the share of ground reading red fell from about a third to under three percent. Tall walls and real cliffs still block it, as they should.

Two from the Oracle, and both of them are ours. A player asked her what the plus Frostfire Damage property on a weapon did, and she explained it, at length, with great confidence. There is no such property. The player had made it up. She now checks the names in a question against her guides and the full item list, and says she does not know of anything by that name. Separately, she had started reading her own notes to herself out loud. Players were getting answers that opened with, and I quote, "So answer: one pet slot. Cite the pets doc." She is a professional. She begins with the answer now. She also picked up about sixty new answers this week from questions players actually asked her, and she can tell you where all fifteen pieces of virtue armour come from.

A small cluster of creatures standing inside the scenery. In The Outlaws' Run, something could spawn inside the mossy stone pillar in the ruined chapel yard, where all you could see of it was a pair of eyes looking out through the stone. The navigation map held a sealed little patch of ground in there, and spawns, teleports and creatures walking home could all land on it. Ground inside a pillar, a rock or any other solid prop is skipped everywhere now. The Obsidian Troll in The Rise has stopped wedging itself a couple of metres inside the walkway over the pit, where nobody on the walkway could reach it. Dragons in player dungeons keep their whole body under a walkway instead of rising up through it. And in the Snowy Tundra encounter, thirty-two rocks had their no-walk markers in the wrong place, some of them more than a hundred metres away, which is why your visiting bounty hunter kept climbing a boulder and getting stuck up there.

Three for your lot. A bookshelf moved inside a house could fall through a gap in the floor and land underneath the building, taking everything on its shelves with it. That spot shows red now and tells you why. Stacked decorations could get linked into a loop, and a looped stack vanished from the lot on every single visit. And your pets and townsfolk walk around the furniture: one chair tucked under one table could stop a whole lot's walking routes from being built, which is why pets on the busiest lots in Ardoris, Aerie and Tortuga strolled straight through the tables.

Quest givers wear their marks again. An NPC with a task for you shows a gold exclamation mark over its name, and a question mark if it is part of something you have already started. They are on by default and there is an option to switch them off. Along with them, Grigor, hiding out by the Understorm Gold Mine, calls to people walking past instead of waiting to be noticed. Jenna in Jaanaford finally mentions that a faun in her own town holds the Blackblade Pass key, rather than leaving travellers to discover that from a man on the far side of the pass it opens. And the invisible walls up the cliffs at the Battle of Solace Bridge tell you to follow the compass markers, instead of standing there mutely while you bounce off them.

Chat has emoji. There is a smiley button in the chat box, typing a colon and part of a name offers you matches, and the old typed smileys turn into pictures when the line is sent. Twenty-four of them are drawn from the game's own art. Sixteen are free for everyone to send, Rewards Program members can send the lot, and everybody can see all of them, in every channel and in speech bubbles. Two options turn the pictures off if you would rather they were not there. Universe chat also has a limit now, twenty messages in any five minutes, and a message over the limit gets you a line asking you to wait instead of disappearing.

The World Calendar went public on the web yesterday: Calls to Arms, official events, approved player events, and every Cabalist stronghold that has fallen since launch, all shown in your own time zone, with subscription feeds and a browser reminder before an event starts. Players can submit their own events through the guild and town site for review. Those same pages draw every lot in a player town over the town's own in-game map, coloured for settled, free, for sale or at auction, read straight from the game's records. So a lot that looks free on the map is free in the game.

And Steve, the boy who sells news in Aerie, has stopped sounding like a forty-year-old man. A check of every child in the game turned up twenty-seven groups speaking with adult voices: the news hawkers in Aerie and Port Harmony, the child thieves, the young squires on South Drachvald Spur, Harvey in Soltown, Christopher in Resolute. All of them recast, twelve hundred and thirty new lines, and the voice audit now fails any child who does not sound like one.

Then there was the smoke alarm problem. A good part of yesterday went on log noise, which is the warnings our own code writes when it thinks something has gone wrong. One spawner near a door was writing eight hundred and eighty-five lines a day in nearly every town in the game. Picking up market crate food wrote five hundred and ninety-three warnings in a single build's life. The movement check flagged eighty-two stalls in a day, every one of them a player taking their first step after a zone load. A dragon getting back up after its first fall warned a hundred and nineteen times and needed lifting on exactly none of those occasions. Some timed traps managed two hundred and forty-eight warnings in under two days, a hundred and eleven of them from one visit to Quel Shardfall. And the client's own log relay was dropping around twenty-one thousand real lines in a session, because a leftover debug line and copies of other people's fight messages were crowding them out. None of this is glamorous work. All of it is the difference between finding a fire and standing in a room full of alarms.

Quickly, the rest. Exceptional crafts have stopped rolling a plus fifty maximum durability bonus that the live game retired years ago and that crawled back out of its grave in August, and gear that already has it keeps it. The Blank Wax Cylinder recipe showed in the list, but the server refused it for anyone who had not learned it from a scroll, so the craft button never lit for a single person. Repairing your tool in the middle of a batch no longer ends the batch. Characters have stopped hopping down stairs, a complaint first filed so long ago that I will not say the number out loud. Asking the Oracle to restore your protection from open combat now takes five minutes to come into effect, with a chat line telling you when you are covered, and Options will show you whether you are flagged and why. On the test shard, every Cabalist now fights with its own kit inside a coloured circle that pulses a warning in red first, a drained one has four times the health it used to, and switching the circles off no longer leaves a Cabalist standing there holding nothing but its weapon. A hundred and twenty-five tracker issues went down, eighty-four of them raised by players and testers. And the release itself had a day of its own: two copies of the Windows build agent connected under the same name and took it in turns, cutting off whichever build happened to be running. They were both extremely polite about it.

That is Sunday. Two hundred and eleven entries in the work log, the better part of four hundred commits, and a world that bites back harder in about thirty specific ways. What I am looking forward to is the first person who jumps a Crushing Slam on purpose and then tells their friends it was reflexes.

Which brings me to those three legendary bears, and the fact that a tanner will turn each of their heads into a rug or a wall trophy in its own fur.

So you can hunt down a legendary bear, skin it, and hang it in your great hall. We are calling it a bear-skinned interface. Good night, friends. Mind the pack.