The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Where new players stop, and the first hour
• A six year old review worked as a bug list
• Melee hits land with the blade again
• Spawn rosters gave the last creature an extra ticket
• Emoji broke the interface, then came back

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British, come to tell thee what thy makers were about on Monday. The first hour of a new life in this world was taken apart and put back together. A six year old scolding of our game was read closely and treated as a list of chores. The rarest beasts of the realm stand accused of cheating at dice. And one small picture of a smiling face brought thine entire interface to its knees. I shall hold that last one back a while, for it is the finest of them.

There is a man in Soltown called Edwin the Tanner, and his job is to teach you to work leather. He asks you for hides and for cotton, and at the end of it he looks over the leather helm you have made and tells you that you have the makings of a craftsman. For some time now, Edwin has been saying that to absolutely anybody. Buy a helm in a shop, loot one off a bandit, or simply walk up already wearing one, hand over the hides, and Edwin would congratulate you warmly on your craftsmanship. As of yesterday, he would like to see one you actually made.

That was one of about a dozen things we found in a new player's first hour, and we found them because we finally went looking properly. The team built an internal page that answers a question we have been guessing at for years. For every character ever made, how far did that person get? It follows each one through the Isle of Storms and then through whichever starting path they chose, Solace Bridge, Highvale or Blood River, up to the moment they reach their first town. For the people who stopped coming back, it records the step they were on, the place they were standing, the tasks still sitting open in their journal, and how long they had played.

The first reading of it is sobering. Most of the new players who stop, stop inside their first hour. People on the Path of Love tend to carry on past the escort and keep going. On Courage and Truth, the largest single group of people who gave up did so in the Outskirts camps at Highvale and Blood River, before they ever reached Resolute or Aerie. That is not a mystery any more. That is an address.

So the rest of the morning went into that hour. On the Isle of Storms, the skills lesson used to finish with a training dummy, and a new character could win every fight on that island by holding down the attack button, which teaches a person nothing at all. The lesson now ends on an armored watcher whose plating turns a plain swing aside. A basic attack does a tenth of its damage and reads on screen as a glancing blow. The skill you were just handed hits in full. Nobody tells you to use the ability. You work it out, which is the entire point of the lesson.

At the Battle of Solace Bridge there is an automaton on the gate who will not let you through until you have trained with him, and what he taught was archery. Only archery. If you had built a sword fighter, your choice was to learn a bow skill you did not want, or to stand at the gate and think about your life. He teaches thrusting and bladed combat now, and a thrust on your hotbar opens that gate just as an arrow does. And when the gate does hold you, it tells you why. Before yesterday it said nothing whatsoever, which is a cruel thing to do to someone twenty minutes into a world.

The tanner's lesson also asks for less than it did, eight hides instead of ten and four raw cotton instead of twelve, with the cotton on the East Perennial Trail growing back in five to seven minutes rather than ten to fifteen, and Edwin will point you the right way to it, which he had not been doing. Then every quest step handed out on the Isle, at Solace Bridge and in Soltown was audited for whether it appears in your tracker and whether it can be cleared. Several steps that only lived in the journal have a line now. Nyssa's errand about Markus finally goes away when you hand her the letter. And the town criers, who would answer any question about the mystery, the investigation or the undead with a completely unrelated rumor, and a different unrelated rumor each time you asked, now name the next person or place you actually need, and say the same thing until you move on.

Now, the humbling part. Six years ago somebody made a long, careful, widely watched video review of this game, and a good deal of it was not kind. The team pulled that video back up yesterday and worked through it as a bug list. Every complaint in it that was still true got fixed. One complaint that had quietly stopped being true got proved and then pinned down with a test so it stays untrue.

The largest of them was about swordplay, and I love the diagnosis. When you swing a sword, the swing belongs to your own machine and takes the time it takes. But the blood splash and the meaty hit sound were waiting on the server to confirm the hit, and that wait was being added on top of the swing's own timing instead of overlapping with it. So the blade went through the bandit, and then a moment later, after a trip across the internet and back, the blood showed up. Every hit in this game felt like it had to be approved by a committee. The splash and the sound land with the blade now. No damage number changed. It simply feels like you hit something, which it had not done for a very long time.

That same review has a shot of a wolf biting a player with its neck bent up at a dreadful angle, so the animal could look you in the face while chewing on your leg. Measured on a grey wolf at close range, that neck was bending forty five degrees. A wolf now turns its head toward you only when you are within twenty five degrees up or down and sixty degrees to either side, and the neck takes half of that turn rather than all of it. While they were in there, the team found that every head turning limit in the game had been falling short of its own number, so a limit set to forty five was stopping at about thirty five. They all mean what they say now.

Skinning had a related indignity. The game placed your character at a point near the animal's shoulders, which is fine for a rabbit and rather less fine for a cow, where your kneeling avatar's head ended up inside the carcass. You now walk to the nearest side of the body, step off it first if you were standing on it, and turn to face it, like a person. The indoor conversation camera was a third. In a shop too small for it, the camera shoved itself into the wall and the shopkeeper blurred into what looked like a crude lump of a model. It checks both sides of you and the NPC now and stands on whichever side has room, and when the room has no room, it takes the close up on the NPC and keeps them sharp.

The one from that review that stung the most was a brand new character walking the overworld, caught by a wandering encounter, and dropped straight into a fight with bandits about thirty levels above them. Almost every overworld encounter in the game sits at level thirty. From yesterday, when an encounter is far above your level, it asks. The window tells you the encounter's level and your own and offers you a door out, and slipping away leaves you standing on the map. Within ten levels of it you are pulled in as before, because that is the game. As for the complaint that the minimap drew you off the path, we checked, and the map lines up with the world to within a few metres along the whole trail and both bridges. The reviewer was looking at the old arrow marker, whose tip sat a little ahead of the player. That became a dot in September, and there is now a test holding that map honest.

And so to the dice. Every spawn point in the world works from a roster, a list of creatures with a weight on each, and the game rolls against the total. The roll was including both ends of the range, which means the last creature on every single roster in this game has been holding one extra ticket in the raffle. Always. The Red Ice Snarler that runs with the wolf patrols in Jotungrund was set to appear one time in seventeen, about six percent. It was appearing about eleven percent of the time. Our rarest creatures have been our least rare creatures, by very nearly double, on account of a greater than or equal sign. Rare spawns are rare again.

In the same stretch of the world, four wolf packs in the Ruins of Utheim had been spawning grey and timber wolves in their twenties and thirties, in territory meant for characters four times that, because the roster listed the obsidian wolf at a weight of zero and the game dutifully never rolled it. Those packs are level eighty obsidian wolves now, and the north east quarter of that map can hold twenty more of them at once than it did. Please do not take a new character there to check my work.

A player called inuphet found us a different kind of creature problem on the test shard. The Lupine Alpha in the Obsidian Panopticon, a boss, a dreaded thing, was hot pink. Head to tail. It had been handed an old wolf model whose body had never been given a texture, and an untextured surface in this engine renders as bright magenta, so the terror of the Panopticon was the colour of a birthday cake. He wears the Lupine Destroyer's coat now at half again the size, and a new test fails any creature in the game with an untextured piece on it.

Rinaldi reported one I have enjoyed picturing all day. In the Cabalist Stronghold, the Cabal's army had decided the wooden decks were nicer places to stand than the yards, so the besieging force would queue up a ladder and crowd onto a balcony for minutes at a time. The decks are off the list of good places to stand, and any creature that stays rooted to one spot for ten seconds while trying to rejoin its Cabalist is now simply put back down beside him. Siege warfare, with less loitering.

One new thing for the spiders, and I think it is a good one. There are three hundred and twenty two spider egg clutches scattered around the world, and until yesterday they were scenery. They are a creature you can attack now. Walk near one and it stirs, and about four seconds after that it hatches. Kill the sac first and nothing comes out, and you are left standing over an empty shell. It takes extra damage from fire and from sun magic, and it gives no experience and no loot, so there is nothing in it but the choice. That is the whole difference between walking into a spider nest and clearing one.

On Sunday we shipped emoji in chat, and I was pleased about it. On Monday morning the entire interface developed a stammer. Open a window, gain a buff, take a hit and watch the combat text arrive, and the game would hitch for a moment each time.

The cause was ours and it was embarrassing. To draw emoji as pictures you hand the text system a sheet of little images and tell it where to look. We attached that sheet to the shared default that every single piece of text in the interface inherits from. So every label in the game, your health numbers, your buff timers, a vendor's price list, was checking a large sheet of emoji each time its text changed, just in case some of it was a smiling face. A window with thirty lines in it took seventy milliseconds to appear. It takes two now.

The build was already staged for the test shard with weeks of work in it, the bear pass, the wolf pass, the new bosses, the calendar. We held it back. There is no sense shipping a hundred good things with a stutter sitting on top of them. The fix went in, the build was rebuilt around it, and by the evening the emoji came back by another road, drawn from a colour font that windows containing no emoji never load at all. The chat log has its pictures again, so does the picker, skin tones and families and flags and our own among them, and offline play can finally send every one of them.

The other large thing yesterday happened on a machine in our own building. The Oracle, the chat moderation, the watch bot on our community chat, the screening on new character names, the character helper, the dialogue our NPCs improvise and the forum summaries have all been running on a rented model somewhere out on the internet. They now run on one model of our own, on one graphics card we own, in a room a person can walk into.

The measurements made the decision easy. On eighty one real questions players had put to the Oracle, the house model answered in one and six tenths of a second at the median, against two and three tenths for the rented one. The chat moderation passed all hundred and one of its test cases at a third of a second a message, while the Oracle was under load on the same card. Name screening passed all sixty six of its cases with nothing wrongly blocked.

It did arrive with one flaw, and it is a very human one. On fourteen out of sixty questions that our own guides answer in plain text, the model said it did not know. Half of those it never searched at all. The other half it searched, read the little preview snippets that came back, and stopped there without ever opening the guide. We gave the thing a library and it stood in the doorway reading the spines. The repair was to run the search on the player's question before the model gets a word in, and then hand it the full text of the best matches. Misses went from fourteen in sixty down to two. We also tried a second model of our own that gave slightly better answers but took six to eight seconds about it for one player, and fifteen to twenty eight seconds with four people asking at once, which is not a conversation. Every one of these services still falls back to the rented model if ours goes quiet.

Three things about crafting. At a station you can right click a recipe now and choose exactly which material fills each of its any of this kind slots, which strap goes into the chainmail, picked from what is in your pack and what is in your lot storage, with counts beside each. The recipe then takes that material and nothing else, and tells you when it runs out instead of quietly helping itself to something you were saving. Double clicking a reshape recipe puts a blank piece on the table ahead of one that already carries a pattern, which it had been doing backwards, to the sorrow of everyone who had just finished reshaping something. And the recipe book's search opens on the chapter you were reading, so looking up sausage from the cooking book no longer lands you deep in tanning.

Sound got the biggest single piece of work of the day. Every player run town and every player owned town has ambience across the whole place now, where before the birdsong sat in a thin ring out at the map edge. Grassland, forest and island towns carry birds through the day, a chorus at dawn and dusk, and crickets or owls at night. The swamp towns have marsh noise instead, the deserts have wind, and up in the alpine towns you get some of both. The river at Snell's Bend is loud enough to hear from the bank. On top of that, a radio on your lot keeps the area music quiet across the whole lot rather than only where you happen to be standing, and there is a new background music slider that turns down the music of the place you are in while leaving every jukebox, phonograph and instrument alone. Barugon asked for a small one that I suspect a lot of you want as well. You can turn off the word attention at the front of the expiring buff announcement and just be told which buff is running out.

A few for your bags and your windows. Cups, mugs and goblets stack now, the way plates and bowls do, and taking one out to drink from leaves the rest of them in the bag. The target frame shows you yourself and your pet again when you select them, which it had not done since the original servers. The cluster of window buttons in the top right corner can be dragged anywhere you like, and once you move it away the minimap slides up into that corner. And the build number is back at the bottom of the Options window, where it had gone missing when that window was rebuilt in July. A player asked the Oracle for it.

A hundred and sixteen tracker issues were closed yesterday, seven of them top priority, and I am not going to read them to you. A good cluster were about magic and how it behaves. Stacked chilling effects no longer slow a creature to a dead stop, so something hit with three ice spells at once keeps chasing you slowly instead of standing there like a garden ornament. Spell critical hits have their own colour in the floating text and announce themselves over your own head. Lunar specialists get a moon attunement from Celestial Blessing the way sun specialists always have. And the summoned earth elemental's earthquake, comfortably the most alarming thing any summon could do, now catches four enemies instead of ten, hits each of them twice instead of six times, and briefly stuns about half.

Vendors picked up two conveniences, a button that hides every listing from one seller out of your searches, and a tab holding every buy order you have out, which you can cancel from anywhere with the deposit coming straight back. The new website grew a player guides section, eighty six of them in nine groups, the same guides the Oracle reads from in game, now readable in a browser. First drafts of a proper set of player facing terms went up for legal review, replacing a privacy policy written in twenty eleven, which is older than some of you. And ahead of the forum move, nearly four hundred thousand old forum members were checked against the game accounts, with all but a few hundred matching exactly one.

Two from the back room. A nightly round of checks had been failing since the twenty eighth of September on its own self test, over an invisible difference in how two systems mark the end of a line, which meant everything queued up behind it had not run in a fortnight. That is fixed and written into the ledger where such embarrassments live. And on the test shard, signing in through Steam stopped working during the day. Our key is fine, the client is fine, Valve is fine, and we are chasing the piece that is not. Your account name and password still get you in while we do.

That is Monday. What I am looking forward to is somebody rolling a brand new character tonight, walking that first hour, and finding it dull in none of the old places. If you do find a dull place, tell us where it sags. We are watching that page now, and it is a great deal harder to argue with than my opinions.

One last thing before I go. We spent a good part of yesterday teaching a wolf to stop craning its neck up at your face while it chewed on your leg. Six years that animal has been at it.

I would call the whole business a pain in the neck, but it was his neck and your pain, so let us agree it was a shared experience. Good night, citizens of New Britannia.