The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• High ground finally changes weapon damage
• The creature balance audit was measuring wrong
• Fishing gets a painted reel meter and sounds
• The new website rebuilt on the game's own art
• Returning players no longer log in under a dock

Transcript

Hail and well met, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British speaks, with word of what thy makers were about upon Friday. The high ground at last rewards the one who holds it. Thy fishing rod has been given a painted face and a voice of its own. A new website rises, raised out of the game's own paintings, with its gates thrown open to all who are returning. And a certain arena beneath the Obsidian Trials stands ready, though its doors remain shut a while longer. That is the shape of the evening. Let us begin, as one properly should, with the zombies that nobody could see.

You hear it first. Something close by, wet and unpleasant and clearly alive. Then something hits you. You turn around and there is nothing there. No body, no outline, nothing to click on, nothing to target. An empty patch of ground, making noises at you and taking your health. That was the Plague Bloats and the Shriekers after this week's build. Their bodies failed to load, so they could be heard and they could swing, and that was the whole of it. Twelve creatures in total were pointing at artwork that no longer existed. They have their bodies back, and the game now runs a test that checks every creature and every townsperson actually owns the body it claims to own.

Now, the largest single piece of work on Friday is something most of you cannot see yet, and I want to talk about it anyway, because it is the thing I am most looking forward to showing you. The new website was rebuilt from the ground up on the game's own material. There is no template underneath it. The painted loading screens, the colours out of the in-game books, the ornaments, the woodcuts, the real logo. The world map fills the whole window now and you can push it around. The home page says, plainly, that all of Episode One is free to play, because it is.

There is a page on it called Coming back, and it exists for one very specific person. You played for a while. You stopped. Life happened, or another game did, or a bad week did. Now you are thinking about logging in again and you have no idea what is different. That page tells you, and it carries a search over more than a thousand bug fixes, so you can go and look up the exact thing that annoyed you into quitting and find out whether we dealt with it. I find that page a little exposing. I also think we should ship it.

Heraldry came across as well, rebuilt rather than carried over. There is a crest builder with two hundred and seventy-two charges, thirteen ordinaries and thirteen divisions, which is enough to put together something a guild will be proud to fly. You can upload your own artwork, and a member of staff looks at every one of them before it goes live. Changing your crest becomes free, once every thirty days. Guild pages carry the crest, and the game itself reads it from a new image service, so what sits on the website is what flies in the world.

Behind all that is an entire signed-in half of the site, built and switched off until the account move is finished. Your characters, your lots and when the tax falls due, letters you have not opened, the leaderboards, the roadmap, a search across every player vendor in every town, every town in the game with its merchants and what they sell, and the Oracle answerable from a browser.

One small confession. The first pass of that site used real screenshots, and a few of them had a test account name sitting in the corner and the whole interface switched on. Those were pulled on Friday and the game's own paintings went in instead. Nobody outside the team ever saw them. I am telling you because it is funnier than hiding it.

Which brings me to the bug that would have met those returning players at the door. If you logged out standing on a pier, and while you were away somebody picked that pier up and put it in their backpack, you came back standing on the river bottom underneath where it used to be. Not swimming. Planted in the mud, under the water, under nothing at all, unable to move.

Your first moment back in New Britannia after two years away, and the welcome is a stuck character with a close view of some fish. That is fixed. A login over water whose dock has gone now starts you at that area's arrival point. If you logged out while actually swimming, you still come back swimming, because that was your own decision and we respect it.

A wider rule went in with it. Anybody logging in for the first time after ninety days or more away now starts at each area's arrival point rather than exactly where they left off. Towns get rebuilt while you are gone. Lots change hands, houses come down, and a quiet corner of somebody's garden can be the inside of a wall by the time you get back. Starting at the entrance is the kinder option.

Right. The high ground. This is my favourite kind of bug, because the game was doing all of the work and then throwing it away at the last possible second. Weapon damage is supposed to change with elevation. Strike from above and you hit harder, strike from below and you hit for less. The game has always worked that number out, and worked it out correctly. Then it multiplied the hit by the bonus before the bonus had finished being calculated, so the figure it reached for was not there yet, and every swing in the game came out exactly as though the ground were flat. Everywhere. Since the day it was written.

And we have a loading screen tip that tells you to take the high ground. That tip was removed at some point, presumably by somebody who tested it and discovered it did nothing. It is back now, because for the first time the thing it says is true.

A hit from above does up to twenty-five percent more damage. A hit from below does up to twenty-five percent less. You get about a tenth of that at one metre of difference and the full amount from around six. It covers every weapon in the game, bows included, and it applies to creatures as well as players. Spells are unaffected. Go and find a rock to stand on.

There was a second one of these on Friday and it is a little worse. Dragons carry a Crowd Control Resistance stat. So do the elemental bosses, the Spider Queen, the mechanical creatures and a handful of others. Its tooltip has always told you that it lowers your chance to stun them, root them, knock them back or knock them down. No roll in the game has ever read it. The number was there, the tooltip was there, the dragon was wearing it around like a medal, and nothing in the combat code had looked at it once. It works now, and it ships switched off until it has been tried properly on the test shard. A creature carrying the full hundred can still be stunned, at about a fifth of the usual chance.

The third is the lich in the Lich Fighter Statues. Its magic resistance was set so high that Stone Fist, Earthquake and the burn off a Fireball did nothing at all to it. The combat log reported zero, or Immune, which tells you precisely nothing about whether the creature was built that way or whether something had broken. It takes spell damage now, from any school. And a spell that any creature resists completely says Resisted, over the target and in the log, so you can tell a bad matchup from a bad day.

Part of the reason those survived so long is that the tool we use to check whether creatures are balanced had been lying to us. The creature balance audit walks every creature in the game and reports how hard each one hits and how much punishment each one takes, so we can line them up and spot the ones that are wrong. On Friday it took two serious corrections. It had been counting a single hit from basic attacks that land several, and reading the wrong weapon on creatures that carry one, so it was reporting the wild elementals at about two thirds of their real damage. Two-handed fighters, dragon breath and spellcasting creatures were all off as well. It compared bosses on raw health while ignoring armour and absorption entirely, so a boss in heavy plate looked identical to a boss in a shirt. It also displayed a complete immunity as one percent, which is about as wrong as a number is able to be.

So, with a tape measure that works, here is what Friday found. A player reported that the fire elementals in The Breach were hitting for almost nothing. They were right. The Fire, Water and Air Elementals from level one hundred and thirty upward had been dealing somewhere between a little over half and four fifths of what a creature at their level should. A Fire Elemental's Heat Haze was burning you once a second for so little that any decent armour absorbed the lot, which is a great deal of combat log reporting no event whatsoever. It now burns every three seconds at three times the strength. You will feel it.

The Ancient dragons were in worse shape. Each life had roughly half the health of the other bosses at their level, so the most feared creature in New Britannia was going down faster than a spider. Each life now carries a little under twenty thousand health, up from a bit over sixteen thousand. An Ancient still rises once at full health before the fight ends, and the experience for killing one is unchanged.

And the spider queens. A tester group reported doing almost no damage to the queen on the hard version of Spindelskog. They were hitting her perfectly well. She was healing a hundred health a second, flat, straight through the fight, which no other boss in the game does. Both queens, in Spindelskog and in Xen Trohop, now heal at the slow rate everyone else gets. Their abilities and their armour are untouched. Go and try her again, and tell that group thank you, because that is exactly the report we need.

Then there is the fishing, which had an art pass land on it late on Friday and came out looking like a different game. The reel meter used to be a yellow square moving inside a grey box. It is now a wooden angler's gauge. Walnut frame, rope edging, brass corners, a spool and a float and a trout painted over the columns, water running down the middle, a fish riding the gold band and a red float on the bar you reel. The callouts sit on a wooden plaque. If you preferred the old one, there is a Fishing Meter Style setting and Classic brings it straight back.

The better change is that the meter now tells you what you have hooked. A header appears with the fish's picture, its name with its size word, and how hard it fights, which is Gentle, or Fights, or Fights hard. If it is a kind you have never landed, you get an outline over the words "Something you have never caught", which I think is the loveliest small thing in the whole pass. And if you would rather keep the mystery, there is a setting that shows you the shape and nothing else.

The meter reacts now, too. The gold band glows and bubbles rise while your bar is on the fish. Setting the hook sends a ripple out from the plaque. A low line pulses orange-red and grows a frayed tuft on its end, and a snapped line cracks and shakes the whole frame. Land one and a card comes up for a few seconds with the picture, the name, the length, and a tag if it was a clean catch, a critical, or the first of its kind you have ever caught. High Contrast drops the glow and the bubbles for anyone who needs it to sit still.

Out in the world the line hangs with a sag in it instead of standing stiff off the rod, and it pulls taut and trembles when a fish fights. A bite splashes and rings the water where the bobber goes under, and during the fight the fish drags the bobber about just below the surface. All of it makes noise now. The swish of the cast, the bobber landing, the bite, the hook set, a reel that clicks faster as the line comes in faster, a creak when a fish pulls hard against the line, and a small snap from the rod when the line finally goes.

One piece of the art pass did not make it. The plan was for the fish to leap clear of the water during the fight, and it has been set aside, because the fish models in this game do not record which end is the head. Or how big the fish is supposed to be. So before anything can jump, a human being has to go and inspect every species by hand and establish, individually, which way round it goes. That is the real reason. I could not invent that.

Elsewhere, and in a quieter voice, Cinderspire was made ready. The arena has its way in from the lobby of the Obsidian Trials, hidden until the day it opens, a way back out on the start platform, its own map, its own loading screen, and every word of its text in nine languages. The party windows now name whichever arena you are fighting in, where before they called everything the Obsidian Trials. It is not open to you yet. But the stone is cut, the gate is hung, and the torches await only a reason to be lit.

A player called Ceal Astra had three ideas, and all three of them shipped on Friday. A taming necklace with nothing inside it now says Empty after its name, so you can type "empty" into your inventory search and find the spare ones. The inventory search learned to look up gear by the combat deck it is saved to, so you can ask it which of your armour belongs to your fire deck, or what is sitting in the bank attached to no deck at all. And you can lock a taming necklace while you are wearing it, so you cannot tame a new creature straight over the pet already in there. Three for three. Thank you.

Your house had a good day as well. A flipped house stays flipped through the Property Manager, instead of coming back on its normal hand with all the furniture still arranged for the mirror image. Decoration layouts put back what you placed by hand, where before they judged every item more strictly than you did and left your hot tub in your backpack. Bathtubs and beds that had stopped taking a click since the middle of September take the click again. And if you paid gold crowns for a lot deed upgrade that then failed, because the price quote expired at the precise instant you paid, or because the lot was unclaimed out from under you before it finished, those crowns used to be simply gone. They now come back to you in the mail.

One for everybody's download allowance. The client build had been cutting its download packages from scratch every single time, which means one new asset could shift every split point after it and force a rewrite of most of the game. One build this week changed three hundred and forty-nine zone packages out of three hundred and ninety-seven. That is four point six gigabytes, pulled down by every player, to deliver a change that was a tiny fraction of it. Packages keep their contents between builds now, so a patch carries what actually changed. There was also a cross-check in there adding between five and fourteen minutes to every build that had caught nothing at all across nine builds, and that is off too.

Faster now. The mouse wheel could zoom your camera in and then refuse to bring it back out, because if you had a keybinding slot waiting for a key and you scrolled the Options window, the game handed Mouse Wheel Down to that slot and took it off Zoom Out without mentioning it. Theme Editor changes survive a restart. Compass markers have their up and down arrows back. The crates in the Solace Bridge camp say Steal All again, which is useful information to have before the Justicar arrives. Titles and guild names stay over players with a weapon drawn, and there is a new option if you would rather they did not. Party members appear on your minimap and your map in the party colour, moving as they move.

The maps had a bad week and a good Friday. The Castle Atos map had you standing twelve metres north of where you actually were, which put anyone beside the north wall out in the moat. Three side chambers across Paladis, Midmaer and Quel Passage were named after the wrong compass points entirely, so the one in the northeast corner was called the Southwest Chamber. And the world map was drawing every lot in every town a quarter turn off and shoved sideways, so keeps and castles sat well outside their own walls. Overlapping lots across the whole world went from two thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine pairs down to eighty-five.

Beyond that, about six hundred and ninety vendor items that could only be found by typing their names with the space missing are findable properly again. The Oracle learned around fifty new answers, can find your own bug reports from the past week, and will pass a question to the developers to read on the livestream. Harvesting no longer leaves your bow dangling off the side of your hand. The giant chess boards stopped asking for the board position before they had finished arriving. And a hundred and seventy items came off the tracker, sixty-four of them bugs and most of the rest a long overdue read through the wishlist.

That is Friday. A strange day, in that a great deal of what went in is work you cannot see yet. The website is waiting on the account move. The arena is waiting on a date. The screenshot gallery is built and sitting dark until it launches. What you can see tonight is a fishing rod that finally looks like a fishing rod, and a hill that is finally worth the climb.

And before I go. We spent all of Friday teaching the fishing meter to tell you exactly how big your fish is. After all these years, Shroud of the Avatar has finally got a sense of scale. I will see myself out. Good night, citizens.