The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• A polar bear kept burning to death beside a campfire
• Rogue of Novia, built and shipped in one day
• The player website is open to every account
• Soltown's first hour is shorter and kinder
• A spare copy of the thing that signs you in

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with an account of what thy makers were about upon Wednesday. Thy website stands open at last, and upon it has appeared a crawl of six and twenty floors, down into the dark and back again. Thy first hour in Soltown is shorter and kinder, and no longer sends thee off on another man's errands. The beasts of the wild have been taught, with some patience, where their own bodies lie. And we have forged a spare set of gates, that one stumble might never bar thee from the world. But I shall begin with a polar bear, for the polar bear is the finest tale of the day.

There is a barbarian camp in the Snowy Tundra, and in that camp there is a campfire, and beside that campfire there was a polar bear. Not in the fire. Beside it. And the bear would stand there, doing nothing in particular, and quietly catch fire. And burn. And die. Every time, on its own, with no help from anybody.

The fire was checking a patch of ground rather larger than the flames, and the bear was large enough to have a paw in that patch while standing nowhere near the actual fire. So the game set a polar bear alight, repeatedly, for the crime of being big. Creatures now only take campfire damage when they walk into the fire. Players never had this problem. Which I imagine the bear would find insulting.

The bear was not the only creature having a rough day. The four Elemental Lords in The Breach, and the fire elemental bosses down in the player dungeons, only took damage from the one school each of them is weak to. Everything else came back Resisted. Death, Moon, Chaos, all of it bouncing off. If you walked into one of those fights with anything other than the one correct answer, the fight simply did not move, and nothing on your screen told you why. Every school gets through now. The element each boss is weak to still hits hardest, which is the part that was supposed to be interesting.

Then there is the business of hitting a creature that has fallen over. Knock a panther down and the cat lands on its side, which is lovely. The thing you could click on stayed standing exactly where the cat used to be. So you would swing at the body on the ground, hit nothing at all, and the only way to land a blow was to attack the empty air a meter away where the panther's ghost was still politely waiting. Hit areas now follow the body down and stay with it until the creature is back on its feet.

And while we were in there, stunned big cats got their fall back. Panthers, jaguars, snow leopards, lions, tigers, sabre-tooths and the cubs had been skipping the falling-over part and simply arriving on their side, which read less like a stun and more like a sudden decision to lie down. They now reel from the blow and stay upright for the duration. A falling troll's ring of damage, and an obsidian bear's Shatter, now land when the body hits the ground on everyone's screen, instead of up to a second after the corpse had already settled. And dragon wrasses knocked loose in a fight pay their experience and count toward the Wrasse achievements for every player involved, which they did not always do, and I will spare you why.

Now. The thing I have been waiting all episode to talk about. Yesterday morning there was no such thing as Rogue of Novia. By early afternoon it was playable. By the evening it was live on your Desk, with its own board on the Leaderboards. It is a dungeon crawl in the shape of the original Rogue, which came out in nineteen eighty, a year before I shipped the first Ultima, and which I lost a truly indefensible number of evenings to at the time. Six and twenty floors down, from the Soltown Catacombs to The Obsidian Panopticon, and then the climb back out with the Heart of Sorrows in your hands.

Here is the part that makes it more than a toy. None of the contents were invented for it. The creatures, the places, the items and the spells are read out of the game's own data, so each floor is stocked with the creatures that actually live in that dungeon. Descend through the Catacombs and you fight what is in the Catacombs. The item icons are the game's item icons. The master trainers sell spells, because they are the game's master trainers. There is a Today's dungeon that is the same for every player each day, and your first run at it counts on a realm-wide list, and when you die you get a gravestone with a proper Rogue-style epitaph on it.

The magic went in by mid-afternoon and it is the part I keep poking at. Thirty-one spells across ten schools. Each cast speaks its words of power. They are paid for out of Focus, which comes back fastest when you stand still, costs less if you are carrying the school's reagent, and is likelier to fizzle if you are wearing heavy armor. Tomes on the floors teach you new ones. And there is a day clock and all eight moons running, so Sun magic and Moon magic each grow stronger in their own hour. A browser game, with the lunar cycle in it, because the lunar cycle was already sitting there in the data.

By late afternoon it had its set pieces. Four of a planned thirteen artifacts, hidden on the deepest floors, and the names will mean something to some of you. Cuthbert. Undead Bane. The Sword of Speed. The Ring of the Moon. The eight Obsidian Potions work as blessings for the rest of a run. On the climb back up, the Cabalists come for the Heart, bringing servants that feed their power, and the Heart itself answers with a Wave of Sorrows. Lunar Rifts will carry you two floors on if you are brave or desperate. The Oracle will pick your path for you with three questions. And your gravestone carries the skill-mastery title for whichever school you leaned on hardest. One day. I have shipped less in a quarter.

All of that sits on the other big thing, which is that the player website switched on for everyone. A signed-in player now gets a single slim bar across the top with the Desk, News, Roadmap, World, Forums and Store on it, and a Player and Public switch in the corner if you want to see what a visitor sees. The Desk is no longer a guild thing. Every account has one, with a folder for each guild and each player-owned town you belong to, plus chat, the map, the Oracle, a Games folder holding all of the Desk games, and a Links folder pointing at the community wiki. If you have no guild and no town, you still get a Desk. Notes and the Desk games stopped asking for a subscription. You can set the site to open on your Desk when you arrive. The web store wears the same bar and no longer shows your login name anywhere on it, which it had no business doing.

My favorite small fix in that pile is Umbra. The towns list counted a player town's residents by who held an official role there, and Umbra's residents hold lots without bothering with roles. So Umbra reported one resident. Possibly zero. And because the default filter hides towns with nobody in them, Umbra was being hidden from the town list on the grounds that nobody lived there. Eight people live there. The count now includes the governor, anyone with a role, and anyone who holds a lot, which is a reasonable definition of living somewhere.

Late in the evening the town folders got their own faces. Nineteen of the towns use the shield from the cover of the book written about them. The rest of the forty-eight towns and settlements get an item that stands for the place. A player-owned town gets a picture of the land it was built on, a pine cone, a seashell, a cactus, and seven more. Folders that had been sitting there labeled with an internal scene code, Castle Atos among them, now carry the town's actual name and open a short page about it, and places that are not towns stopped getting a folder at all. A player town's governor can pick the icon everyone in the town sees, from the folder menu or the town's manage page. Anyone who had already chosen their own picture keeps theirs. That one goes live with the next website update.

Right. Your first hour in the game, which is the story the team put at the top of their own list, and rightly. The complaint was that the main quest in Soltown was getting buried under optional crafting errands before a new player had any idea what the game was about. So the town crafting tutorial is shorter. Edwin the Tanner in Soltown, Gilda Metcalfe in Aerie and Bledig deCani in Resolute now hand you the crafting tools the moment you agree to be their apprentice, and ask for the eight animal hides straight away. The raw cotton, the thread and the bolt of cloth are gone. Four conversations and one trip out of town, and characters who are partway through the old version get moved along to the hides the next time they speak to any of the three.

Then the two optional side quests moved town. Master Archer Varren and his arrows, and Linda and her salmon for the refugee families, used to live out in the Solace Bridge Outskirts, where a brand new character ran into them before they had a lot of their own or any reason to care. Varren now stands by Soltown's southern gate and Linda is in the refugee camp, so you meet them after you have your row lot deed and the arrow kit has somewhere to go. Captain Kinsey has stopped sending you off to Sedgewick and Fleta, and Guard Stanley mentions the two of them once, after your report, and then lets it go. Rewards and quest flags are untouched, so anyone who already finished them is not offered them again, and anyone halfway through can finish in either place.

Five item hand-ins also learned to point at themselves. Morton's ledger in Owl's Head, the elven wine for Vinicius, a dead body for Davropos, a burial coffin for Shimzu in Spite, and the taming necklace for the stable hands. While you are carrying the item, the person who wants it is now marked on your compass and your map. Before this, the only hint was a question mark over their head, which you could only see once you were close enough to have already found them. Helpful. Vinicius also got a proper task entry for his wine, translated into all nine languages.

And then the quest-flag typos, which are my favorite kind of bug, because the game was doing precisely what it was told by a misspelling. Shimzu in Spite has a greeting where he laments the shortage of burial coffins, which is meant for people carrying one. The check for the coffin was misspelled in a way that always passed. So Shimzu complained about the coffin shortage to every single person who walked past him, forever. Erling in Vikland had it worse. He would say "Life is a constant struggle," and then take Erica's amulet of testimony off you, whether or not you had ever held it. Both of them now check the item they are actually naming. And while we were there, handing Shimzu a coffin before agreeing to help counted as nothing, so he would take a second one the same day for another first-time reward, and Davropos would pay his first-time reward out again the following day. Both now count the delivery you already made.

The quiet work of the day was a spare. Everything that signs you in, the game login, the website, the forum, the guild pages, all of it has been leaning on a single copy of one service. When that copy stops answering, nobody plays anywhere in the game. No zone, no shard, nobody at all. So the team spent the middle of the day building a second copy on a different server, kept current within seconds of the first, and checked continuously to make sure it never accepts a change of its own and lets the two drift apart.

On that second copy, existing players sign in as normal. Making a new account, changing a password or choosing a public name get a short page saying that part is paused until the main copy is back, which is a much better answer than a spinning wheel. The game servers will check sign-ins against the standby when their own copy goes quiet, and switch back on their own when it recovers. Only lookups go there. Anything that writes waits. Promoting the standby to be the real one is a single scripted step that first waits for the last change to arrive, so nothing is lost, and takes care not to hand out the same account or reward number twice. There is a watch checking both copies every two minutes, and it posts to the team when either goes quiet, when the standby falls behind, or when the standby starts behaving like the main copy. Those alerts used to go into a log file, which is a wonderful place to put a message that nobody will read.

The piece I find clever is the third copy. There is now a copy kept deliberately one hour in the past. Think about why. A fast copy is a perfect copy, which means if something destroys data on the main one, the fast copy destroys the same data within seconds, with great efficiency. The slow copy has not heard the bad news yet. For one hour, there is a version of the truth that predates the mistake. None of this is on the servers yet. It goes on after the account move, and I would rather tell you about it now than after we have needed it.

Three things about your pets. When a tamed pet dies, its body now gets an orange paw print on the minimap and on the Map window, and a chat line reminds you that casting Resurrect Creature on yourself will raise it from anywhere in the area. People have been losing pets outright because they could not find the body in time to target it, which is a miserable way to lose a companion. Dying also stopped costing your pet gear durability. The collar, the ball and the harness now only wear while the pet is out and taking hits, instead of taking the hit for a pet that was not even summoned. Your own worn armor still pays on death, as it always has. And there is a Peacock in the Crown Store under New Pets for a thousand crowns. It follows you about or sits on a lot as a house pet, and it walks, runs, pecks at the grass, and fans its tail as its dance and now and then when it thinks nobody is looking.

Two things about buying and selling. Buy orders now cover every tradeable crafting material that stacks. The list of orderable items had been kept by hand and had quietly fallen behind, so it now builds itself out of the item catalog, which took it from about eight hundred items to roughly fourteen hundred and sixty. Six hundred and forty-nine more things you can place an order for, including the Strip of Thick Troll Skin, the Glowing Belt Buckle, gems and jewels, the Elemental Cores, the Binding Shard, more seeds and dyes, crafted weapon parts and the casting molds. New materials will appear there on their own from now on. Separately, the three legendary bear trophy recipes and their three skin rugs had shipped without ever being added to the game's recipe list, so no merchant sold them and nobody could craft them. They are on the trophy and rug recipe merchants now at three hundred gold each.

Two specializations now come with a name for the pair. Two hundred and ten combinations, every one of them named, shown after your two schools in the Skills window and on your character sheet, and visible when you examine another player. Earth and Tactics reads Sapper. Heavy Armor and Life is a Paladin. Fire and Life, a Phoenix. Taming and Bard, a Ringmaster. Heavy Armor and Subterfuge, and the game calls you a Silent Knight, which I would have taken as a title gladly. The names show in English in every language until the next translation pass catches them.

A couple of other player-facing things worth your time. The slash translate command now asks our own translator first, running on our own hardware, before falling back to the public web service it used before. A line comes back in about a tenth of a second, slang and casual tone survive the trip, and linked item names come through exactly as written. On a hundred and ten real chat lines pushed through all ten client languages it scored four point seven seven out of five for meaning. Languages it does not cover still go out to the web service. And the Oracle now knows about the hundred and twelve new dances on the way, Breakdance and Moonwalk and the Charleston among them, and will happily list them and then tell you plainly that you cannot learn them yet. The Avatar, moonwalking out of a throne room. We live in strange times.

Last of the middle, and I apologize to anyone who has been decorating with mannequins. A dressed male mannequin has been showing its wooden knees, shins and elbows straight through trousers, sleeves and robes. In every pose. All seventeen of them. The mannequin was drawing its own body underneath the clothes, so the clothes and the wood occupied the same space and the wood kept winning. A garment now takes the place of the body part it covers, which is how the female mannequins have worked since September, so the male ones have been standing around in your houses for a month and a half with their knees poking out.

A hundred and four tracker issues went down yesterday, so let me sweep the rest fast. Small piles of loose rocks on cave floors stopped bringing players to a dead halt. That same pile of gravel stands in roughly forty-seven caves, mines and towns, which means the Avatar, slayer of dragons, has been defeated by the same handful of pebbles in forty-seven locations. Piles scaled up to knee height still block, as they should. Mature crops on farms keep their proper models four times further out, which ends the ring of brighter and darker plants that used to follow you around a field, flipping to face north and south as it went. Mounted fish trophies now grow with the length of the fish, so a longer catch always hangs bigger, and the largest Sharptooth Catfish trophies stopped displaying a different species of catfish entirely. And the dragons raised by Dragon Totems in player dungeons come out the same size at every level, which they very much did not before. A level two dragon was about two meters tall. A level five was about eight. One of those is a dragon and the other is a confident lizard.

The rest is housekeeping with a few gems in it. Around twenty log warnings and errors that fired for perfectly ordinary content got quieted, which makes the real ones easier to see. Quick Deposit, Restock and the Undo now write down every item and amount that moved and the container it went into, which is how we answered a player who reported Buckets of Water vanishing out of the bank. Every bucket was accounted for. They had been topped up into a lot chest that already held water. Earth Elementals and Obsidian Golems now drop Earth Elemental Essence, which they somehow never did, reported by Rinaldi. Three bosses now wear the name their own achievements use, so the Aether Lich has stopped introducing itself as a Lich Mage. The Town Criers in Central Brittany will finally give you directions to the bank, the docks, the Oracle and the Colosseum and mark them on your map, where asking one where the bank was previously got you a crisp "Where would you like?" About two thousand more lines of text are translated into all nine languages, every one checked by two reviewers, four hundred and seventy-nine of them corrected. The Twitch Drops got their first exclusive rewards, a Spectator's Cloak, a Clockwork Cat, a purple lantern string and two Twitch purple dyes, none of which can be traded, salvaged or bought. And a polearm you had put away stopped leaving its swing streak hanging in the air behind you while you ran.

One more, because it deserves a moment. Iolo's Cat Gut Goulash has been advertising a five percent bonus to Rhythmic Readiness. Rhythmic Readiness was retired in the bard rework. So for some time now, Iolo's goulash has been promising you a faster version of a skill that no longer exists. The line is gone and the other six buffs are untouched, and I will say in Iolo's defense that the dish is called Cat Gut Goulash, so the label was never the main problem.

That is Wednesday. A website that opens onto your own desk, a dungeon crawl that did not exist at breakfast, a shorter road out of Soltown, and a spare set of keys to the front gate. What I am looking forward to is the first realm-wide run on Today's dungeon, and finding out which of you reaches the Heart of Sorrows first and what your gravestone has to say about it.

And a final word on our polar bear. For several weeks, beside that campfire, the poor fellow was not so much a polar bear as a solar bear. Goodnight, friends. Be kind to your mannequins.