The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Castle Atos finds its names at last
• Crusader homes grow to half again their size
• Six cards of the Focus tree in one day
• Diving, rowboat seats and galleon gun ports
• The build that an apostrophe killed

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British before thee, with word of what thy makers were about on Thursday. Castle Atos has found its people at last, a gate guard, a porter's daughter, two beggars and a guard with a very sad story about his knee. The Crusader homes are on sale, and their owners may now grow them by half again. There is water deep enough to drown in, should thou wish it. And one stray apostrophe laid an entire build in its grave. We begin with a man hanging in the air beside a flower box.

Here is how it looked. You walk along the edge of a planter box, the kind of thing you never even look at, and your character slides half a step too far and stops. Hanging. Just off the ground, legs tucked up into the falling pose, going absolutely nowhere. Falling in place, beside a flower bed, with great commitment and no motion whatsoever. And you could not shake it off. You had to back away from the box and leave it alone.

That has been happening for about a week, and it was our doing, in a very particular way. The build before last narrowed the check the game runs under your feet to decide whether there is still ground there. We did that so stepping off the end of a dock actually drops you in the water, the way it should. The narrower check then stopped noticing knee-high edges while your character was still resting on one. So the game decided you were standing over nothing and started a fall, and the ledge under your boots quietly refused to let that fall happen. Now a character caught partly over an edge slips off onto the ground beside it, and walking straight at a knee-high ledge still steps up onto it. Same check, both answers, and your Avatar no longer levitates next to the shrubbery.

Now, Castle Atos. That castle is mine. I have walked it a great many times. And somewhere between the thousandth visit and yesterday I stopped noticing that half the people in it did not have names.

Start at the front gate. The guard there is Baozhai, and Baozhai has a problem, which is that her voice is very quiet. She shouts "Halt" at everyone who comes through, and nobody halts. Nobody even slows down. She will tell you about her training in Ardoris under Captain Cugel, about the bandits who surrendered to her, and about the lessons she has been taking from the Town Crier, which have not helped. Ask her about halt and she will give you a demonstration. Carry Captain Stanley's greeting to her from Soltown and she asks you a favour. She has written Stanley a sealed letter, and she has written the whole thing in capital letters, so that this once he would finally hear her. Take it to Soltown. He reads it, he sends an answer back, and she pays you for the round trip. That is the finest thing anyone built yesterday and it is a letter.

Then there is Corwin, the guard on the stone walk beside the brazier. Corwin was going to be a dancer. Billed as Corwin Lightfoot, no less, with an audition in Ardoris and everything arranged. And the night before that audition he took an arrow to the knee.

I know. I know. We did that on purpose and I regret nothing. Ask him to show you a spin and he will do you a spin, which is both lovely and a little sad, and that is precisely the register we were after.

Down on the lower cargo walkway, the girl counting sacks is Mirka. She is the porter's daughter, she counts what comes off the hooks for her papa Bohdan, and she will talk to you about her mama, who is at sea, and about a crate that squeaked. And the two beggars have names now too. Tomek swept the castle's streets for twenty-two years, until the cleanliness elementals took over the sweeping and left him with nothing to do. He would like work at the stables and he cannot bring himself to ask Wendelin for it. Offer him help and he sends you to her, and she has an answer about him now, and he pays you out of his own pocket once she says yes. Vesna sold fish in the market until a fever took the strength out of her arms, and she sold her stall to pay the healer. Bring her one salmon and she buys it from you.

Both beggars still ask you for coins, and each of them tells you their name once you give one, or once you take their errand. Every line any of these five speak is recorded, and translated into nine languages. You can hear Baozhai failing to be heard in whichever tongue you play in.

Right. Houses. The twelve Crusader Village homes went into the Crown Store at a thousand crowns each, under Homes, Village. Six designs, each in a desert look and a stone look: the plain House, the Courtyard House, the Terrace House, the Cottage, the Veranda House and the Large House. Every listing has a front view, a back view and a short description, because nobody should spend a thousand crowns on a building they have only seen from one side.

And then the interesting part. Their owners can make them bigger. Up to half again their size, in steps of a tenth, from the lot sign's Move House mode using the same scale keys you already use on decorations. It costs nothing, the owner does it themselves, and the house has to be clear of placed items while you work. A resized house only grows as far as its lot will hold it, and every one of the Crusader homes reaches full size on a town lot. Reset Position puts it back the way it came.

Here is why that is harder than it sounds. A house in this game is not an object you can simply stretch. It is a pose. Until yesterday that pose meant a position and a rotation, and now it means a size as well, which the server keeps and hands to every client who walks in, so your enormous cottage is enormous for your guests too. But everything attached to a house has an opinion about where things are. Where the stairs land. How wide the doorway is. How high the lamp hangs. Which flat surfaces you are allowed to set a mug down on. Where the dog walks when it follows you upstairs. Scale the building and every one of those answers goes stale at once. So all of it grows together now. Stairs, doors, lamps, decoration surfaces, and the paths your pets use, which I am told was the fiddly one.

The Focus tree had a very long day too, and six separate pieces of it landed. The one I enjoyed most is a confession. There is a Focus skill called Quick Swapping, and Quick Swapping has never once made anything quicker. What it actually does, and always did, is lower the focus cost of swapping decks in the middle of a fight. It has stood there for years with a name that promises speed and delivers thrift. It is called Efficient Swapping now, in every language, and its tooltip says both things, plus the old name for one release so nobody panics. While we were in there, the Oracle learned to explain that Tranquility and the Taming skill Concentration are two different skills, which players have been reasonably confused about for a long while.

The Focus tooltips also started quoting their prices, which is the sort of thing that should never have needed asking for. Spellbinder Stance now names the twenty points of damage avoidance and twenty points of damage resistance it takes off you, says the penalty and the critical bonus both run for the first half of the stance, and admits that a single step ends the whole thing. Aetheric Feedback says out loud that its bonus wants a spell critical hit inside the last four seconds, and that the window stretches by about two seconds for every hundred levels of Focus Specialization. Mind Wipe says that wiped runes and combos come back with no cooldown and that a locked slot keeps its rune. Focus Specialization lists which four runes it improves. None of that is new behaviour. All of it is newly honest.

There is a new option under Interface, Hotbar, called Show Rune Timers on Combat Hotbar, off by default, which puts the seconds remaining on every rune in your combat hand and turns the number amber as the rune begins to slide away. Mind Lock will now show you how much time it actually bought, counted across each rune it reached, and that part shows up whether you switch the timers on or not. The three summon training skills stopped wearing the specialization's eye and got icons of their own, a heart, a shield and three claw marks, in both the Classic and the Modern sets. The elixir pair now admits that only one of the two can train at a time, and that putting one on Training puts the other on Unlearning, which the old note asked you to do by hand, and which the game had been doing for you all along. Reported by Barugon, from a very old entry on the list.

And the ghosts got filed. Six Focus skills were designed long ago and never built: Higher Consciousness, Consumption, Eidetic Memory, Mental Reflex, Mindfulness and Summoned Pet Taunt. They are now written into the game as skills that were planned and never made, with their places and five of their icons held in reserve for whoever revives them, and a test that stops anyone from quietly cannibalising the pieces. One icon in that pile was down as an orphan nobody used. It has been in use the whole time by Swap Deck. We also retired the Maintaining training mode, which has done precisely the same thing as Not Training since the day skill decay went away, so anything set to Maintaining now reads Not Training with all of its experience intact.

Now, the water, and there is a great deal of it. Diving went in for testing on the QA server. In the Volcano Archipelago you can press Q while you are swimming and go under. Space takes you up, Q takes you down, and swimming forward follows wherever the camera is pointed, so you can nose over and go into the dark. There is a breath bar above your hotbar holding about a minute of air, which refills in five seconds once your head is up. And if you run out of air you start to drown, losing a tenth of your health every two seconds until you reach the surface. Under the water the view closes right in to a blue-green fog with motes drifting through it and no sky at all. Both keys can be rebound. It is on the QA server only and switched off everywhere else, which is correct, because the first thing a new drowning system does is drown somebody important.

Rowboats learned to be rowed from the middle seat, which they were always meant to do. The reason they would not is almost too silly to say out loud. The clickable spots on every boat seat and on the oars themselves sat exactly flush with the plank underneath them, so the cursor kept finding the hull instead, and nothing ever lit up. They sit a little above the seat now, and the boat highlights when you hover it. If you plant yourself in a passenger seat with an oar in each hand and try to pull, the boat will tell you to move to the middle. The rowboat has also lost its rope ladders, and the three decorative rowboats on the Volcano Archipelago quay and jetty are real boats you can get into. Reported by Knightrider, who also reported the next one.

The galleons' cannons were standing in the wrong place entirely. They sat in a tidy row along the main deck behind the rail, while the square gun ports they were meant to be firing out of were a whole deck below them. Every ship has now been measured individually, and each gun stands on the proper deck behind its own port with its muzzle in the opening, reached by that deck's own ladder. The pirate, haunted and shogun galleons carry six of them. The smaller galleon carries four. The two baron ships have no gun ports in their art at all, so they carry nothing until somebody cuts them some.

And out on the Great Sea, ships leaving Central Brittany's harbour to the north used to simply stop, on water that looked completely open. We keep a safety margin off every shoreline so vessels do not grind along the rocks. In a strait a hundred and fifty meters across, the margin from each side ate nearly the whole passage, and the sailable channel left in the middle came to roughly nothing. That margin now shrinks with the width of the water, and a lone sea rock keeps a smaller one. Sailing is still switched off everywhere, so nobody noticed but us.

The build itself went out yesterday to the test shard and to Steam, the first update there in a week, and the restart did two large pieces of housekeeping. Mail the game sends you can now be set down as decoration: tax credit slips, vendor sale and order notices, lot and house sale notices, refunds, tip jar letters and prize letters. They arrive as a receipt that lies on a table like a sheet of paper and opens its text when you click it. Letters written by players still cannot be placed, and that is deliberate. So during the restart we converted the ones already sitting in mailboxes, all five hundred and fifty-five thousand, three hundred and eighty-nine of them. Our players have been hoarding tax paperwork. I find this both baffling and completely in character.

The other thing about that build is that it is not the build we meant to ship. The one before it never shipped at all, and the cause was a single apostrophe. One line of item data had a stray quote mark sitting in it, the catalog that lists every item in the game refused to assemble, and the whole update stopped dead right there. The catalog check now catches that before anything is built, which means the next one fails in front of a developer rather than in front of a release. An apostrophe. Thirty years in this business and the punctuation is still winning the odd round.

One more from the build, and this one is properly interesting. Wandering creatures on the Novia overworld could stand perfectly still, for everybody in the zone at once, for close to ten minutes. The reason is in how zones work. One player's game runs the creatures on behalf of everyone else in that zone. It is cheap, it is clever, and it works beautifully right up to the second that one player's game stops answering. Then every creature in the zone freezes solid for all of you, nobody can start an encounter, and the overworld turns into a diorama. A stalled room now notices and hands its creatures over to a player who is answering, and things are moving again within about forty-five seconds.

Three things about the icons that shout at you from the top corner. The damaged and broken gear warnings actually lead somewhere now. A left click opens your character sheet, or the pet sheet if it is your pet's gear, and a right click opens a repair menu that will mend each listed item using a matching kit out of your bag. Clicking them used to open the Hints window, with Show Hints firmly switched off, which is a bold interpretation of an option. The encumbrance icon respects that setting now too.

Several numbers stopped fibbing. Effects that change your move speed now read as a percentage of your on-foot run, the way move rate effects already did, so a wolf tendon slow reads one point eight percent instead of minus nought point one of some unit nobody could name, and Sprint reads plus thirty-five and a half percent. A one-shot damage debuff sitting on your buff bar, like a lich's Burning, reads red when you hover it, instead of borrowing the cheerful colour a skill tooltip uses for damage, on the sensible grounds that on a skill you are the one dealing it. And the Meticulous Collection count on the harvest bar counts a bonus swing when it lands rather than when it begins, so it no longer shows you the full total with a swing still to go. A harvest with no bonus pull at all now tells you in chat what you got and what producer experience it paid, which it was always paying, invisibly, to a great many people who assumed it was broken.

Your belongings got easier to find. A backpack set down on a lot shows how full it is when you hover it, the same line placed chests have had for ages. Search All My Stuff now names the lot, its size and which floor a thing is on, gives you coordinates, and points the compass at the actual container rather than the building. And the recipe achievements finally count recipes you learned before the achievements existed. One character with twelve hundred and seventy-six recipes in their book had been credited with fifty. Fifty. The count catches up shortly after you log in, so some of you are about to get a pleasant little shower of titles you earned years ago.

A handful of quests came unstuck. The Enter K'rul side of the gate by the Blood Bay exit, which did nothing whatsoever when clicked, now puts you inside where Blood Bay arrivals land. Hiring a Necropolis guide no longer offers you the word "fired" as the very next topic to click, which meant that reading politely through everything he had to say dismissed the man, while your journal cheerfully promised he would be waiting for you. And Captain Bearfield in Blood River Outskirts will take the Cleansing Manifesto again from veterans still carrying a warrant copy from an older run of that quest, where she had been standing there giving no answer at all.

Twitch had a day as well. Earned drops that showed Connect where they should have shown Claim now show Claim, and if you linked your account before this you will need to click Connect once more and approve with the same Twitch account, with your watch progress kept. And we built Watch Rewards, which is switched off for the moment. Once it is on, linked viewers earn watch minutes by simply being in the chat of a participating stream, and each reward they reach goes straight to the in-game Rewards window with nothing to click at all. Streamers opt in by making the rewards bot a moderator in their chat, and they earn their own rewards while linked viewers watch them. Requested by necronut.

And the Desk's radio window is open to everyone now. The Royal Jukebox and New Britannia Herald Radio both play in your browser, with what is on the air, what is coming next, and song requests you pay for in gold. Which means this show has a radio station. I have not decided how to feel about that yet.

The sweepings. Thirty-one tracker issues closed yesterday, and a good two thirds of them were tooltips, labels and icons behaving in ways I would rather not describe in detail on a family podcast. Five hundred and seventy-six English lines that had been sitting with no translation at all now have one in nine languages, covering loading tips, the boat and grappling hook controls, the compass marker menu, item and character names, journal entries and three ferry captains. The Oracle learned twenty-one more answers to questions players actually asked her this week, from where to hunt skeletons at every level to whether sheet music plays more than one voice at a time.

Elsewhere: ninety player towns on Mistrendur now sit where their towns actually are on the world map, instead of all perching on the centre of the hex you enter them from. The compass obeys Lock HUD Positions like everything else on your screen, and the line under the zone name tells the truth about whether you are in a party, private or open. Talk Like a Pirate stopped pirate-speaking the names inside linked items, so your trade links are legible again, and Pirate's Grog finally plays the same drinking animation as Cat's Grace. A door in the Grand Gothic Manor that no human being could fit through is now a door. And the character sheet portrait spent a few hours drawing every Avatar in the game at roughly half height after a framing change the day before, then was back to full size by mid-morning, which may be the fastest we have ever insulted everybody and apologised for it.

A few more that only the team will feel. The Editor stopped drawing the island prototypes twice over, which had been costing about two thousand two hundred wasted draw calls every frame. Our granting tools can mark a gift as no trade before it ever leaves. The add-on scripting interface grew the pieces deck exporters have been asking for. And we drew up a plan for fish tanks, which involves fish that swim about on their own, each species in its own manner, resting at night and coming to the glass to look at you. Also a lava tank, because of course there is a lava tank.

What I am looking forward to is the first Avatar who takes a deep breath in the Volcano Archipelago, swims down into that blue-green dark, and comes back up with something none of us put there. That, and the first thousand-crown cottage grown to its full size with one tiny chair standing in the middle of it.

One last thing before I go. Our galleons' guns are finally standing in their own gun ports. For years they just milled about on the open deck behind the rail, with no port, no purpose and no supervision. Loose cannons, the lot of them. Good night, friends. I will be here tomorrow.