The New Britannia Herald

In this episode

• Creatures stop breaking off a chase and going home
• A new line of gel cubes, oozes and acid
• Satyrs charge with their horns and stop fleeing
• Gamepad and Steam Deck support arrives
• A dungeon that had no sound at all gets some

Transcript

Good evening to thee, citizens of New Britannia. Lord British, come to tell thee what thy makers were about upon Sunday. The beasts of the wilds have stopped breaking off a chase halfway and trotting home for reasons known only to themselves. There is a new tribe of slimes growing in the back rooms, and they are hungry for thy sword. The satyrs have learned to put their horns down and charge. And the game can now be played from a couch with a gamepad in thy hands. We begin, though, with a kobold who was asked a simple question and could not cope with it.

Picture a kobold expedition warrior. Large fellow, armed, out in the world somewhere, and a player walks up and starts a conversation. It goes well enough until the player says the word human. At which point the kobold decides the appropriate response is to pick his nose. He reaches for the animation that does that, finds that there is nothing there at all, and locks solid with both arms straight out to either side. Standing in his own camp, pinned to the air by a rude gesture. He has been doing that for a while. Every creature who picks its nose in conversation now has its own clip for it. Kobolds, satyrs, fauns, zombies, the Oracle's bodies, and the humans too.

Now, the big one, and it is a story about a doorway. Players have been reporting something maddening for a few weeks. You pull a wolf in Twins Foothills, it comes for you, it takes four or five steps, and then it turns around and goes home. You pull it again. Same thing. Humanoids did it too, and there were reports out of Soltown and Blackblade Pass as well. Two separate tracker entries, both marked high, both describing a creature that would not commit.

Here is what was happening, and I love this one. Every zone exit has a flat marker lying on the ground that tells the game where the way out is. The game decides whether a creature is standing in the exit by taking the box around that marker. A flat pad, when you ask for the box around it, gives you something enormous. The marker had quietly become a strip running the full length of the map. So there was an invisible line out in the middle of the wilderness, nowhere near any door, and the moment a chasing wolf crossed it the game told that wolf it had reached the exit and should go home. The wolf obeyed. It had no reason not to. The exits are measured properly now, and a creature that walks into the actual exit still goes home, as it should.

That same mistake was behind something that looked completely unrelated. In Despair, the Black Dragon stands near a zone exit, close to its own spawn point. The game was therefore sending the dragon home, and stopping it, about once a second. Every time, the dragon dropped whatever it was fighting, and every pet and summoned elemental in the area looked at it, decided it was a creature walking home, and refused to attack it.

So you would bring your wyvern to the Black Dragon of Despair, and your wyvern would look at the most dangerous thing in the zone and conclude it was busy. The dragon stands and fights now.

While they were in there, the team went after the other half of the chase. When a creature gives up on you, it is supposed to walk back to where it spawned. Most of those walks were ending with the creature vanishing and reappearing at its post instead. In one evening on the test shard, out of three thousand seven hundred and forty-eight long walks home, three thousand five hundred and ninety-seven ended with a pop. Pets heading back to their owners were being snapped the same way. They all walk now, in every zone. And in the Ruins of Ravensmoor, the Forsaken Ghost will finally fight the player standing next to it, rather than stopping its casting and floating slowly across the room for half a minute looking for the range it prefers. A ranged creature too slow to back off in a few seconds now fights where it stands. The quick ones, the kobold archers in The Breach among them, still step away like professionals.

Right. The slimes. This was the largest single piece of work on the day and it is nowhere near done, so let me be straight about what is in your hands and what is still in the workshop. Slimes have been in these games since the beginning, and ours have been badly served. They did not tell you what size they were. They made a dog's bark and some borrowed monster growls. And when you cut one, it was supposed to spray acid back at you, which in the shipped game had never once landed on a living player.

Yesterday they became something to be careful of. There is a new Acid damage type, resisted only by acid resistance, and it is not a poison, so the undead and the elementals feel it along with everybody else. A melee hit on a slime now leaves you Corroded, four percent off your weapon damage per stack, up to five stacks, for a short while. Arrows and spells are untouched, and nothing happens to your durability. The great ones shed Ooze Droplets as they take damage, and a droplet left alive for twenty seconds flows back into its parent and heals it. They spatter a slick of ooze at your feet that slows you and does no damage at all, which is worse. The rare Gold Slime raises a shell that only a mace or a hammer will break, and if you have not cracked it in forty seconds, it burrows away and takes the reward with it. A slime you cut divides, which is as old as this hobby gets. Fire seals the split for a few seconds, and a slime that splits while sealed leaves scorched halves that take extra damage. The old tales got there first and they were right.

Then there are the cubes. Seven gel cubes went in, each with its own translucent gel, its own colour and its own acid. A cube lunges onto you and folds around you, holding you still and burning while it does. It lets go after eight seconds, or when your friends have taken enough off it, or when a big fire hit lands. The large ones can paralyze the person inside, and a paralyze is not a stun, so nothing you carry for stuns will shake it. And the near-clear cube has a skull, a set of ribs and a thigh bone floating inside it, and in a dark corridor those bones are the only part of it you can see. Which means the first thing you will spot is somebody else's leg, going past at walking pace.

Most of that is built switched off and not placed in any scene yet, because a hold that pins a player needs two people to test it properly before it goes anywhere near you. What did land is the housekeeping: slimes now announce their size, a Great Slime divides into Slimes and those into Slimelings, they have their own gurgles and squelches and bursts, the Death Metal Slime in Tartarus has a dark steel body of its own instead of borrowing the gold one, and a slime that is not fighting settles onto a fresh body and keeps it there for at least a minute, so your loot is still waiting when you have cleared the thing off.

The satyrs got the same treatment, and they needed it more. A satyr used to be a bag of melee swings that ran away when it was losing. Its mages could take a healthy player down in one volley, with a burn that ran for half a minute and stacked four times over. Its low-level members were walking around wearing the archers' bodies. Their attacks were called Melee attack, faithfully translated into every language we support. And the strongest satyrs in Tartarus were still holding the best weapons that existed on the day they shipped, which stopped a long way below their own level, so a Royal Guard swung like something half its size.

Eleven new fighter abilities went in. The one you will meet first is the charge. From a short run away, a satyr plants itself for about a second, then puts its horns down and runs at the spot where you were standing. Stay there and you go down. Step aside and it misses, and its horns bury themselves in the ground for a moment while it works out what happened. The higher ones are sure-footed, so a hard slow or a root slides off them and they cannot be slowed again for a few seconds, though stuns and knockdowns still hold them fine. From level seventy-eight up they stop running away. Once a fight, under a fifth of their health, they go into a frenzy instead and come at you faster and harder for thirty seconds. The strongest ones crouch and leap the length of a field at whoever in your party is most hurt, and land on them. One of them rears up and stomps everyone crowding it, which a well-timed jump clears, and it has the manners never to use it on a lone player.

The archers now draw their heavy shot with a cast bar you can see, and a hit during the draw spoils it. Higher up they loose a volley. The assassins of Tartarus mark one of you as their quarry, which means more damage taken and every other satyr archer nearby turning to look at you. Close on one and it hops six metres straight backwards and keeps shooting, unless you have rooted it. The casters were pulled back hard: the burn now lasts about eight seconds and stacks twice, and the ground fire from the fireball dies down in about eight seconds too. The hits themselves are unchanged, so they are still dangerous. They just no longer delete you while you read the tooltip. And the Tartarus satyrs are carrying weapons of their own level at last.

Now, something for your sofa. Shroud of the Avatar can be played with a gamepad. I want to be honest about why that was hard. This is a game with a crafting window, a character sheet, a bank, a deck editor and a combat bar of ten slots, each of which has a self-cast version. That is twenty combat actions, and a gamepad has two thumbs. The answer was chords. Hold the left trigger or the right trigger and the face buttons, the D-pad and the bumpers cover all ten slots and both versions of each. The left stick moves you in any direction and walks you when it is only tilted. The right stick is your camera. Open a window and a cursor appears, driven by that same right stick, with one button to click, one for the right-click menu and one to close. Your combat bar shows the pad buttons on the slots while you are playing on a pad, and the combat chords keep working with a window open without also clicking around inside it.

There is a new Gamepad section in the controls, with its own rebinding list and its own reset that leaves your keyboard bindings alone. On a Steam Deck, Steam's own keyboard now comes up by itself when you land on a text box, the button names use the Deck's own labels for its built-in controls, and the interface draws very slightly larger on that small screen while still leaving room for a full party list. Later the same evening the PlayStation pads went in. Cross, Circle, Square and Triangle sit where the Xbox buttons sat, so every default binding lands in the same physical place, and the prompts, the bindings list and the combat bar captions all use the PlayStation names. It works with Steam Input on or off, and there is a setting to tell the game which button names to use for a pad it cannot identify. Before any of it was written, somebody sat down and read Valve's input rules and looked at how other online games handle this. That is why it works.

Yesterday was also a day for your ears, and it started somewhere embarrassing. K'rul had no ambient sound. None. Not in the halls, not down the chasm, not beside the lava. A player went to the trouble of filing that, which I appreciate and would rather we had not needed. It now has a low cave ambience through it and a lava rumble at every pool. The reason it was worse than silence is lovely: there are about fifty humming machines in that dungeon, and a looping sound you were fifty metres away from and could not actually hear was still holding its place in the mix. So the machines you could not hear were pushing out the skill sounds and creature sounds you needed. A sound nobody can hear now yields to one somebody can.

The Earth Elementals were a different sort of problem. The grunt they make when they swing was recorded far too loud, loud enough to clip, so a fighting elemental crackled like static. Several of their hurt, death and spawn sounds were clipping too. Eight clips were repaired and set at the level of the rest of the creature, and because the ice and sand elementals and the copper, ice, lava and obsidian golems all share those sounds, they are all fixed as well. In player-owned towns, the docks, the stone paving, the sea-wall tops and the bridge decks had been playing dirt footsteps, across all nineteen town maps that have them. Rowing boats as well, ferries included, and the wooden piers around the world. They sound like wood and stone now. Fishing got the bite tick turned up, the splash turned down so it stops covering the tick, and a Fishing Sounds slider of its own, because players told us they could not hear a bite over the water.

And then there is Boletusporis Regem, the mushroom boss in the Psilocybin Lair. He has been speaking in a warm human woman's voice, which for a very large fungus is a choice. He now has a deep, wet creature voice made for him. But the better half is his dying cry. Somebody wrote it in the script as the letters A, H, G, and the voice reading it did exactly what you would do. He has been dying by spelling it out. Aitch. Gee. That is gone, and he is already live without a client update.

A few smaller things that will improve somebody's evening. Bodies in the world that carry a quest item now hand every player in the instance their own copy. Town Crier letters and packages on the roads, the Spindelskog runestones, the Vikland crystal spheres, the Oracle's shards and her lens, and, I am sorry to report, the vault keys in my own castle. Whoever opened the body first took the item from everybody else standing there. And a body or a chest somebody else has already opened stays lootable for the rest of you now, instead of losing its name under your cursor and refusing to open with things still inside it.

Over in the combat decks, the big green button marked Equipped took your deck off. One stray click, or a double click on Equip, and you had no deck and no combat hotbar, and a relog would not bring it back. That arrived in the tracker as a missing combat hotbar after drawing a weapon, which is a long way from the real cause. The button does nothing now, and taking a deck off on purpose lives in that deck's options menu.

Being in a party got easier in four ways. Changing your Matchmaking Preference no longer counts down and hauls you out of wherever you are standing. It waits until the next area you enter, and the options tab tells you so. Joining a party while you are in a different copy of the same area now asks you, with a Join button and a Stay Here button, and it waits until you are out of combat to ask. Following your leader when they travel to a lot in a player-owned town puts you at the front of that lot beside them, rather than at the edge of the town. And the party list has stopped shuffling its rows up and down every time somebody's pet appears.

Some characters got stronger. Raising Summon Skeleton or Summon Lich now raises what the summon hits for. Before yesterday those skills only raised the summon's health, so you could train the skill to a hundred and own a very tough lich that hit exactly as softly as it did on day one. At skill one hundred an unspecialized lich went from about twenty-five damage a second to thirty-three. The whole Shield tree now leans on Shield Specialization, with Testudo, Dig In and Shield Smash all gaining something for it. And the Elite Ancient Undead in Despair now pay about five times the experience they used to, with gold on the corpse and a chance at potions, because what they were paying bore no relation to how hard they hit.

Two for the eyes. Gulls now gather where the fish are feeding, so watch the water in coastal towns for a low, noisy flock diving at it, and watch the skies over those towns from the overworld. Find the birds, fish under the birds. And on Windows, the painted backdrop behind the rows of trees at a forest edge could draw as a flat black wall with hard straight edges, which was most striking from high ground in Savrenoc Timberland. Those models were missing their surface direction data on most of their corners, the shaders turned that into a value that is not a number at all, and an NVIDIA card draws that as black. The shaders now fall back to plain lighting on anything missing that data, which covers the same tree rows in about sixty forest zones.

A hundred and fifty-eight tracker issues went down yesterday, a hundred and twenty of them bugs. A great many were houses and the things in them. Letters placed as decorations had been sinking into tables until only their corners showed. Ground-floor decorations were floating a couple of centimetres above the boards in twenty-two more house types, and there is now a test that walks every house type so a new one cannot ship with the same gap. A witch's skull refused every spot on a particular buffet because its collision was tilted along with the model. And the lamps in a decorated Viking Great Hall were going dark at one end, because the town's light budget had handed their slots to the street lamps outside.

The random dungeon generator had been installing about half its secret doors backwards, with the hidden brick facing away from you and the lever sitting out in the open where you walk in. A secret door with the switch on the visitor's side is a door. That is fixed, and while they were in there they walked every stairway against every doorway in the kit, one thousand two hundred and seventy-six pairings, hunting the ones where a low frame stood over the last step and stopped a character dead.

Elsewhere, briefly. A shader warmup that could freeze the game for minutes after a graphics driver update now does a few at a time and explains itself. Antialiasing stops switching itself off on slower chips, steps down to Fast instead, and says in the options that it did. The over-the-shoulder camera has stopped headbutting door frames. The chat arrows reach back through every past session again. The Oracle learned around seventy new answers and stopped telling people Black Dragons are weak to a school no player spell can deliver, which is advice you cannot act on. A long list of switches that had only ever run one way was retired, which got the bundle of settings the server hands you on entering a zone back under its size limit. And a game master who possesses a troll no longer drives it backwards at a full run, or rides along on its head like a fairground attraction, because the camera now sits on its body where it belongs.

That was Sunday. Two new tribes of monsters begun, a game taught to be played from a sofa, a dungeon given a voice, and the creatures of the wild finally asked to finish what they start. I am looking forward to the first report from somebody in a dark corridor who sees a thigh bone drift past at head height and has to decide, quickly, what to do about it.

And I will leave you with this. A satyr puts its horns down, charges you at full tilt, you step neatly aside, and it drives both horns into the dirt and stands there stuck. Proud creature. Terribly stuck up. Good night to thee, and I will see thee in New Britannia.