The Dragon's Neck Dev Update
Shout-out to Khaine for drafting the vast majority of this update!
Although the start to the year was a little slow, from the middle onwards we've rapidly been picking up speed as we approach the final hurdles towards launch. We're very excited to say that we're now extremely close to launch and believe that we might be able to share an exact launch date with you by the end of next month. On top of that, we will be looking to share what our priorities are over the first 3 months of post-launch plans will be. That said, we have a few things to run through for this month regarding how things are going and where we are exactly.
3D Assets
Happily, Ruladre got her hardware issues resolved and dived back into working on the remaining assets needed for launch. As of the time of writing this, there are only a handful of pieces left for male dwarves, leaving only elves and heads to complete. A lot of extremely hard work goes into the assets being made and the work is very tedious, which is part of why we're a little reluctant to give a launch date just yet.
After all of this time, we don't want to put any unnecessary stress on any of the team. If you want to support Ruladre's endeavours to make TDN really shine with completely new models at a quality and consistency never seen before in Neverwinter Nights, we'll post another link to her Patreon. Donations are purely to show support for all of her hard work, they provide no additional benefits and aren't meant to be in any way obligatory!
https://www.patreon.com/goldbaerry
TDN 11
And more good news! The overhauls to classes that were required due to TDN 11 are almost fully complete. The base classes have all effectively been overhauled, though we still need to go through some of them with testing to squash any major bugs, and then only the prestige classes are left. After that, we will be reviewing the spells and spell lists* to ensure that nothing is going to be overly powerful in the hands of players, and also we want to try and make sure all of the additional caster classes that were added to TDN (Favoured Soul, Shaman, Dread Necromancer, Blighter) have their own unique identity.
We're also looking at the way that animal companions will work in an attempt to create less 'meta' and approach companions as if they have roles or classes as opposed to offering very specific animals, most of which do not see any use or make people feel like they're taking a large mechanical hit for what they want to have in roleplay. Essentially, we intend to have only three types of companion classes, however each class will have a set of appearances that can be chosen within that role, with all offering something unique in terms of viability. More on that hopefully next month!
Footnote: We would like to stress that some spells may be removed from TDN entirely, while others may see something of a downgrade. However we can't offer any details on this specifically until we start to work on it. More than likely we'll provide more comprehensive details in the next dev update.
Dungeons, XP and Loot
With the extra time that's been afforded by the delays, we've been looking into ways to streamline many of the systems we have so that they can easily be tweaked post-launch, but also something that can be more engaging and convenient for players. As a result, we identified a few key things we'd like to change to make dungeons more immersive, satisfying and ultimately friendly to player time. The changes are as follows:
Groups & Difficulty
The way this was previously handled is that groups of 4 was the acceptable maximum without penalty, while groups of 5 would receive significantly reduced experience and groups of 6 would receive minimal or no experience at all.
Now, players will be able to have up to 6 people in their group, which includes summoned creatures but not animal companions or familiars. If the group is larger than this, people will stop receiving experience entirely. The reason summoned creatures are included in this cap is due to how strong summons are. They will not be strong enough to substitute a real player, but they will be potent enough - especially buffed - to be sufficiently capable of avoiding, receiving and dealing damage to warrant a player slot. Conversely, animal companions will be a boon, but not to the same extent.
The difficulty of each dungeon will also be separated into three tiers, alongside the intended level of the dungeon. The tiers are: Solo, Group and Group (Hard).
Solo dungeons should hopefully not provide a great deal of challenge to even the weakest of solo classes. In addition to the way experience will be handled - detailed below - we expect this will provide something to do for players who really aren't able to find a group and want to kill some time productively. It won't, however, offer much at all in terms of financial benefit.
Group dungeons should be quite manageable for groups of 3 or 4 players, though there will be an element of risk even to these. Expect that you will get hurt. However as long as you're careful enough you should be able to get through these dungeons with few issues. Group dungeons will have an adequate amount of loot.
Hard dungeons are recommended for groups of at least 4 players, and should be very punishing, however they should also provide the best rewards. There should be a lot of damage being dished out, and you may need to leave and rest or at least take the dungeon slower than you normally would in order to get through it all.
Experience
Experience was doled out per enemy kill and modified by player level. If players were four levels higher or lower than the intended level of the dungeon, players would no longer receive experience.
Now, experience will no longer be earned by individual creatures but by clearing 30% of the total enemies in a dungeon, up to a maximum of 90%. You may leave 10% of the dungeon untouched, which is the allowance we have made for any kind of usual bugs associated with NWN such as enemies getting stuck in walls, behind placeables, etc.
Furthermore, you can earn experience regardless of the intended level of a dungeon. However, an incremental 10% modifier will be placed on the experience awarded based on the highest level member of the group vs the intended level of a dungeon.
To explain this as simplistically as possible, let's say that the intended level of a dungeon is 6 and for every 30% of the dungeon you earn 1000 experience. However, your highest level party member is 7, so you take -10%, meaning everyone in the group will only earn 900 experience. However, if the highest level in the group is 4, your party would gain +20%, and thus earn 1200 experience. Intended dungeon levels will be level 3, level 6, level 9 and level 11. This means that in most cases you will probably be earning over or under the 'target' experience.
But wait, there's more!
We have designed it so that 30% of a dungeon will be a very substantial contribution towards your daily Combat XP cap. This means that you may reach your cap within a dungeon or two, at most. We are intentionally doing this with the view that there are people who prefer to spend their limited time roleplaying as opposed to feeling pressured into finding and dungeon group and then doing dungeons until they have to log off. Due to our catch-up mechanic for Combat XP, even if people miss a day or two of dungeons this will make it very easy for them to keep pace with friends.
However, due to concern that this will make gaining levels much too fast in combination with the benefits of gaining money from dungeons, we have decided to reduce the amount of RP XP ticks while in dungeons. We would like to stress this is only inside the areas that are considered dungeons themselves, not anywhere outside.
While we have heard player concerns that this may reduce in less RP overall while in dungeons, we would like to remind people that roleplay is the focus of the server and should remain the primary objective even if you aren't being mechanically rewarded for it at every moment.
This decision was made so that there was at least some compensation for those who don't wish to spend all of their time RPing in dungeons, as if we didn't reduce RP XP ticks in dungeons we believe people would feel far too pressured to be doing them still or otherwise lose out on something (in this case, money).
Loot & Money
Previously, all money acquisition in dungeons came solely from several loot containers placed in every dungeon. This came with common complaints that it wasn't satisfying to loot chests and receive 'miscellaneous' items that sold for very little.
In an effort to fix this issue and a few others, we have changed the way loot containers work and how money can be acquired from dungeons. Money will primarily be earned through creature kills. Each creature kill will be worth a certain amount of money, however we won't delve too deeply into that for now, as the reason will be baked into the IC events that are introduced when we launch. Suffice to say this will be the primary means of earning currency from dungeons. Loot containers will be much reduced in number, however loot containers are being amended so that they make perfect, immersive sense in the context of the dungeon. Furthermore, the contents of these containers will be what you would logically expect:
- Armour Rack - Armour
- Weapon Rack - Weapons
- Shield Rack - Shields
- Book Shelves/Piles - Scrolls
- Barrels/Crates/Etc - Money, misc items (which sell for decent money), potions, healing kits
Concessions (Faction Contracts) & Launch
As evidenced in this month's update and the last, we're painfully aware that development has taken longer than we hoped. We're doing our very best to get the server launched, as we all desperately want to see it released as much as you. But we want things to be in a good place. Not just because we want to showcase something we're really proud of and have people enjoy it, but because the smoother the launch is, the easier it will be for us to fix any outlying problems and then focus on telling great stories with you all, while simultaneously adding more features to the server over time, building on a good foundation.
Because of that, we will not be launching with Faction Contracts in place. (For those unfamiliar, these are the built-in systems that are intended to provide mechanical gameplay engagement & conflict for each individual faction. Faction ACCESS is still in-game.) We're holding this back for a short while because we don't anticipate that too early in launch that people will be deep enough into a faction to really make the most of this anyway. But we want to stress, it's not a feature we intend to cut out, it just won't be available at launch.
Similarly, we want to remind everyone that when we launch there are many, many things that are potentially going to need tweaking. Even though we're doing our best to test systems, dungeons and classes, there's nothing that can really prepare for several dozen people all doing various things at once, interacting with things in ways we may not have anticipated. There is also just the potential for human error, where we may have missed little things, or gotten numbers wrong. We would just ask you guys to be patient, bear with us, and try to help us wrestle this huge beast of a project into a good place which we can all enjoy.
Kudos!
Last but not least, we just want to offer a gigantic Thank You to all of the people in the community. For all of the good feedback, the help, the discussions, the critique and the praise. It's been a very long journey towards the launch of this server, but we're so happy with what we've made and we definitely have found great value from all the discourse you guys have provided; there is a lot of help you have offered to us, whether knowingly or not, and we just felt compelled to offer a few words towards it in acknowledging that. We're very proud of the community we've fostered, so again, thank you.
Moar Teaser Images
Dwarven Armors!
Scenery!
