Eternia: Battlegrounds

It's been about five days now since we first went live into open testing and a lot of work has been done in those five days, most of it being bug fixes and tweaking numbers. A lot of the bugs were stuff from old code that shone through in new and exciting ways but I've not only managed to squash the majority of the runtime errors popping up, I've dropped the memory usage of the game a dramatic 80% which should result in a major increase in stability. There's far too many fixes and changes to list specific ones but lets just say I worked myself exhausted and both days I meant to not touch the code ended up seeing updates anyways.

A lot of the players who have been playing over the last fives days probably noticed that monster reward levels and item stats are being altered almost daily, this generally happens as we see points in progression where things become too fast or too slow. Keeping in mind that monster grinding isn't meant to be the end-all for gaining levels and experience points, and on that note...

The next content update to the game, I'm personally dubbing The Rebirth of Quests will take a bit of the bite out of the grind until the next major content update rolls out. While the majority of the early quests will involve basic things like finding certain items, or killing a certain amount of monsters, the rewards will supplement the rewards from actually obtaining those things in meaningful ways. As other types of content become available to the players even more types of quests will become common. The ultimate goal being to have a system that allows even non-programmers to build quest-lines to submit to the game.

Players probably noticed that there are indeed quests in the game already, but these are just left-overs from legacy systems in the RP version of the game and they're not easy to expand on or create more of without a lot of convoluted programming and it's simply not ideal for me to sink that amount of work into a few basic early game quests.

The intention for this update is to level the existing quest system to the ground and build it back up in a much more expansive way, this will allow Writing a New One (and eventually others) to add quest content while I focus on more technical programming.

I expect this update to take a week or so, barring any significant timesinks that come from bugs and TLC for the running version. There will be of course, fixes throughout the week as things get uncovered and resolved.

I imagine the first releases with the new quest update won't have a ton of quests to do, but there will definitely be more than there are now, and they will be designed with the PVP version in mind from the get-go.

Beyond the quest rework, I'll be moving onto dungeon content, the first dungeons won't be instanced or do anything fancy. I have a much bigger, expansive idea for the full realization of the dungeon system that I simply can't justify the development time for until there's more to do in the existing content, including some kind of dungeons, even if they're dramatically simplified compared to what my real plans are.

I'm not doing to go into detailed specifics on those plans, and they will require quite a lot of logistical planning before even beginning, but if they come out even half as cool as I'm hoping we'll be looking at some grand content. Things on the line of dungeons of such scale that they rival pieces of the world map in size that only you or your group will be playing in with no other players to interfere. PVP dungeons where anyone can come and go as they please where PVP mode is enforced at all times. There's a lot of potential in the design I'm aiming for but it will take quite a lot of time -- which is why it's being held back until I can really focus that time on it and do it properly.

In the meantime there are other smaller undertakings planned as well, such as the bank and player marketplace, PVP events such as bounties, and a PVP arena for the gamblers in us.

We've kept fairly quiet about the release of the game because we're looking at something like the first 1% of the planned game in its current state but live testing is a much more ideal environment to start making sure everything's working out with all the big changes that have been made. Once a fair deal of content is ready we're going to start telling the world, so expect those player counts to keep rising!

I'd like to express a special thanks to all of the people who have played and enjoyed the game over the last five days, we've gained quite a few regulars and over 100 fans without having to talk too much about it.

And an extra special thanks to everyone who has subscribed and purchased credits, knowing that early game purchases are more for supporting the development of the game and less about the benefits (but those benefits will continue to grow alongside the game's general content!). Thanks to you lot I won't be getting disconnected by my ISP in a few days and I might not be eating potatoes for too much longer!

Plus a shout-out to Dimmie for her continued support and generosity towards the development of Eternia: Battlegrounds (and the RP version too). Without her both versions of the game would be many subscribers shorter.