Feedback Friday - 11th July 2008

Welcome to this week’s Feedback Friday! Today we’re discussing the build status for Deployment 10 and 11, some upcoming creature changes and a Progressive Weapons overview with Art Director Victor Meinert AKA _Slash.

Build Status D10 and D11

Deployment 10 is on the Public Test Server. We are applying another build today to fix a few nagging issues *looks glaringly at the Military Surplus*, and it will be on its way to Live servers after a few weeks of testing. You can find out what was changed for D10.3 in our Patch Notes section.

As for Deployment 11, we’ll be wrapping up content building this week and having our “stability week” to bug fixes and minor tweaks next week.

Creature Changes

Meet a new member of the Thrax family. Ya, he’s a little smaller than his fellow Thrax cohorts, but don’t feel sorry for this guy – he’ll be beating up on new recruits around Wilderness while his bigger brothers move towards higher level threats. This is a new approach we’re taking to make creatures “pick on someone their own size” and add variation to your enemies as you get to higher levels. You see their unarmored versions from 1-16 (except bosses) and the beefier versions after level 16. We plan to extend this concept with Lightbenders, Kaels, and Amoeboids (but not with those specific levels). We don’t have an exact time frame for when this will roll out to servers, but keep an eye out in the next few deployments.

Progressive Weapons Update

Hello everyone!

I thought I’d give everyone a glimpse of what sort of cool stuff we’ve been working on in the weapons department. It’s gonna be art-centric mind you…but it oughta be fun none the less.

We started off a couple of sprints ago with the high level objective of giving players more opportunity to distinguish themselves, especially at higher levels after a lot of investment in their characters. One opportunity we immediately identified was new high level weaponry. ‘Kick ass weapons for high level players!’ was the battle cry. We successfully got the Series 2 and Series 3 Shotgun released in one sprint! That was really exciting for the team to be able to do a release that fast and the feedback so far seems very positive. Plus, who doesn’t love a Bad-Ass Triple-Barrel Transforming Incendiary Shotgun!?

We want to repeat that initial success of course, to feed new and cooler weapons to the players, but with an increased focus on the classes over all. Tom and I want to avoid the ‘tail wagging the dog’ in terms of art being released for art’s sake (although as art director I have to admit that it’s a very attractive idea to just make cool weapons and hand ‘em out!).

Seriously though, I’ve been working closely with Tom and a small group of our key systems designers to develop a design-driven framework that we can then use to guide us in developing future ‘bad-ass’ equipment. Obviously that’s a complex challenge, but everyone is really excited by it getting it right.

From a purely art-centric perspective I wanted to give everyone a glimpse into what we’re thinking about. I have to caveat this with by saying it’s only early prototyping!! J….but it’s still super exciting. Right now we’ve got a working prototype of a couple of new high level Chain Guns. The Chain Gun has been really exciting in particular because we’re developing it in collaboration with our oversea team over in Seoul. We’ve got 3 super talented senior artists over in our Seoul office that are attached to the TR art team and are continually delivering really great content. We just love working with this team because they are so talented and intuitive. This is also the team that has been helping us out for the past 4 months optimizing the armor and beautifying the females. All of the facial improvements have been driven by those artists. They’re just amazing!

The Chain guns still need some work but we are actually much closer on some new high level Rocket Launchers. What’s that you say…? New Rocket Launchers? In fact what we’ve come up with is an Over-The-Top, Bad-Ass™ Double-Barrel-Transforming-Rocket-Launcher. Folks on the dev team are drooling over it. I cannot wait to get this equipment into players hands! As soon as we get the mechanics and some lingering audio additions done we’ll get them into a build near you!

I just want to say it one more time because it sounds sooo good when you say it out loud…everyone join me now….Bad-Ass-Double-Barrel-Transforming-Rocket-Launchers!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We’ve also been doing a bit of top secret concept work on some very high level content that I’m very excited about. I think I’ll save that for my next Feedback Friday though…along with some impressive concept imagery…

Thanks everyone for playing TR! I’ll see you on the battlefield!

_Slash!