Tabula Rasa: Feedback Friday April 11, 2008
Focusing on the squad system and clan controlled points, this week's Feedback Friday starts off with on a bit of a dour note:
Spring is in the air, the treemites are coming out to play and it feels like update time again. As stated in Starr's update, the team has gotten smaller. With a smaller post production group, you have to concentrate on the things that will make the product better and prioritize features that will make the game enjoyable for the players. So the team got together, and talked about what that would make the project better in the short term based on their thoughts of the game and player feedback. We came away with two big features that we felt would really make a large amount of difference.
The first feature is a better 'looking for squad' system. We want to make sure people can find other players to play our game with. Tabula Rasa is much more fun when you play in a squad, so we need to facilitate that. Speaking of which, one of the things to enhance this system will be a better lock feature. When you lock a target, that target will now stay locked, regardless if it is behind you or not. Furthermore, there will be a lock for friendly and hostile actions. So if you are locked on a friendly, but switch to a hostile weapon, that friendly will still be locked when you switch back. This feature is going into testing now with 1.8.
The second item we wanted to concentrate on was clan owned control points. This feature won't just be a PvP feature, but a PvP and PvE feature. The reasons the team felt this was a good call was that it highlighted certain things:
- Need to continue concentration in class balance for the PvP end
- Makes use of one of our more popular features - control points
- Adds a sense of ownership for control points (and the game)
- Rewards clan participation - encourage more socialization
The clan owned control points endeavor will also include a currency for common actions that will contribute to your personal glory or your clan's glory. This system is called prestige currently. Names have a way of changing in development however. You have already been introduced to the baseline of the system. We will be converting control point tokens into prestige. There will no longer be an assault and defense token, but rather a single currency. This prestige will be able to be earned in several ways and will be able to be spent like the current control point tokens. How prestige is earned may change, but currently includes the following ways for PvE: killing a control point attacker or defender, killing a control mini-boss, reaching the maximum killing streak, getting a blue or purple drop, gaining a level, or perhaps completing some special missions. We hope this system goes into test with release 1.8. With the introduction of the prestige system, we are basing the system for ownership of control points and prestige rewards on merit rather than the original idea of having clan size be the deciding factor in clan rewards.
So this begs the question, where are PAUs, flashpoints, and command opportunity? Well, as I said above, names have a way of changing in development. Flashpoints as instances requiring more than one squad aren't currently in development. However, we did put in missions that would activate for more than one squad on overland maps. We are calling these missions flashpoints now. That doesn't mean we won't be doing multi-squad instances in the future... it was just a name change to these new types of missions.
PAUs are still being worked on by our artists. The design for them is fleshed out, but we have to get them to our coders. When we feel that enough people have freed up after Clan Owned Control points, we will likely begin work on PAUs. I'm personally looking forward to seeing them implemented with the new design.
Finally there is command opportunity. The team felt less strongly about this feature than PAUs, LFS, and clan owned control points. In order to even begin work on something like command opportunity, we need to make sure our current summoned minions respond better to orders. Given that class balance is an important part of getting to clan owned control points, there is a heavy concentration on getting things like reinforcements, clones, and the reanimated working up to snuff. We can look at command opportunity again and gather your feedback after all the work is done with class balance to see if it still makes sense for Tabula Rasa.
That's where we are now. We have a ton of good quality of life features coming down the pike that I am really excited about. We also have some new instances coming up for the level 50 crowd, and maybe even one new one around the level 25-30 range. We're continuing work to make sure that all the maps have very high quality standards.
I'll see you out there.
Paul Sage
Lead Designer