Asherons Call: E3 2005 - Q&A Session with Ibn

WarCry - Do you intend to add a follow feature?Ibn - There aren't any immediate plans for it. I don't know if we have the pathing tech that would really support a follow feature. I think it would be a much larger engineering task that it would be otherwise. It's not one of highly requested features, so it would be low on the list.

WarCry - Are there any plans to deal with game mechanics that are still out of balance? Examples that come to mind are shields and magic.
Ibn - Just a quick anecdote regarding game balance and how it is perceived... at last year's Turbine Nation during Q&A we asked the question, "Do you think war magic is overpowered?" Half the people raised their hands. Then we asked how many felt it was underpowered. Half the people raised their hands. There are people that say that if half the people feel it is overpowered and half the people feel it is underpowered then it must be in balance. If everyone agrees that it is overpowered then we have a problem.

Shields with enough AL and shield level, you can make it so you don't take any melee damage, I can see where the perceived balance issues could be there. But we just added a new ability to monsters that we may slowly roll out in Throne of Destiny that might mitigate that somewhat. It will make it a little more dangerous for those that aren't taking any melee damage currently. I don't necessarily agree that magic is out of balance right now. I think we have really done a good job of balancing monsters to take into account the spells that people would generally have at that level.

Calandryll adds that it is not a black and white issue such as a bug so it takes more to work on it. It also is clouded by personal preference.

Ibn - Obviously if it is something that is clearly unbalanced we will fix it. One example is say all sword fighters use one sword then we would look into that. We have shown this recently in Singularity Scepters. When you look at the "does everyone use it" argument, we may need to take another look at war magic on Darktide, but PvP is even a bigger balancing issue which we are working on.

WarCry - Will there be any attempt to tie up loose lore ends such as the Great Work, the Talking Trees and many more unexplained features?

Ibn - What would it be if we tied up all the loose ends? There wouldn't be anything to talk about. Everyone once in a while there someone who suggests tying up the loose ends, but that is about it. There is no systemic plan to do it.

Crowley mentions that the upcoming Viamontian story arc actually ties into an old loose end. You will know who that person is.

Ibn continues that they really enjoy giving lore to those that have followed the lore activity to really closely and talk about on forums such as our Hall of lore.

WarCry - Will Throne of Destiny also bring us any upgrades / changes to the creature AI?
Ibn - Not really the creature AI, but we are adding a lot of new creatures that play in interesting ways. I was play testing through with a level 140 mage and was fighting a high level Viamontian Knight. I was able to kill him relatively easy but by the time I killed him he had me down about half health. The span of that fight was only about 10-15 seconds, and my guy was fully buffed with 7s. So if I had two of them on me I would be in trouble. As for as new creature AI, no but the tactics by which you have to fight them probably yes.

Delmar - I mentioned that I used to be a member of the same allegiance as Chip Ali, the player from Harvestgain whose design for a new creature made it into Throne of Destiny as the Thrungus. One of the quests using these creatures is apparently called "Thrungus Among Us"

Ibn - We are using the new Thrungus in several places including in the new training hall.

WarCry - Will Turbine continue with updates every month, or will those span out over a longer period of time, like 45 or 60 days after expansion?
We are definitely returning to regular content updates. We have been talking a lot about the updates and where the story arc is going to go. Everyone currently tends to compare current story arcs to the Hopeslayer arc. We want people to start comparing it to the Throne of Destiny arc. We want that to be the new benchmark. We are still working on are schedule. One thing we did was work quite a bit of work on the tools for Throne of Destiny. This allows us to push things such as content integration faster. Next we want to work on our art pipeline.

WarCry - Are you pulling away from cell.dat and portal.dat?
Ibn - It's not that simple because the data format has changed significantly. Before there were 2 files, now there will be more.

WarCry - Do you have any plans of possibly implementing an auction system?
Ibn - It sounds cool, that would be neat. It's so far off the radar. It would be cool but not a need. It doesn't fill a specific hole in the game. We want to get back to the items we have discussed before the Microsoft transition. The community has been waiting long enough for these.

WarCry - Is there still plans on building an API for 3rd party plug-ins such as Decal and if so any ETA on a date?
Ibn - Throne of Destiny really put this on the back burner. It was being worked on by Zycra to the point where it was being QA'd and it we were looking at what it would take to release it. Then we realized that we would have to rework it for AC:TD. It's in no one's best interests for Decal to be broken for two months after AC:TD ships. We don't want that, our fans don't want that. We are taking steps to prevent that. While we don't officially support Decal, we won't intentionally break it either.

WarCry - Will Turbine fix Mansions such that Monarchs do not have to type /house hooks off every time they want to "use" a hooked item (i.e. Head of Homonculus, Font of Jojii, Portals)?
Ibn - Yes we want to very much fix this. It's not really in our best interest to go around angering monarchs. It's very easy for them to broadcast to the entire allegiance about their dislike over something we have done. It has been something we've been investigating since development began on Throne of Destiny and we will get to it, but we have to finish the Throne of Destiny bugs first.

WarCry - Will Turbine add hookable Display Cases? It would be great to be able to display all your pack dolls in one place.
Ibn - It really is difficult to explain the issues with this. You can't really take an object, stick another object in it and thus change the appearance of that object. Take for example you have 3 possible badges and a display case that shows the badges you have. A rough guess on the iterations of design you would have to have is 3 to the 3rd power. This means that you would have to have one image for every possible option. We need to have a unique item for each possible combination. Think about that and you can start to understand why we haven't yet updated the Composite Bow quest.

WarCry - Can you PLEASE make it so that it is impossible for players to go PKL in Marketplace?
Ibn - On one hand you have those that feel you shouldn't be able to PKL in the Marketplace, but the other hand you have just as many people that feel you should be able to. Because it is someplace you can get too easily, and also these players want people watching. They want to show off their abilities. The bigger issue that the there is no way of flagging a land block to not allow PKL. An idea that I think is better is some sort of Arena that you can recall to. The downside is what if no one is there? At the Marketplace there is always something you can do.

Delmar - A small note here is that Ibn did not say they were putting in arenas, just that it might be a possible solution.

WarCry - Can you please introduce more quests that only those that complete it can use the reward? There is nothing more frustrating than completing a quest, being proud of your hard earned reward, and then seeing a low level character that could not have possibly "earned" the reward sport it around town because they bought it off a Trade BOT.
Ibn - On one hand we don't want to limit the ability for a player to do what they want with an item they got. If Turbine says you can't do that then you will be upset. We do have some items that are Bonded and Ivoryable or have wielded requirements. One thing we want to do is make sure that the reward is worth the risk.

Delmar - It was pointed out that in the past there have been times that some quests may be too easy for the reward while another quest introduced the same month is not worth the reward. They said that they're trying to prevent this from happening in the future.

WarCry - You removed XP as an incentive for Monarchs. Are there any plans to introduce something to game that only Monarchs can use or wear?
Ibn - I really do feel awful about all the Monarchs that keep asking about this, but I am not going to lie because we don't have any specific plans or an ETA. If we find something that is really cool and easy we will get it in before something that is really cool but takes longer to develop. We have a really good team for the live updates. It looks like we are going to get back to a level of content each event that we were before we started working on the migration.