Asherons Call: ToD Weekly Status Update is Up

Throne of Destiny Weekly Status Update 6/15

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Hallo! Welcome to this week's update on Throne of Destiny's development. The last week has been very exciting! We signed off on our release CD candidate and shipped it off to our distribution partners at Station Publishing and Codemasters for approval, which is a very major milestone. We've got a lot of confidence in where we are right now, and that confidence was buoyed by the feedback we've been receiving from Closed Preview.

The Closed Preview has been running since last week and has gone quite well. One of the players involved remarked to me how great the game looked. Later we realized that he only had his Texture Quality set to Medium instead of High. He wasn't even looking at the best graphics that we're going to be shipping with, let alone the textures we'll be releasing in an Event later!

I personally had the thrill of logging one of my oldest characters on to Destiny. This character was started on Leafcull way back in the Fall of 1999 so he was copied along with the rest of the Leafcull database. Let me tell you, even as someone who has been looking at Throne of Destiny day in and day out for many months, I got a little tingle when I took this character that I've been playing for five and half years and ran him around Sanamar.

But you're not reading this to hear me go on about how much fun it is to play Throne of Destiny. (Or maybe you are for some reason.) You want to know how things are going. Things are going well!

We are definitely still on track for the July 18 launch date. Open Preview is going to start on June 22, if you haven't read our Open Preview Information and FAQ you should definitely check those out. Right now Closed Preview is still ongoing, with internal testers, a small group of players and the press logging in and playing the game. Destiny (the Preview world) has been quite stable, with no server-side issues since it went live.

We're also continuing development for the August event. We've set up our development schedule in such a way that if any major issues arrive from Preview or from Launch we can adjust accordingly to address those issues in the August event.

A couple important notes before I'm done:

" During Preview, we will not be running any Live Events, scheduled or unscheduled, on the live worlds. Our goal is to get as many of you playing on Destiny as possible, and we felt that scheduling Live Events on the live worlds would be a distraction.

" I'll be mentioning this again when Open Preview starts, but it's worth mentioning now. The default video settings when you launch the Throne of Destiny client are not the highest available. Many of you will want to tweak those settings upwards for even better visuals. This is true for both Preview and the retail Launch.

" While there is no NDA on the Open Preview, I've asked our largest fan sites to hold off on posting full walkthroughs for Throne of Destiny quests and content until we launch on July 18. Now, obviously many of you will be posting and looking for spoilers on various fan forums - that's fine. I've simply asked that full, official fan site walkthroughs not go live until the 18th, to preserve a sense of mystery for those players who may not be active on the forums. Obviously, feel free to post reviews, screenshots and the like throughout Open Preview!

That's all I've got this week. Odds are no one will read next week's update - you'll all be logged in to Destiny!

- Ibn