Ballerium Progress Report

Hi all,

This is an update on what's been going on Through the last two months of development. Much has changed, and much has yet to be changed.

[li]Redesign:

Some have been said on the previous release regarding the redesign that Ballerium is going through. While more information will be revealed later on, the main redesign features
are:

[li]City control and conquest: Previously Players in Ballerium just interacted with the cities. As a result of testers input and our own thinking we've developed a system by which players can actually conquer cities through the possession of control points located in the cities. Controlling cities allows a player to receive a portion of the city income in exchange for the extra protection granted to those cities.
[li]An improved army management scheme that takes care of some disturbing micro-management that disturbed players of the pre-beta version. Players can now create a limited number of heroes out of their experienced soldiers. Those heroes can further improve their abilities, learn skills and can even be revived once killed.
[li]At least in the first version of the game, the world map will be divided into large islands of ~5000 players each. This came up from our publisher in Taiwan, after they reached a conclusion it is better for the players. The gameplay results are that players now actually have a chance of being the best of their world, even if it's "only" a 5000 player world. Should this concept prove to be wrong, it may later be changed back.
[li]Races -
[li]The interface is being further improved. Pictures of the new interface will be displayed in the gallery once it's complete, within less than a month.
[li]Technical issues:[ol type="a"][li]Win98 support is being handled.
[li]Localization support is being complete
[li]Improved game-engine and offline manager stability.

The current Ballerium is a much better game. But those improvements cost a price. In order to enable us complete all the said changes, and in order not to release a premature product, it is now estimated that we would need to wait till Christmas before releasing the Public Beta (hopefully supporting about 5000 testers). It is estimated that such a beta could take as much as 6 months to finish.

[li]Expo Pictures:
As you may know, Ballerium has been presented on E3 some 4 month ago (pictures available on the gallery). What you may not know - is that the game has recently been presented in an expo in Taiwan. Some pictures from the event have also been added to the Gallery.

[li]Sanctum, Ballerium's Publisher in Taiwan, are working on a localized version of this website. Once available in Chinese, we'll let you know.

[li]New pictures released to the gallery
(http://www.ballerium.com/community/gallery/):