It's been a long while since I posted an update here on Otland, so I'm bringing some fresh material here so you can see that the server is still alive and being worked on extensively.
If you wish to keep up to date with the community and upcoming updates, I suggest you join our discord where I post on a day-to-day basis.
The update with all these features is supposed to be up somewhere later in February. More information on that when the date is confirmed.
For now, consider this a large teaser of what you can expect.
The beta has been up for a long time, and as such, we've had the opportunity to observe how the game plays and spot things that need changing or were not adequately tuned.
I'm not promising that this update will be the mother-of-all savior of Necronia, but it will bring under fold an enormous amount of very important aspects of the game.
Furthermore, we've taken a long time to start finally sorting out our internal structure, file handling and so on, to make it tidy and easier to work with. That's still not perfect either, but in a much healthier state than it was a few months ago.
The point of this update is to change most of the systems that I felt needed change, and give total control to us (developers) over things that can not be left to operate on whatever their defaults were.
So amongst a thousand changes, here are some highlights.
The following is a cut-out from the post I made on our website regarding this update, but I've edited it to include some newer details:
New Login & Game Screen Peronsalization
We understand that many of you play on a different range of monitors and resolutions, and have different wants and needs in regards to how you want your gameplay layout to look. For this reason, we're adding a few useful tools to allow you to personalize this client behavior. You can see that in the video below.
You will also notice that the login screen and character selection have been completely changed as well.
Also, revamped Furian outfit.
Changes to the beginner experience
To kick it off, instead of the standard 3 button modal window for selection of what to do upon your first login, there will be a neat new loading screen depicting the area of The Dream.
We also created the new Knowledge Center which will harbor all the stuff that you might see in tutorials or need to know about the game mechanics.
Mostly done to replace the old /tutorial command, it should also bring a better aesthetic and collect all of this knowledge under an easily browsable explorer.
Quick Targetting
Set up a key, which, when pressed, will target the nearest creature to you. If you keep pressing it, it will switch to other nearby targets. You can change the detection range if you prefer to only target creatures within a certain distance.
Quick Loot
Configure a table of items and into which slots you want to loot them, and watch the magic happen automatically whenever you open a corpse.
New Bars, for you, and your enemies!
Players will get the ability to show/hide additional bars that show information about their stats. Mana, Stamina, Soul, and Class Ability are now available to be configured as your additional bars. Furthermore, Rage and Breaker have been added next to Flesh as new class bars.
In turn, important characters, bosses, minipets and other special creatures will now have their own additions and bars.
And here's what the new Spearman
Breaker passive bar looks like.
(Necromancer players will be familiar with this as it's pretty much the same principle as their Flesh bar)
New Notification System
The new notification system allows us to relay data to you in new different and creative ways that can hold more data while depicting it better visually. It also introduces a new gameplay element and the ease of communication with NPCs, which in turn, can make it easier for us to have an NPC summon you for a visit or tell you something else, such as Father Wisdom telling you your blessing has expired on level 50, etc.
Supported Mods
From time to time, people with ability to create mods for OTClient may arise within the community. For such times, we are introducing the Mod manager, which will allow you to enable custom mods developed by community members and approved by our team, such as the Loot Parser which has gained popularity among wiki editors.
New Recipe Browser
We have completely changed the way the Recipe Book looks, so that you can finally browse your recipes with no confusion. Alongside clarity, it adds about 5 billion points to visual pleasantness compared to the old one.
Quest Log
The quest log has received a fair bit of changes as well. The browser at the start has been simplified, and everything is more colorful and full of indicators that let you know what you need to know about a quest before you even begin viewing it. Furthermore, viewing a quest will now tell you what you're gonna receive from completing it.
Gameplay
The gameplay on the server will take a different turn as well. We are fixing many bugs that have plagued the health of the game for a long time, and bringing revamps and new content. Check out some of the stuff that you can expect to see on Necronia after 1.25 hits. Some of this will be rolled out post-patch, and some of it will be there immediately when the patch is live.
Mastery Points
The Consumption Points system has been renamed to Mastery Points. For the most part, they do the same as they did before, with a few notable changes. Firstly, they've all been renamed; to Endurance, Intellect, Agility, Constitution and Spirit. Constitution (ex Lupol) now also gives +1 HP and +1 Mana. Agility (ex Eney) now also gives bonus basic attack damage. All of them now give bonuses to a certain spell type.
Food System
The food system is completely reworked and no longer allows the stacking of food for increasing effects. Instead, you can eat as long as you are hungry, but most foods give an unique buff that usually consists of a regeneration factor, alongside more special effects (e.g. increased skill). These buffs do not stack, so while one regeneration lasts, you may not stack another one upon it, but you can eat another type of food to overwrite your current buff. These regenerations and other food buffs still scale with Mastery points in various degrees. Check out some examples of what you can expect below:
Sprinting
Sprint also works a little bit differently. You can no longer toggle it on and off, but it has the following effect:
Changes in professions
Aside from having fixed some popular bugs (such as the Stuck bug), professions were fixed a bit of an overhaul to be more interesting and reward you better.
In case of Lumberjacking, the annoying chances of breaking your axe, not getting anything because you cut yourself, and such things were all changed to use more appropriate values and chances.
Mining and Lumberjacking can now yield profession finds, which consist of various rare items and trinkets that you may trade for rewards or reputations.
They can also trigger events tailored towards the character that triggered them .
(so whatever you manage to spawn or get as a task, will be specifically appropriate for your character in terms of difficulty)
Weapons and Ammunition
There was a bug regarding weapons that have both a physical and an elemental instance of damage. Due to this bug, weapons that had an elemental instance of damage dealt vastly more damage than intended. This bug has been fixed, and on top of it, we made it possible for a weapon to have solely elemental damage and no physical damage, something that was doable before but with a very buggy gimmick.
On the other hand, ammunition is something that I've personally pondered on for quite a while, and finally decided to remove. It was removed because it hindered the development of new ranged weapons, and hindered development in general. From requiring various resources, to additional balancing, to ultimately making us clog up our custom ranged effects script - it was just something that was a pain in the ass every time a ranger update was due, and I'm glad to have done it. Bows and crossbows will now have a pre-assigned ammunition type which they will fire (in terms of the visual effect) and the damage and effects of each bow will be defined on the weapon itself.
The hit chances of ranged weapons have also been vastly improved in places where they were lacking, alongside an annoying bug that prevented the marksman passive from proccing when it should have.
You will find a new arsenal of weapons available for various classes throughout the update as well, which brings me to my next point:
Equipment
As it is today, equipment varies a lot, but there are still some classes which feel the lack of equipment when compared to their peers. This is about to be fixed. The power level of equipment was always drawn behind curtains of numerous tiers, but the tier was never plainly stated anywhere on the equipment. Now, it will be a little more obvious because the crafting system will change in a way that will require you to use Tier Blueprints to craft equipment that begins a tier range (1-5, 6-10, 11-15, etc.) Equipment will be mostly crafted, with some special drops reserved for monsters. More about the details of this will be posted in another post later on.
The random rarity system from loot has been removed, and we're looking into new ways to implement it into blacksmithing instead.
Ability Panel and Spell Management
To replace your Quiver, we'll remove the current Spellbook module and introduce the Ability Panel, which will hold all your spells, and allow you to easily check what they do, their formulas, and bind them to your hotkeys with 2 clicks.
This also means that spells can from now on be useable with crosshair, which will be a huge quality of life changes for classes such as
Saint, replacing the need to write your targets' names as parameters for your spells to work.
Fishing, Cooking, Lumberjacking
Cooking will already receive a major improvement just by having the Recipe List usable easier, but there is also a lack of content related to cooking, which we're looking into changing. A ton of new foods, recipes and hopefully quests related to cooking will be added. As it stands, there are already over 45 new food items.
Lumberjacking as a system is fine as it is, but we've heard your complaints about the chances of your axes breaking, and they will be tuned, especially to be forgiving towards the very first few skill levels.
Fishing has been described as tedious. We hope that will change with the introduction of a large variety of new fish, and the removal of the "dropped your rod" feature. However, we expect to be expanding the system with various minigames that may have you dragged into the water by a monster that gives special loot when killed, or triggering a hunt for a quick-swimming fish on the surface of the water, etc. These minigames will both spice things up, and provide an extra layer of security against possible macro users. It is also possible that different levels of fishing rods will be removed in favor of a single rod, so we can focus on adding more rods instead of adding a billion sprites for each level of existing rods as the system expands.
Classes
This is no news to anyone, but it is worth stating - the Wildheart class will be completely reworked, while Spearman will have a large amount of its spells changed. We are saving the details of this for the next post which will focus more on such details. Speaking of spells...
Spell Hotkeys and Crosshair Targeting
Since Quiver is no longer going to be necessary, it will be replaced with a spellbook slot which will hold all your spells as icons inside. You will be able to use your spells by using these icons, and/or putting them on hotkeys. Furthermore, this means that you will be able to finally use some spells with crosshairs. This is a very important change for the health of classes such as Saint, who won't have to type out names of their targets as parameters but will simply be able to heal people by targetting them.
Dawn of Joy
The winter season will likely take effect together with the next patch, bringing along the Dawn of Joy event and Shivernorth together with it. Look out for those Yetis and Grokka, who are coming back even more menacing this time! Will you manage to decorate Santa's tree fully this year? Last year you did an amazing job!
There are more things to mention about the gameplay, but this post is starting to run quite lengthy, and I'd like to save some juice for later too, so I'm gonna put an end to it here.
If you thought there's a lot of stuff here, this barely scratches the surface as there is new equipment, monsters, dungeons and more coming throughout this patch that I haven't even mentioned here.
I hope you're looking forward to these changes as much as we are, as they represent major fixes to most of the gameplay systems, which means that there will be nothing else to have a better focus on in 2018 but finalizing the lack of gameplay content.