Custom changes
But I mentioned "custom changes" at the beginning, what about them? Our goal is not only to create a perfect copy of Tibia 7.4. It is merely a starting point. Although we think that such an accurate recreation, together with several forgotten mechanics, will alone be a breeze of freshness, we also realize that it may be not enough to keep the game interesting in the long run. In the olden days no one had so many years of experience behind. Today almost everything has already been said, and probably everyone knows the map like one's own pocket (apart from these minor differences). Therefore, we will introduce several changes that in our opinion - atleast to a minimal extent - may help to bring back the feelings that once accompanied Tibia players daily.
* The first - and perhaps the most 'controversial' - change is the lack of the city of Ankrahmun. The area itself will still exists, but we used it for new content, writing an alternative story of the Djinn war. Why? First of all, we want Tibiantis to include things to be yet discovered, but we didn't want to expand the map too much at the start. The basis for mantaining close interaction is in our opinion the size of the map tailored to the number of players. Too much dispersion of server's population would cause a feeling of 'emptiness'. This can be referred to today's Tibia, which has probably reached 30 cities already and even with 300 active players online in some of them you won't meet a living soul for a long time.
But why getting rid of Ankrahmun? After a broader analysis, and our own experience too, we came to the conclusion that today's game on version 7.4 has become a boring schema in which almost all events revolve around Ankrahmun and the nearby hunting places (tombs). This is due to the bad design. Tombs are simply too good, as if they were designed purely for GFB shooting, in comparision to what else the game offered at the time. While the city itself is one big protection zone, which allows to move around safely in any situation. Originally it was even worse, as initially there was no PZ on the pyramids whatsoever, which resulted in the impossibility of killing anyone who jumped on them. Hence CipSoft "fixed" it. Which only confirms the thesis about poor design (or not-so-well thought at least). And although Ankrahmun and tombs were added in 7.3 and 7.4, and truly had its climate, we find that it did not quite match the then gameplay. At the time, we may have not realized it, but from the perspective of years it can be clearly seen.
This is why we decided to break the schema. There will be one city less, which - we hope - will slightly help to people other cities as well as stimulate the creativity of players in inventing others new-old ways of hunting. And meanwhile it left us enough space to create some new content full of secrets.
Also on Mainland (and other isles) you may notice some slight changes, but definitely not as drastic. We've added some interesting and more or less hidden quests and places, fully integrated with the original Tibia lore. We will keep sure that there's always yet another thing to be discovered in Tibiantis. And yes, the so-called "epic quests" will be present as well, those will also be embedded in the Tibia lore and have a coherant and logical sequence (not just some senseless and completly random crap
) leading to reward.
* We also plan to balance some of the existing original quests and the properties of some items. In the olden days everyone dreamed of shiny armor, there was a high demand of inventory items despite they were valued much more. For a long time prices remained at a high level. Today, however, hardly anyone buys equipment on trade, because most of the items can be easily obtained at low cost from no-risk & no-effort quests. Usually all you have to do is to reach the required level and go grab your reward. Who is going to buy a crown armor today, knowing he will get it for free once level 50 is reached? Or what could be the price of - for example - a bright sword, considering that every 45+ level takes it, but only maybe 5% of these people actually need it? So 95% of these swords go on trade, where there certainly is not enough demand?
In addition, players have long come to the conclusion that the best pieces of armor don't really do much and are not worth a lot of monney. It is considered much better to buy some runes instead, e.g. People then stopped caring about typical loot hunts, like camping a single demon spawn and so on. That's why we will slightly balance some of the quests, those that only rely on passing the level gate and taking rewards (all the 'smaller' quests will remain original). In the same time we will raise armor value of the best armor pieces to increase the difference between them and only the average. This way we'd like to regulate demand & supply a bit in order to revive the market and bring back the satisfaction of upgrading your equipment.
* We will also balance the druid profession a little. Although this profession is quite underestimated, we still can't deny there are some issues. Soon we will provide more information, but the changes will be rather cosmetic. "Poison UE" or anything similar should not be expected.
We'd rather like to differ it a bit more from a sorcerer vocation than the way around.
* Other minor changes will also include, for example, slightly higher travel costs. This is to atleast insensibly help slow down inflation by an additional outflow of gold from the server, as well as make players more willing to choose the path on foot, as we often used to in the old days.
Of course, these are also just some examples of planned changes. What we do is not limited to what's said in here, but don't worry, we'll be able to present everything in details long enough before the start.