Greetings all!
We've decided delaying a bit until pushing our next game update to deliver a slightly larger patch in time for steam's summer sale event, so we thought it'd be a good time to write a devblog to update on our progress. We continue to be focused on filling in blank areas of the open world with questing content that also rewards exploration. We're also currently prioritizing the early/midgame areas of the game.
For example, in our next update the bare lands between Mistywood and Haywind will receive a complete facelift with a new village named Aurfield full of npcs with dialogue, multiple new quests, and new surrounding wilderness with semi-hidden caves and new resources to find!
Beware, according to fishermen's tales a great crab monster may also be lurking nearby...!
From a more optimization-perspective, we've tried using a different style of housing for this area. The houses we've used thus far are actually somewhat unnecessarily resource intensive for what this style of game should really need, so for the future we'll be creating houses that only use a far more appropriate amount of system's resources.
Similar to Aurfield, the road from Haywind to Thornhill is another area that currently remains devoid of content and thus isn't particularly exciting to travel. It will be receiving more attention a bit later, most likely after the Aurfield update. We want to apply more polish to these areas first, as they're ones that new players can encounter relatively early on (definitely earlier than Thornhill City itself, for example) and we wouldn't want anyone to feel discouraged from playing further as they encounter these rough patches.
At the same time, we're of course always looking to expand on the core skills in the game. The next update will include some new interactions across skills such as tailoring, fishing and woodsmanship. A new farm estate will contain a tailoring minigame to make skill leveling a bit more fun...
The taverns are another place we're looking to flesh out a bit more. There are quite a few of them in game and the ones that have amusing NPC background conversation make the game feel infinitely more immersive and alive in our opinion. We'd also like the taverns to be a place where the player can generally expect to find quests.
For now, here's a scene from a new quest started at Thornhill's harbor inn, which will unlock a fast travel option between the two cities of Thornhill and Haywind.
At the moment our efforts mainly center around improving the experience of journeying through the lands as the player progresses through the main quest content. We're also adding more tasks around the game's world that can be repeated, also in the form of repeatable quests from npcs, so that it may feel a bit more alive with things to do, and with alternative ways of gaining experience in skills for example. Later down the line in autumn we're planning to shift more towards implementing challenging high level content.
You can expect our next game update to land at the end of the month.
As usual, feel free to follow us on twitter and/or Discord for future news and updates.
Stay tuned, happy gaming and hope you all enjoy your summer!
Regards,
Pura
