Hey Everyone!
Hope you've all had a great month!
Just wanted to send out a quick update here. Even though we're quiet, we're furiously working hard and forging ahead on multiple fronts! We're putting 99% of our efforts into actual development, so progress is moving very quickly.
First off, we're continuing our combat re-build. As mentioned previously, our biggest hangup with the design of WoD so far has been combat. To be straight forward, we really love classic style MMO's with tab targeting, but it very quickly can turn into a pure grind and is super repetitive. This was clearly how WoD was shaping up in terms of combat. We realized that we fell in love with old school MMO's for reasons far different than their combat systems. Despite our best efforts, it truly was the only part of WoD that we just couldn't get right. We felt like we had come up with some really good ideas and decently engaging combat with our tab target system, it still just came back to the feeling of being a grind and really not how we wanted to push the genre forward. So we knew we needed something different.
We took a step back and started brainstorming about what we wanted instead of copying other systems or games. We had multiple core tenets that we wanted to ensure were in our combat system, they were:
- Hard
- Unique
- Dangerous
- Gear being a huge factor
- Strong Mouse/Keyboard skills
- Highly intellectual
We were building a new MMO with unique ideas to help push the genre forward. After several months of prototyping and experimentation, we finally believe we have come up with a pretty innovative combat design that will meet every one of these requirements. Let me tell you, it is incredibly fun. Fights are long, complicated, fast paced and very rewarding. I have no hesitation in saying that it is easily the best combat system of any MMO. After we finish up all of our changes, we'll be doing a full reveal. So standby for that.
In addition to that, we've wrapped up our mount system as you can see in the screenshot above. Yes, we're launching with a full mount system on day 1. Morgath is a huge world and it'll take some help in getting across it. We also have other ways to help with travel that we'll reveal in the coming months.
Other updates, we've re-built our character editor system to further suit our armor and gear. We thank you all for your help on our discord in sending us messages and giving us ideas on gear naming. We really appreciate it! We've used a lot of them and we'll continue to do so. Building out gear is quite a long and tedious process, so plenty of months ahead of working on this.
Finally, I'll leave everyone with one final note: Merry Christmas!!! We hope you have a great December and we'll see you again next month!
-Josh
Creative Director