Caverns of the Wild –Patch Notes
Hello!
Welcome to patch 36. Probably one of our largest patches to date and the beginning of a flurry of content updates over the coming weeks.Below is a list of notes for this patch.
The Caverns of the Wild
The Caverns of the Wild is a new beginning dungeon experience. An adventure awaits in the Darkspire Mountains. The Darkpire Raiders have long had a secret hideout. Explore the caves to find the hidden entrance to their base. There are many rumors about what the Darkspire are up to. Everything from raiding and pillaging to raising the dead. Adventure to the cave to find out what awaits!
• The Caverns of the Wild is a new encounter with three entry level bosses for new players.
• The beginning of the quest implementation starts in the Caverns of the Wild.
https://youtu.be/_2ToHl1BDVc
Massive Environmental Cave Update! A total Environmental revamp for you to explore for hours.
Natural Cave Environment Set
The Caverns of the Wild focuses on a mysterious bandit hideout nestled somewhere in sun-filled caverns, lush with foliage, whereas darker areas are lit with strange glowing butterflies. Small ruins and hints at animal life lay strewn about so take care... the wolves don’t like guests.
Bandit Cave Environment Set
Delve deeper into the underground and you may happen upon the secret hideout of the Darkspire Raiders. Much further below, these caves are dry and withered, lit by torches and bonfires, while other areas are dark and haunting. Make sure to bring a light source, you don't know what could be lurking among the scaffolding.
Wet (Amarian) Cave Environment Set
The murky den of the *Amarians Mogfen Liar is unlike any other in Sundaria. Gather close and watch out for the magics of these hostile creatures among the muck. The Lizardmen live in the darkest of areas lit by the mysterious glow of the fungus infested waters which you so lightly follow.
Platforming and Class Movement
• The caves have new platforming assets that greatly improve gameplay. Some of these assets are geared to help players utilize their double jump abilities more. Use the ranger to swing from platform to platform, the rogue to wall run across a chasm, etc.
• Added several unique areas based on each of the classes' double jump ability. These areas will reward you with loot or hidden chests, but be sure to watch your step!
• Destructible platforms make some of these areas inaccessible if destroyed.
• Ladders have been added to the caves, allowing for tons of platforming possibilities and ladder climbing.
• Some large rooms now have platform shortcuts that are there for the player to discover and utilize. Most of the time they are hidden away by a destructible wall or in the shadows, so keep an eye out.
Materials
• Enabled ambient occlusion on all mesh materials in the caves to add more depth, contrast and detail.
• Balanced the diffuse, roughness and specular values to create a more convincing scene with physically based materials.
• Updated the look of the water material.
• Created material instances to achieve a unique look for each of the cave sets.
• Added detail normal maps to certain materials to bring out more of the gritty look.
Lighting
• Increased post-process ambient occlusion values and scale size.
• Lighting has become more pocketed to create more contrast around points of interest and lootable objects.
• Lowered the bloom amount to tone down emissive particles in the caves, including ability particles.
• Shifted the colors to a slightly cooler hue to enhance the mood of the caves.
• Toned down the lens flare to be more subtle.
• Switched to the Gaussian Blur distance field method to slightly improve performance.
Gameplay
• Significant improvements to pathing and NavMesh in all cave variants, providing better performance and pathing for the player as well as the AI.
• Overall the lighting got darker, light sources are more scarce and have become part of the cave gameplay in form of lootable or interactable objects. Bring a wizard or stock up on torches if you want to search every corner of the cave for loot.
• Torches can now be looted off the wall and used, lighting the way for any unfortunate adventurer stumbling around in the dark.
• Firepits can be interacted with to light large rooms. Look for embers in the darkness!
• Decreased the amount of original actors while adding new assets in order to not affect or potentially even improve the current performance in the caves.
Performance
• Refactor dynamic texture loading of character armor and weapons
• Fixes numerous crash scenarios
• Improved loading performance and memory utilization
• Added options and feedback menus to lobby
• Server optimizations for spawning players
• Server optimizations for destructible objects
• Server optimizations for number of running and available instances
• Better heuristic for preventing overload of game servers
• Fixed many edge cases that could lead to partially loaded player data, missing ui, abilities, etc.
• Fix potential cases where players characters could be invisible beyond time taken to load
Combat
There are several combat changes that are in this patch. They are part of a large combat revamp in which we want to make the game combat more immersive. From a player perspective, the combat changes begin with melee weapons. NPC AI changes as well as additional player changes will follow soon.
Weapon Changes
• All Melee weapons now have their own animation sets
• Melee weapons will have two types of attacks Directional and Non-Directional
• Non-Directional attacks will ultimately be faster and less powerful than Directional
• Directional attacks are activated by pressing a direction just prior to your attack key.
• Directional attacks have the ability to hit multiple targets
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Additional Combat Changes
• Adjusted melee camera movements.
• Fixed reticle for classes (champion and rogue has melee reticle while others have ranged one)
• Adjusted Charge's distance and destination check.
• Fixed input stuck issue caused by firewall.
• Increased range of Resurrection and Hand of Judgement
• Hand of Judgement is usable on downed players (not dead)
• Improved Channel Heal's visual.
• Added animation for track ability.
• Adjust hitbox size of lizardman.
• Fixed animation blend issue
• Players can now dodge in combat. Pressing shift (Sprint) will move the character backward. If a direction is pressed then dodge, the player will dodge in that direction.
UI
• Dungeon size option has been removed, all dungeons will be at maximum size.
• Refactor Dungeon UI to support upcoming themes for each dungeon type
• Refactor chat UI and expose additional panels for combat and item events
• Fixed character creation UI issue
Chat UI
The chat UI in the game has been upgraded to allow for multiple chat channels. We have removed the old item pop ups that you used to see on the UI.
• Improved the overall quality and performance of player chat
• Loot updates will now show in chat
• Quantities and qualities of items will show in chat appropriately
• The first pass of combat log done, will be improved and detail added in future passes
Items
• Improved Item Tooltip load times
• Torches in Caverns of the Wild are lootable (most torches will be adjusted to this in the near future)
• New asynchronous asset loading implementation (armor/weapon/world loot)
• Item data on inventory page will autoload
• New Crafted weapon/armor stats calculation (will be implemented in next major patch)
Quests
Quests have been implemented in the game and should begin to increase in frequency
• Quests can be tracked under the Journal tab
• Quests once accepted can be Abandoned by clicking the x in the upper right corner of the Quest information on the Journal Tab
• You can currently track up to 10 quests at a time
• If an NPC has a quest and players meet the requirements they will be offered the quest upon talking to an NPC
• NPC’s do not have any external marking to indicate they have a quest.
Thanks for checking out our patch notes! We have much more on the way!
John
http://store.steampowered.com/app/436560/