Hi everyone!
I wanted to take a moment to talk a bit about what's coming in the Factions Update. It's still a little ways off, but hopefully this little taste will give you some insight into what's coming!
This update is divided into several different parts. Let's talk about them one by one.
Starting points for specific groups or classes
To support different factions, you'll want to be able to set different locations for different factions to spawn; or even different locations for each specific class in each faction!
I've been upgrading our starting points to allow that. Here's some work-in-progress on an interface to specify what can spawn at each starting point:
In the future, this same interface could allow you to add and remove services from other types of buildings! I expect that in the initial Factions Update it will just be starting points, but I definitely want to enable this sort of thing for potion shops, blacksmiths, and other buildings!
Character Variants
Here's one that people have been requesting forever, and it's finally happening to support Factions; once you develop the technology for it, you're going to be able to create variants of player classes, monster types, and NPCs. Variants inherit all the attributes and combat abilities of their base class, but can be given a different name and a different appearance. And of course can be part of a different Faction!
Apart from not taking up a character type slot, they are otherwise treated as if they are a completely normal character type; here's a shot showing three Spider variants with separate monster zones placed next to each other:
Factions
My current plan is to have Factions be handled similarly to character types; you'll get access to a certain number (probably two) when you first unlock the Factions tech, and then will be able to add more. There will be no limit to the number of Factions you can have (although there will probably be a cost)
Each Faction will get a name, a space for lore, and a customizable banner, which will work a little like our current costume editor to let you make unique banners to visually identify your different Factions!
And of course, there will be a selection of scenery items that let you place these customized banners around your world. Here's some early models, as an example:
Individual regions and districts will each be able to set the Faction which owns that part of the map. Buildings inside those owned areas will (by default) not serve players of opposing Factions.
World PVP
Everything I've talked about above is at least partly implemented now, but the stuff below is just my current plans for the update. Obviously, it may change wildly before the update comes out! So.. watch for future Dev Blog updates to stay up to date! :)
The idea is that you'll be able to specify where PVP is allowed to happen; you'll be able to enable or disable it globally, per-region, and per-district, so that you can restrict PVP to exactly the spots where you think it should be allowed for your particular game.
Contested Zones
In addition to the above, where particular areas can be set as statically 'owned' by a particular Faction, they can instead be set as "Contested", in which case ownership can change hands between Factions based upon holding particular control points you've placed within those areas. If one Faction can take control of enough of the control points and hold them for a long enough duration, they'll take over ownership of the zone, which will also transfer ownership of all the buildings within that zone!
So that's what I've been up to! There's a bit more to it, but those are the broad brushstrokes that show approximately where we're aiming! I'll be back in a couple weeks to talk about how I'm tracking on the implementation!
We do also have some other stuff going on in the background, including some awesome work on the Eldritch art theme as voted upon by our player survey, and some further performance improvements especially around load times and memory usage. I'm very much looking forward to getting to share some of that with you in the coming weeks!
-T