Wow, it's been far too long since I gave a progress update on how Factions development is going; we've actually had *three* major content updates since the last time I posted about the development on this feature, which is much too long a time to leave you all hanging!
We now have a public preview Factions build open for players to try, which I hope will go some way toward making up for my tardiness with announcements about the development progress! I'll explain how to access the preview build below, but before everybody runs away to install it, I'd like to say a few things about this preview build, what's in it, what's not yet in it, and what's coming next!
Factions
The core idea behind Factions is to be able to have a large global conflict between two or more groups of your subscribers. Once you develop the Factions technology, you'll be able to create a set of factions for your game, and assign different player classes to the different Factions.
In the current preview build, you are limited to creating only two factions. More will be available in future preview builds! We just wanted to catch any bugs with the simple cases before moving on to the more complicated ones!
Once you have factions, you can assign player classes to the different factions. So for example, you might choose that your Paladins belong to a faction named "Lightbringers", whereas your Mages belong to one called "Darkriders". You can assign as many classes as you like to each. You may also leave some player classes "unaligned"; players using those classes won't take part in the faction conflict.
Faction Turf
Last time we talked about designing faction banners. The faction banner also controls the appearance of faction turf; the parts of the map which are "owned" by each faction.
Inside of the Lightbringer faction's home turf, the buildings and NPCs will only provide services to players in the "Lightbringer" faction; Darkrider faction members won't be able to make use of them. Similarly, quest-giver NPCs placed inside Lightbringer turf will only give their quests to Lightbringer faction members, and class trainers inside Lightbringer turf will only train Lightbringer faction members. You get the idea. Buildings and NPCs placed in neutral territory will serve the members of any faction (or unaligned players!)
It's worth also noting that starting points inside turf areas will by default only spawn player classes which belong to that faction. This way, it's really easy to have the Lightbringers and the Darkriders spawning in different parts of a region, or even on opposite sides of the world map!
Class Variants
Now, what if you want your Lightbringers and your Darkrider factions to both have Paladins? For this, we've added the concept of class variants. Once you develop variants, you can very cheaply and easily create renamed copies of existing class designs. So you can take your Paladin class and make a "Light Paladin" variant and a "Dark Paladin" variant, each of which can be given a different model or colors, but they'll keep the same statistics and combat abilities as the original, even if you later modify the original, so they'll all automatically remain in balance with the other variants! (apart from aesthetic and newness bonuses to popularity, of course!)
You can assign different class variants to different factions as if they were completely separate player classes, making it easy to fill out your factions.
Placeable banner stands
New banner stand scenery items will automatically show the banner of whatever faction controls the position where they're placed, and will automatically update if they are moved into a different faction's turf!
Respawn points
It's worth calling out explicitly here; faction-affiliated buildings will only serve their own faction members. This includes graveyards. If a graveyard is placed inside faction turf, only members of that faction will respawn there.
Buildings placed outside of any faction's turf are considered neutral, and will serve everyone. It's generally useful to ensure you have at least one neutral respawn point in each active region, just to be certain that there will definitely be places for players to respawn after death! If no aligned respawn point is available in the region where someone dies, they'll be teleported to the nearest region where there *is* an available respawn point which will serve them.
Just something to think about as you play with the preview build!
Public Preview Build
Our public preview of the "Factions" build is available *now*; open the game properties in Steam, select the "Game Versions & Betas" tab, switch to the "next" build version, and let Steam download the update. As of right now, the preview build has early revisions of everything discussed above.
Currently, the preview build limits you to a maximum of *2* factions. More will be unlocked/unlockable in future preview builds!
Right now, you are allowed an unlimited number of class variants. I probably should put some sort of limit on this before full release, but I wanted to see how players use them, first!
And of course there are a whole bunch of bug fixes and major UI improvements!
- Revamped the main header interface.
- New UI for editing regions, including a 'Randomize' function.
- New "overlays" interface which has absorbed the old "Grid" and "Network" tabs.
- Localisation is now fully moddable (it's possible to add brand new languages to the game! Come chat to us in the Discord for full details)
- ...and a bunch more!
Known issues in the current preview build:
- Players currently can make use of cross-faction-aligned flight paths when they shouldn't be able to do so.
- The turf-painting controls are currently visible but non-functional in the UI even before you have developed Factions; they should only appear there once Factions have been developed!
Upcoming
The big missing piece of Factions right now is world PVP, which is what's next on my list. The different factions will generally avoid each other, but as of right now they do not yet actually fight directly. The plan is that in the final Factions update you'll be able to have factions with PVP, factions without PVP, or PVP without factions. Additionally, individual regions will be able to be set as allowing or forbidding PVP, so you can constrain the fighting to happen only in certain areas, if you wish!
I'll also have a few other bits and pieces to talk about in the near future. But for now, I hope you enjoy this taste of what's coming!
Talk again soon,
-T
