NEWS: New faces - Orbital apartment - New engine

[Chrisax]

Friday with Means - March 20th, 2009

As we speak the build guys are preparing the next update for TestLive. We are hoping to get it to the Test dimension at some point this evening. I am looking forward to seeing the feedback on the 12 man instance over the next couple of days before we ship it to live. This version will also of course have the long awaited perk reset NPC and a great many small fixes that have cropped up in the last few weeks in almost every area of the game...you guys are keeping us very busy. Anyways...12 man/woman instance coming soon...finally. A complete redesign later...but finally.

New Heads

Last week I brought up the idea of "new heads"...while perfection can never be achieved another tweaking attempt has been made and is linked at the bottom again. I think we might have the "feel" of it right this time. Damn those artists are good.

(Click for full size pictures)





The Engine:

I joked last week that the code meetings were boring. It was a joke. Granted it wasn't that funny...but it was meant as a joke. That being said those involved are very serious about getting this done. In the near future we are adding another senior render coder to the team to help Enno and his minions get to the goal faster and prettier. As much as I understand that some of you would like posts from Enno on the progression of the engine I can't allow that as "faster and prettier" unfortunately would be delayed by the action of informing the community and responding to queries...this takes a lot more time than you might imagine...time that we all want him to use to bash out more awesome new engine code. I will not sanction any interruption of his work of any kind...no matter how much fun it might be. Optimization is serious and time consuming...focus is very important.


Coming soon: New orbital apartments and night clubs

We are currently working on a new "Orbital" apartment for the uber rich in game for a silly amount of credits, if you are a credit billionaire you should live like one. This apartment will also be available for paid points as it is a purely social content type item. At the same time we are working on concepting out a new social nightclub area in orbit as it has been a very long time since a new nightclub was added to AO...and I am sick of RKTim Picketing our offices for the opening of "Head or Tails" in omni territory. I think gathering in a new superclub in orbit would add style to our future events. The apartments are meant to be a part of the same spacestation facility...hopefully we'll see the both facilities at close to the same time. Before anyone asks this will not be in before instanced Pandemonium or Instanced cities.

Some of the concept art for the apartments:










Next Week:

I'll be answering questions again as it has been awhile since we did that last. Feel free to include questions for others besides me.

Have a great weekend!

Colin "Means" Cragg

[noobas]

chris: can you ask means about the inclusion of a lowbie quest for noblets where there is a quest that requires basic prof based buffing and midpoints thru the quest are the reward of a prof based lowbie "froob" symb which can be implanted and or leveled, but with the main intent of the quest is to introduce players to the possibilities of implanting, and using buffs to implant a higher than -level- implant or "froob" symb?

We talked about this in another thread, but I've never communicated with means, and it sounds like you might, so since we've talked about this in the forums, it has had good reception... I think everyone wishes people who just joined the game knew a little more about how to operate the clinic and implanting, and this quest would do wonders to speed up the learning curve.

Some other ideas regarding low level quests would be to offer team clinics, where the objective of profession specific quests might include, for example a doctor, the purchase (or mission for a lowbie team heal and team max HP, then the next step would be to get into a team and use the team heal and team max HP buffs, whereup the quest would update to another set of profession-specific objectives would be clear.

Ultimately, the profession-specific lowbie quests would be ideally suited towards people who have either just arrived from newb island, Or, they could be approached by an NPC upon reaching a set level (say, level 10 or a title level)----> similarly, There could be title level locked quests available, for which quest start NPC's where available at high traffic zones such as ToTW, subway, Borealis, WA, etc for the lower levels, but at fewer locations for higher mobility/higher TL's.

The point of the TL quests would be similar to the idea prior. How does the role of a level 20 enforcer change from 20 to 50, 100, 150? How does the fixers role change? How does the agent adaptability change? how does the engineer start to use different skillsets as he levels? How does a trader adapt to pvm as he levels? Why are evades important to MA's and fixers? These are all questions that could be answerred (or posed as question) in quests that focussed on teaching at different TL ranges. These questions or quests could ultimately make the game more enjoyable for people just joinging the game, and help introduce them to profession specific quests/items/gameplay/teamplay/soloplay/gear and equipment equipping/ implanting skills/tradeskilling

I don't know if this is a bit much, but it might be useful for Means to see that there could be more lowbie/TL quests that help new people *customers/clients* get accustomed to AO.

Any comments?

[Chrisax]

Noobas, and others, work on all the possible ideas and suggestions that could make AO more friendly and interesting for new players! I have a project I'll talk about hoepfully soon, first on our private forums.