Release 2 Impressions (+ Release 3 Stretch Goals!)

Greetings Avatars,

Thank you all for helping us test Release 2. We feel even more strongly now that we are on the right path to make a great product with all of you. The tight feedback loop we are establishing is already making things better. With Release 2, we were able to respond to your feedback from Release 1 by adding features like jumping. We took this a step further and during Release 2, we released multiple patches to fix bugs and even add features (e.g. highlighting crafting icons on crafting tables and invert mouse look). This was a great test of the team and our patching abilities but also hopefully an indication of the kind of responsiveness we strive for.

Release 3 will be the first time we enable Open Multiplayer Mode and that will consume all of our resources to make happen. Even the simple act of enabling this requires us to solve a myriad of issues like seeing other players’ equipment/customization/animation, creating rule sets for how interactive items work (so two people can’t sit in the same chair for example), creating rules for spinning up instances when zones get full, propagating changes players make across all those instances (for when housing is re-enabled), etc. Making all those things work is why we won’t be adding new major systems until Release 4. However, as with Release 1, we really want to respond to feedback you are giving us about Release 2. Specifically we are adding these stretch goals to R3:

1. Alternate Control Scheme + Key Rebinding: This was by far the most requested feature for R1 & R2. We initially did not have this in our roadmap until after R4, but after witnessing the surge of requests for this, we have pulled it into R3. More details about the alternate scheme and what level of key rebinding we will have will be released closer to R3.
2. Swimming: Jumping was just the first step to giving players a much greater feeling of movement freedom. In R3, players will be able to swim along the surface of the water. Like jumping, swimming will eventually be governed by game systems like encumbrance and focus.
3. Crafting Auto Place: Once you discover a recipe you can double click on it in the recipe log to automatically place all ingredients and tools on the table.
4. Walking: With the run speed increase it became increasingly obvious that we need an option to walk.

Thank you again for being such an amazing community and supporting us on this journey to make the best crowd funded and crowd sourced RPG ever!

Release 2 is dead! Long live Release 3!

Sincerely,
Darkstarr
aka Starr Long

 

Thumbs up to the Crafting Auto Place

 

Awesome, awesome post.
Thanks!
That's a lot for the next release... No pressure!
Swimming, auto placing, customized controls, great news.

 

Surface swimming - nice! One thing though, there seriously needs to be some more "water audio" going on, because in R2, I was stepping and jumping in water and didn't hear any noticeable splashing. We need clear and audible splish splashing

 

Glad things are moving along, especially with your ability to patch changes during the test. Also, you can count me in as a lefty who hopes key rebinding does makes it into R3.

 

Wow! my hats off to the team for what they have accomplished so far. Really looking forward to release 3, Im sure its going to be awesome!

 

If you were inside one of the cabanas, you kind of wondered if the whole house was about to be swept away by the water audio. So there is the water audio, just not for all the water yet.

 

I love the crafting change idea! Look forward to more info!

Mal

 

Sounds like a great list. Those were also what I saw as the most requested feature. I'm glad you guys are going with the recipe book double click. Can't wait to try that out in R3.

Will recipes you have the ingredients for be highlighted? (like a green or blue) or recipes you don't have be highlighted (like red)? I'd assume having ingredients for things being the rarer thing we'd want highlighted.

I'd vote for a blue highlight, just to be different, all the other kids are using green these days.

 

Any chance we can get the same mouse over highlight effect in the nonlist mode inventory. .

 

Walking, and chatbubbles/speech overhead?

 

I am honestly impressed you guys have accomplished so much in such a short period of time. There were several features in play release 2, more than I expected. I am looking forward to R3 and am anticipating Open Multiplayer Mode.

 

Thanks for the reminder. I totally forgot to mention we are also adding a "walk" mode. Post edited now.

 

That is awesome! Thanks Starr!

 

I'm guessing walking will be tied to the left shift key. At least I hope that's where it is because it's what I'm used to in games and it makes sense there ​

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Also, are we going to see expanded NP word recognition in R3? I know most of the time will be sunk into multi-player, but as it stands, NPC's are still missing a lot of very common words and questions. Questions directly related to the conversation too!​

 

Yep, and if not then atleast we can rebind it to Left-Shift starting with R3 hehe!

 

Sounds great, can't wait for release 3 (specifically the Multiplayer mode). It will be great to interact with some of my fellow Avatars!

 

Superb! It was great to finally play on Linux. I am very much looking forward to R3 and multiplayer, though one of my friends is concerned that we will all look identical. I also wanted to say that I am impressed you were able to patch things during R2, it made me feel that we have an amazing team working with us for this game, which care about and notice our wants and needs.

 

Thanks so very much for adding the surface swimming. You guys are awesome!

 

A fancier option would be to show an appropriate tool icon next to the recipes that had ingredients available. Less fancy option is to just show an icon such as a quill (to represent a checkmark) or whatever if the ingredients are available. Just leave that area blank if the ingredients are not available. No hurry for fancy stuff, post-R4 would be a good time to start looking into it.