First up is a return of the Winter Convergence festival. Last year's festival was a resounding success; gleamite meteors shocking the MMORPG world and showing how open world content can surprise and delight players! The meteors are back (along with the videos with "whoa this is cool" reactions).
New this year with the festival is an open world boss; the Winter Warrior. Similar to the Halloween event boss the Winter Warrior will appear in the open world and require a zerg of players to take down. Initial reports are the fight is fun and has healers running for their lives.
The update also brings a new mutated expedition that combines Starstone Barrows and Amrine. It will be cool to revisit these two early game expeditions. Most players likely gave Amrine a spin in their early teens of leveling but many have never stepped foot into Starstone Barrows as it is easy to leap frog leveling right past it. Personally I've never done Starstone so looking forward to giving it a whirl.
The most newsworthy part of the update is the shell company mitigation which will restrict how players can hop companies and how war rosters have to come together. This should hopefully help reduce single companies, who were creating multiple shell companies, from dominating the map. End goal is to get more players into war because more companies can participate. This is a watch and see change, but on paper it makes sense to have the intended effect.
I didn't get a chance to try the patch out yesterday, but will be jumping in today. Are you out hunting meteor showers? If so leave a comment!
First I do really want to commend the team for sitting down and answering some of these questions; even taking a doozie up front at face value (i.e. reading it off as it was written). The first questions of course were "what about PvPppppp!" and the lack of PvP focus on the road map which of course must mean the development team is all part time and something something. Again, kudos for the team taking this on and discussing staffing of the teams (more developers than they had last year) and stating the obvious "we will deliver more than just the main items noted on the road map".
The team also talked about a few PvP topics and specifically they are working on the territory influence process getting revamped. Outpost Rush (OPR) was also discussed and the team shot down the idea of more maps coming to OPR. The team doesn't want to divide the community between OPR maps, but the team does want to improve the current map so are looking to do just that with the cross-server OPR update that is on the road map.
I think this is the right approach for OPR and a new map would divide the players even further than they are today. It is basically the same issue as having too many mutation levels for expeditions. Fewer is better and in the case of OPR, as it requires 40 players, one is enough. It is still my favorite game mode and I am no where near tired of the map. The one thing I'd want is to fix the wide open spaces to give players more of a chance to navigate the map without getting musket sniped. Annnnnd that is my input on the community question that was posed (see screenshot)... basically keep OPR the great game mode it is with some improvements for traveling around.
Also not on the roadmap but covered in the video was that expedition mutations will be "squashed" from 10 levels into fewer. They want to combine this with a grouping of changes for expeditions and mutations.
Basically this was a polite "please be patient, we are doing a lot of good stuff" message in a community Q&A. Ultimately the proof is in the pudding and aside from one minor item, Leaderboards, the team delivered above and beyond on the first year's roadmap. Anyone looking at the past year of the game and saying the team is not delivering is just being ignorant. Keep up the great work AGS!
