Discovered: An Ancient City
Early next week, we will introduce the Ancient City back into the game. It will be an event map that spawns in both PvP and PvE form, with only rarity available on the PvP version. Next week with the release we’ll have a full post that lays out the new experiences available on the Ancient City, as well as the brand new gameplay mechanics.
Today we’ll introduce another small packing update which should improve unpacking and resolve all the known issues. We’ll monitor over the weekend and then begin burning additional tiles when we patch Ancient City.
Patchnotes:
- Improved unpacking checks to finish with the packing for good and start burning tiles.
- Fixed all the remaining known issues with packing.
Q&A
We’ve been promising a Q&A for a while. Originally it was in regards to the planned PvP update, but since we’ve talked about several other things since then, we figured we would open it up to anything. Based on the questions, it seems like a lot of the devblogs weren’t read fully. If you have any questions, there is a lot of good transparent information in them and we recommend going back through them. Either way, we’ll answer a few of the questions in each devblog until we get through them.
Question 1: Are you going to revert back to S1/2/3/4?
Short answer, no. The big changes we made when we started designing S5 were for reasons that we considered fully over long periods of time and we still believe in those reasons. That isn’t to say that features won’t ever come back individually, or even more likely, that we’ll bring individual functionalities back in some way that mitigates the previous problems we saw while still giving most if not all of the benefit.
In the QoL devblog we talked about many of the features that are often mentioned when referring to past seasons, like the lobby, traveling, nomadism, etc.
Question 2: Are you going to improve dedicated servers? For example, things like dedicated UI, updated command list, new commands, etc.
Yes, these are some of the things that we will eventually do, but unfortunately, at the time, they're on the backburner while we work on getting all of the features we want into S5.
Question 3: Will the wingsuit come back? Are you going to revert the grapple?
The wingsuit will return, later in progression. We’ll be implementing some changes to the grapple next week with the AC update.
As we all know, the grappling hook is a ton of fun, but anyone who has played for any length of time in PvP knows the downsides.
When first designing S5, PvE maps were not meant to be all of the progression. This obviously changed over time as we considered things, but we didn’t reconsider that since players will have entirely safe from PvP options through most or all of the PvE progression, that we could live with a grapple that allowed a bit more skill expression.
We won’t be completely reverting the grapple. Obviously grappling in combat had quite a lot of bugs, so the changes ultimately fixed a lot of the most egregious problems in mutual PvP, but also we believe the stamina cost on grapple is a good balancing tool that needs to be adjusted more. But we will be buffing/rebalancing the grapples across the board in various ways.
Question 4: Schematics?!
Most of our plans for schematics are detailed in the PvP devblog. Tl;dr is you’ll be able to learn how to craft most schematics with the PvP update and the AC update will allow to buy schematics at the Trade Stations.
We know there are still some pain points, like inventory management, etc, and we’ll continue to monitor those as we go along.
Question 5: When will modding be supported?
As with everything, an ETA is just not something we can commit to. But it is something we want to do. The issue is that it will require a ton of mostly transparent work and we want to get to a point where the base game is fun to play before we commit that time. Most likely, we'll dedicate a long stretch of time for it after full release.
