Ranger Sheck's Blog

Been a while since I’ve posted, so I thought I’d at least mention what’s happening in Aethora right now.

We’re currently running an event called “Pioneers Week”. Here’s the short description:

Pioneers Week is the time when people all over Hopilus celebrate the anniversary of the discovery and colonization of their continent. They honor the struggle and the achievements of their forefathers, and due to this great attention to the past and its protagonists, the flow of ather itself shifts, temporarily, creating echoes of those who have lived and worked that walk around in places where they worked and acted.

You can find these echoes – ghosts, as some call them – although you have been told they are rather weak echoes, and that there are more powerful, permanent and natural ones all over Hopilus. All towns have some old town square or town hall where the first colonists of that town appear, and on the roads you may be challenged by others, who are remembered for traveling, and like a challenge or who have failed, and are resentful for it.

The event lasts one “week”, which really means two weeks. This is the second event we’ve done in Aethora, and I think it’s going … well, it’s going ok. One goal we have with events is to make them challenging. The skill system in Aethora gives us the chance to introduce new NPC-only skills just for an event, which really levels the playing field and even the most maxed-out players will find it challenging. Unfortunately, we are finding that we may have made the event a little too challenging. Some players are getting frustrated. The dedicated players know that if they stick with it, and start with the lower level areas and work their way up to the harder stuff, they will enjoy it. However, I think more casual players are turned off by the scenario. If they have played enough to be high level, they tend to start playing the event in the high level areas and then are quickly lambasted by the event NPCs.

So what have we learned from this experience?

Well, for one thing, we’re not going to add event-only “roamers” to the world next time. They can be a real pain in the neck for players – those players that logged out in a high level area, come to the event, and then want to travel back to the low level areas to train up have a chance of being jumped by roaming event NPCs surrounding those high level areas. As you can imagine, players find this a little irritating, because these NPCs are extremely tough. And, as my lead designer put it – not everyone likes being forced into an event.

Secondly, we’re thinking the event should be more focused – in other words, it should have a clearer goal. Perhaps centered around a certain mission or something. We like for certain aspects of the event to be repeatable, so the hardcore players can enjoy it fully, but I think casual players might appreciate achieving a sense of accomplishment by finishing the main “mission” of the event. In our current event, there are two “mini-missions”, but they are really just set-ups for single encounters with rewards for their completion.

Lastly, while an event is great fun and gives us a chance to flex our creative muscles, perhaps even introduce some humor and temporary silliness to the game, we know that “real” updates to the game would probably be more attractive to our player base at this point. Initially, we had hoped that doing a few events would be an easy way to crank out some temporary content to keep players interested in Aethora. Unfortunately, the work behind an event actually takes a lot more time than you might think.

The good news is that we’ll be able to re-use the work that we’ve done and bring two events back each year, with some improvements. In the meantime, it’s time to get back to work on more permanent content and code updates!