Successful Playtest & New Features: Character Customization and Random Loot
Hiho!
Last month, Eldria had it's first playtest! We had never had more than two people online at once, and I was half expecting things to fall apart as soon as you guys showed up.
Well, 25 people joined for this spectacle on September 20th. And yes, you found a LOT of things to break.
25 players and 38 things to fix
There were client crashes and disconnects. Some people had trouble downloading the client or logging into the website. A friendly hacker found a chat exploit which was reponsibly reported.
And then there was the PvP situation: PvP was supposed to be turned off in Mirenroot for the test. But a bugged spell could still be used against other players. Sorry to all of you who died by my hand lol.
It was a mess, but also so much fun. I was super happy to meet you in-game! We peaked at nine concurrent players online. These are tiny numbers for an MMO, but a huge deal for us. Thank you to everyone who joined, put up with the broken bits, and took the time to tell us what happened.
I came away from the playtest with 38(!) points of feedback that needed fixing immediately, and many more ideas for future improvements. Quite the to-do list and I have spent a good chunk of the month working through what you found: big objects not rendering correctly across floors, login timeouts, blood splashes not decaying, name and email validation causing errors, DoTs bypassing PvP restrictions (lmao), illegible text in certain places, and much much more.
There hasn't only been bug fixes however - I would have gone mad - so let's talk about some new features!
Richer character customization
Character styles have been been stiff until now. Yes - there was an outfit system and some starter clothing presets to choose from. But now you can additionally pick your hair, skin, and eye colours. Those body colours stay with your character even when you change clothes later in-game.
Earl in the town square will temporarily offer a makeover service for those of you who have already created your characters with the old default look. You can preview different hair, skin, and eye colours, then pay a small copper fee to apply them.
That corpse has something for you
The looting UX was atrocious before, and we've done several things to improve it.
-
We've implemted a shimmer on corpses that contain loot you can take. It disappears when the corpse is empty, and you won't see it on loot that belongs to someone else.
-
Looting no longer requires dragging from the corpse container to your own inventory (super annoying). You can right-click loot items and they'll be transferred to your inventory automatically.
-
Loot now has proper ownership. The first player to actually damage a monster claims its loot, and nearby members of their party can loot it too. Party loot is shared, so you'll still have to agree on who takes what. But another player outside the group can't just walk up and take everything.
Introducing: Random roll loot
One final headline-feature that I've already teased on Discord, is that some items now have random-roll stats.
- of Prowess adds Might and Finesse.
- of Resolve adds Might and Will.
- of Insight adds Finesse and Will.
The amounts can vary, so one Broadsword of Prowess could give you +3 Might and +2 Finesse, and another one could give you +1 Might and +4 Finesse. Those bonuses come on top of the item's normal stats, and you can see the exact values in its tooltip.
We've been talking about doing this for a while, so I'm glad it's finally in. It's a fun way to create variety and adds a reason to grind for the right item. Finding another copy of a sword you already own should still give you a reason to look at it. Maybe this one's a better fit for your character, or maybe your friend would get more use out of it.
We've still got plenty to work through from the playtest, and a lot of your suggestions go beyond fixing bugs. Some of them make us rethink how parts of the game should work at all. That's exactly why I wanted you guys to get your hands on it this early.
Thank you again for spending your Sunday with our unfinished little MMO. I'm looking forward to seeing you in-game again soon.
Join the Discord to keep up with the latest chatter!
See you in Mirenroot!
