28.11.17-Weekly community newsletter – War paint and bed bugs

Welcome back! Hope you had a good weekend!

Winter has come at last over here in Norway, and it's been snowing off and on for the past couple of weeks. Hopefully global warming hasn't screwed us over too much and we'll get a white Christmas this year.

We'll be celebrating barbarian style, of course: eating with our hands and making a mess so we can know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on our palates.

Current state of PC
We hotfixed PC last week to take care of some issues that remained after Update 31 was released. You should now be able to harvest crystals and have building pieces attach to your foundations again. Foundations are still known to disappear from time to time, but this is due to a bug that might occur if you log off away from your base. We believe we have a fix for this already, it just needs additional testing.

Now that update 31 is out we've started looking at what to patch during the time leading up to Christmas. We want the game to be at a satisfying level of stability and polish during the Christmas break, after all. As always, we will keep you informed of how we move forward.

Current state of Xbox
The next PC/Xbox parity patch is going through and we want roll it out this week. This patch will bring all the PC changes to the Xbox, which includes repair kits, new building pieces and thrall inventories. Once that (and eventual hotfixes) are out of the way we'll start looking at the next patch for Xbox.

We also did some quick server-side maintenance on the official Xbox One servers on Friday, which seems to have greatly improved server stability. This does not mean we are done with our work to improve upon client and server stability, both on PC and on Xbox. Please let us know if things aren't working for you and provide us with as much information as you can.

What the teams have been working on in the past week:
Every Friday, the development team meets up to highlight and talk about what they’ve been working on recently: New content and features, bugs that have been fixed, and things to come down the pipeline. In this newsletter wee're sticking to the highlights. Things are still being worked on "behind the scenes", and we'll mention these when they're relevant.

Vanguard
We have an update from the Vanguard team this week! It's been a while. Since the last time we heard from the Vanguard they have gained a new addition to the team: Paul, who's joining Funcom as a junior gameplay programmer.

Paul's been working on improving the way swimming works in the game. Currently, you sink immediately when you enter any body of water. Under the new system you'll automatically remain on the surface until you press crouch, which will cause you to sink into the depths. You hold down space to surface again, and you'll stay on the surface again once your head breaks water. The new method is more in line with conventions on how swimming in games is often done. The problem we are solving is that you can't reliably keep your head above water without constantly jumping out of the water like a dolphin. Making diving look better is next on the list.

Two more of our Vanguard coders have been giving the chat system some love, smoothing out bugs and issues. Once we roll out these changes you should be able to scroll properly using the up and down keys, and the text will format correctly to fit long usernames.

Basically, it used to look like this: (siehe Anhänge/Attachment)

Once we're done it'll look more like this:

The colors are based on the channel you're broadcasting to and aren't just randomly assigned anymore.

Over on the bug side of things some extensive work has been done on the bed and bedroll bugs. We've patched in fixes for bedrolls for PC (coming soon to Xbox) to make them more consistent when respawning, and there's a similar fix coming to beds as well. Beds will get an additional check when you're placing them to prevent you from putting somewhere you'd invalidate the spawn point. Please note that this is still something that needs extensive testing and it won't be rolled out immediately.

Finally, Vanguard has been helping out in with the backend implementation of war paint, which is coming down the line. You'll find more information about that from the Terraformers section.

Berserkers (Combat revamp and movement)
We did a Q&A heavy stream on Friday with lead designer Oscar Lopez Lacalle joining Joel Bylos and myself on the stream. Oscar is the head of the Berserkers team, in charge of revamping the combat system. On the Friday afternoon stream Oscar talked a lot of about the changes that are coming to combat and how this will impact the game.

VIDEO HIER
If you'd rather read a quick summary of the stream, you'll find a write-up over on the Steam Community Hub.

Terraformers (New areas and content)
I promised another look at the volcano and another look you shall receive. After that, some juicy bits about war paint!

Let's talk about war paint. You learn about war paint through the Feats window, like most other crafting recipes. You craft war paint using Papyrus, which creates a special pattern you then apply to your character.

There are two kinds of war paint. One is purely visual, with 7 different kinds of cultural styles and patterns you can apply. The other gives you a +3 bonus to one of your attributes. When we revamp the attributes system to include perks, war paint can be used to give you those extra stat points you'll need to unlock a particular perk or give you an edge in PvP. You can only have one pattern on at a time, so remember to choose wisely.

Cultural style war paint will last about a week in real time, but stat boosting war paint will fade after an hour. So, it could be a good idea to pack extra patterns. War paint will also be fully moddable by mod makers.

Wrapping up
Aaaand that's it for this week! Tune in next week for another update from the Exiled Lands. Maybe some more goodies from the art team? Maybe I'll finally find a decent way to wrap up these newsletters? Only time will tell.

Sincerely,

Funcom