All the new level-less stuff is coming Monday or Tuesday, not today...

[x4000]

Referring to this big huge mess of stuff.

Current Status:

1. Everything noted on the release notes above is done, except some of the visuals for things like the unlocks menu.

2. NOT noted in the release notes are the material costs for the tier 2-5 spells, which is... kind of important.  In our dev versions we've been testing those without having material costs, but for actual gameplay with them there need to be full crafting recipes.  That in turn is requiring more collateral design work than I'd expected, hence the main reason for the delay.  It's always the last cleanup stuff that drags you over the self-set deadlines; we had all this level-less stuff working early yesterday, but minus most of the interfaces to make it actually usable.  Now those are all there and mostly pretty reasonably fine-tuned, but that material costs is creating a holdup.  I really think that is the last thing!

3. Also, we've only been doing testing of this with Josh since this afternoon, and that's just not a lot of time for changes of this scope.  He already found a couple of regression test failures and one thing that broke multiplayer.  We've fixed those, but we'd still like to have some more testing before we hand this over to you guys.  Overall it seems really clean, and neither of those bugs would have caused data loss, but I'd rather have the experience be smoother than not.

4. On another note, Keith has already started working on one of the major new mission types for next week, so that won't be delayed either way.  If we wind up running over Monday, that just means that even more will be packed into this release.


So... things are going well, but a release today just wasn't in the cards despite my wishes.  I'm very excited about how much more interesting and natural this already makes the game feel to me, though, and after another week of working on missions I think it's going to be a night and day difference once again.  Very exciting times for me personally.

[eRe4s3r]

Ah this looks very interesting, seems like that is the update where the actual final game direction takes shape and opens up for the first time

One thing i was wondering though, will there be character portraits that are not rendered? I always thought drawn (Anime style or whatever) portraits fit sprite characters better because you can animate these portraits (mouth movement, blinking etc) much easier and put that in a dialog system

I am saying this, because i was just now playing Geneforge 5 and getting quite annoyed at the fact that while there is a wall of text with bad readability and small font there also wasn't any character portraits for characters i was talking to. It made me feel like i was in a IRC chat in a RP session instead of playing a game... not that AVWW is gonna have this issue.. just wondering either way

[x4000]

Ah this looks very interesting, seems like that is the update where the actual final game direction takes shape and opens up for the first time

Yep, I think so, too.

One thing i was wondering though, will there be character portraits that are not rendered? I always thought drawn (Anime style or whatever) portraits fit sprite characters better because you can animate these portraits (mouth movement, blinking etc) much easier and put that in a dialog system

I am saying this, because i was just now playing Geneforge 5 and getting quite annoyed at the fact that while there is a wall of text with bad readability and small font there also wasn't any character portraits for characters i was talking to. It made me feel like i was in a IRC chat in a RP session instead of playing a game... not that AVWW is gonna have this issue.. just wondering either way

The character portraits that we have now are generally what you can expect in the final version -- they're rendered, but they've got a painterly overlay on them.  I might change up the style of the painterly overlay at some point, but I don't know that I'll have time prior to 1.0 (or even if another style would work as well).  There's basically nothing hand-drawn with this game, as that requires us to spend money we don't have.

Personally I really prefer the non-character-portrait style of text popups in games (like in the SNES era), but it seems I'm in the minority these days.  And a game does feel a lot more modern, I have to admit, when it has the portraits.  I just miss the back and forth screenwriting-style character dialogue from, say, the original FF6.  The remakes lose something by making it broken up differently, in my opinion.  Not that that's really relevant to AVWW either, but still.

[eRe4s3r]

Ha Yeah but in FF6 you were probably also always hitting the button to make that text display fully, because you could read ten times faster than the fastest display setting for the text. I know they made this to sync sound effects with text but..

My ultimate standard is probably NWN1 - if dialog is there, it needs to have an avatar image mainly so you know who says what.  like there
http://i.i.com.com/cnet.g2/images/2002/pc/rpg/nwn/nwn_screen004.jpg

In Geneforge 5 they do this
http://rampantgames.com/blog/uploaded_images/GF5AlwanTalk-751686.jpg

Which i find absolutely terrible, notice the complete lack of proper color coding for narration and dialog parts and .. well its a fancy font, but fancy font =! easily readable font. NWN1 has even smaller font size, but is better readable.. funny... (Also NWN1 does not commit the mortal sin of interspersing dialog of a character with a narrator description. Yurrrrrr)

Now I get that this kind of high quality art (talking about NWN1 obviously ,p) is out of reach for now ;p (As artist, i am well aware that this entails high costs)

Basically i am just meaning to say, if you have to do dialog and narrative in-game then don't do it like Geneforge 5..... ;P

I know this is kinda random, but yeah, playing that game can make you become very random. ^^

Also, i just can't get over the fact how terrible Geneforge 5's dialog looks simply because there is absolutely no proper split between narration and dialog (with color coding, even). Now this probably does not even apply to AVWW ... narration should be done by the dialog itself after all... just saying.. random and all

[x4000]

All good, I understand.   And we plan to keep to having dialogue like we do now.  Though, there won't be a whole huge amount of dialogue in this game pre-1.0, I don't think.  That's just turned out to be more of a secondary focus than I expected, but I think that it will become more of a focus after 1.0.  Time will tell!

[KDR_11k]

So now it's AI War: The action game?

[keith.lamothe]

So now it's AI War: The action game?

There's a kind of truth to that   We've gone through a lot of phases of changes in the game design for this one, and we've still not been happy with what was coming out.  So to some degree we're falling back on mechanics that have more proven track records.  The games are nonetheless radically different games (it would be kind of difficult for them not to be), and there's a ton of things we'd like to do with AVWW if 1.0 does well, but if what you think you're seeing is a move towards suspiciously familiar mechanics, well, your eyes do not deceive you

[x4000]

I'm also always the one hoping that other developers will use some of the AI War mechanics in other games, so that those ideas will survive in the larger genre.  Well... I got to thinking why shouldn't I do that myself, too?

[x4000]

Just an update... it's going to be tomorrow, not today.  There's been a ton of new stuff put in today, and part of this release will indeed include a new mission reward as well all the tons of other improvements, but there's still too many last loose ends to actually release today.  The chance of releasing tomorrow looks extremely good, though.  Knock on wood.

[Jerebaldo1]

I too am excited by these changes. At first my heart skipped when I saw that all RPG aspects would be stripped away. I worried that you decided to abandon progression altogether and make a task based metroid game. But as I read the whole changelog and also thought of AI War, I realized that it would make the gameplay more compelling that ever before. So, I can quite understand this update taking a few days, and so it's no problem at all.

[Toll]

A question... I somehow got the feeling that I can't shake that you'll discard the new aspect or persona system that you were talking about (can't remember which of the names you used). Is this still planned to come in, or is it actually scrapped?

[x4000]

I too am excited by these changes. At first my heart skipped when I saw that all RPG aspects would be stripped away. I worried that you decided to abandon progression altogether and make a task based metroid game. But as I read the whole changelog and also thought of AI War, I realized that it would make the gameplay more compelling that ever before. So, I can quite understand this update taking a few days, and so it's no problem at all.

Thanks for that, glad it's sounding positive to a lot of folks -- that's always rewarding to see, rather than it being something that is divisive.

A question... I somehow got the feeling that I can't shake that you'll discard the new aspect or persona system that you were talking about (can't remember which of the names you used). Is this still planned to come in, or is it actually scrapped?

Yeah, those were scrapped I think in December.  Maybe it was more recently, I can't recall; I'm having trouble keeping track of the recent timeline.  Mechanically speaking, the sort of progression that we were going to do with them has been accomplished in other ways with all the other changes.  Story-wise, it's one of those things that turned out to be too large to fit into 1.0.  Some of the better ideas from the whole personas line of thinking might make a comeback post-1.0, but it really depends on what people are interested in.

I get the feeling that there are folks interested in some more story bits, and so we'll try to see what we can work in prior to 1.0 and afterward.  But in a lot of respects, given how procedural the game is, the story bits resist insertion.  It's kind of like putting a story into a string of RTS pvp matchups -- you can do it, but I'm not sure how compelling it would be.  And I'm not really keen to have a bunch of stuff in the game that is half-baked.  I'd rather have fewer really good things, rather than a lot of just alright things.

We're still sort of feeling our way along, chipping away everything that doesn't look like an elephant, but I think that the 1.0 state is firming up pretty well (with a target still in March for that).  If we try to push too much into 1.0, we're going to run out of funds to keep developing this out at our current staffing levels, and I hate laying people off (having had to do it multiple times in the past).  Arcen really isn't in any danger at this point, but we can't maintain our current staffing levels more than another few months without actually coming out with a new game that is reasonably popular (as popular as AI War, or even less to some extent, would probably do -- though of course we'd like more).

All that said, you know how we like to do things here -- even ignoring the expansions, just the base game of AI War has grown by incredible leaps and bounds since its own 1.0 came out.  My intent is to do the same here, unless that's not something that will keep on the lights, so to speak.  The goal for 1.0 is to have a focused, awesome-all-the-way down experience, and then for post-1.0 we want to start branching out on top of that base system.

[Toll]

Oh, I have no doubts it'll come in eventually, even if it isn't in 1.0. And yes, I'm one of those that want some story Mostly the historical parts though, that might be revealed as we play along; what caused everything, who are/were the Ilari, where did the seal come from, why do the Overlords even want to destroy the continents, why is it so windy to start with... That stuff. After all of that, we kinda form our own story, and I agree there's not much story to add to that; we go out and kick some righteous butt, and that's enough for me.

[x4000]

Yeah, including a lot of backstory and letting players solve the mysteries of the past is something we've been touting from the beginning, and something that really interests both Keith and I personally, as well.  The ideas and so forth are all there.  Doing it in a gameplay-integrated way that is engaging... is harder than we expected, though.  On the one hand I'm not sure if people would be mad with us if we delayed something like that until after 1.0 -- critics and our non-core fans, I mean, when I say "people."  On the other hand, I worry about spreading our resources too thin on too large of a scope at this particular point, so we'll just have to see.

Ideally we'll figure out a way to work some of that in 1.0, enough to keep people satisfied but wanting more, and then that would be something we could expand upon post-1.0.  But we'll just have to see how it goes!

[Hyfrydle]

How will all the changes in the upcoming update affect existing worlds? Would a restart be advised?