There will be a patch going out today (3/31) with a few bug fixes as well as a requested feature brought back, a Tavern!
With the increase in players being at home, and keeping with the social distancing most countries are requiring, it is getting harder and harder to be able to get those social discussions and interactions. While we had this slated for a little later release this year, the team worked on getting it out ahead of the Mini Story Pack, to try and give the players a common hangout to come together and interact.
This is not the entire plan that we have for the tavern, we would like to add an instanced room (similar to entering a dungeon) where you could go with your party and have your own quite room to meet and discuss plans, interview future fellowship members, or even teach a class to fellow players. We also have a few more functionality ideas we would like to see implemented like a mini game of sorts in the future.
Note: the instanced meeting room should be coming out in the coming month, while the mini game will be farther in the future.
Currently the Tavern is set to the same player size as other zones, but one additional change we made is rendering other player models for Quest players up to 30 players in this area (as opposed to 10 in overworld before becoming “ghosts”). With the minimalist environmental art and lack of enemies inside the Tavern we are going to try it out, but will be adjusting this number based on our own testing on live, along with player feedback. We are hoping that with this change that it will give quest players a place to meet more of the in game community, and interact with more players.
Note- One note I’d like to make on this is while it can be a lot of fun to cast runemage spells rapidly, this can cause performance problems for other players. This can be even more compounded for quest users that will now render more of the other players in the main room, we added a “practice room” for this you can access from the tavern with practice dummies that is far enough away from the main tavern room to try and keep performance at its highest.
Tavern includes–
- Main Tavern room
- Side meeting room (non-instanced shared room)
- Practice Room (3 dummies lvl left to right in room-30,20,10)
The Tavern is located right outside the Player House door, next to critter capture, with a Bottle and Plate sign above the door.
Patch Notes
- Updated Highsteppe tree to remove Winter foliage
- Updated Battleground to remove Winter foliage
- Added Highsteppe Tavern
- Fixed a bug causing FPS drops while Invis pot active