Mythic is working behind the scenes, away from the spotlights. Pretty much everyone stopped discussing their games, all the attention is now about WoW, the occasional NCSoft exploits and the periodic SOE screwups.

All this seem to have had a positive effect on the game. Some of the original team doesn’t work anymore on DAoC but is shaping up Warhammer. This is also the reason why the “state of the game” letters aren’t anymore written by Mark Jacobs or Matt Firor but shapeshifted into “Producer’s letters” written by Jeff Hickman, who was promoted to that role months ago. They also seem more frequent and straight to the point compared to the old letters that came every six months and were filled with lots of PR fluff and hype.

The last patch in December was a very good one from my point of view and I think was well received by the community (even if I have been out of touch recently, so I may be wrong). The current feeling I have about the development is that things seem way more “paceful” behind the scenes and there’s a more constructive teamwork. Maybe DAoC has lost some of the ambition and push to surprise now that most of the hardcore work is focused on Warhammer but I believe that the new team has done a very good work at prioritizing the issues and steer the game toward a positive, progressive direction.

There isn’t anything that could draw the attention of new customers or amazing features in the work, but all they are doing seems rather solid and well planned. They are working consistently to address some of the most annyoing quirks and problems, making the whole game progressively better. Smaller steps, but with a more constructive attitude, like the tale of the ant and the grasshopper :)

The new patch (1.82) seems to follow this new direction. Build on top of the previous steps and slowly move to address some of the weak points of the game. Right now we have only the notes from the first fragment of this patch since the complete version won’t be pushed on the live servers till the end of February and more notes will be added as they will be finalized. From Sanya’s words:

That patch is scheduled to go live in late February. The patch after that is penciled in for late March or early April. We go to E3 in May, so we can’t usually patch that month. The next patch is penciled in for June.

Why so much interest about the schedule of the next patches? Because the “Class Enhancements” are one of the current main features and the one that gets more interest from the players. Mythic is focusing the work on a few classes for each patch, adding new skills and tweaking the gameplay more radically than what they used to do till now. So the players are mostly interested when “their class” of choice is going to be involved and, since DAoC has so many different classes, the plan will take a while to complete and the great majority of the players will have to wait their turn (and hope the changes are worth this wait).

The previous patch focused on the “heavy tank” classes (Armsman, Warrior and Hero), while this new one scheduled for late February will toy with three hybrids (Friar, Thane and Warden) and three assassins (Infiltrator, Shadowblade and Nightshade). This will bring the total number of class reworked to 9 on a total of 44 classes in the game.

In theory these changes shouldn’t be balanced fixes required to enjoy the game, but more a new round of development to make these classes feel more solid and fun. So the game works and should be already in a good shape to not make the wait too painful. People will never be happy when it comes to the classes and the balance in a PvP game but at least Mythic is working to improve what they think can be improved.

The rest of the patch (the part already revealed) addresses a few other smaller aspects that have actually a pretty large impact. The first is the possibility to finally open guilds and alliances to the players on different servers, which was a much needed fix when you consider that all the servers are now clustered together and that these limits were just annoying barriers for a community that has already its own difficulties due to the ascendancy of WoW.

Another much welcome change is about the mechanics of reactionary styles that I also ranted about somewhere in the previous months (I thought it was on that huge thread on F13 but it seems I’m wrong). I’m so glad that my evade styles should be finally usable. Before the change the speed of my weapon was slower then the time available for a reactionary style to trigger, so these styles simply didn’t exist for me. With the new change the player has three seconds to “react” and the style will register as correct right away, without depending on the speed of the weapon or other odd, unclear factors:

The style does not have to go off during the three second window. The only thing that must happen during the three seconds is you pressing the button.

Fact is that (if it works as expected) this will fix MUCH MORE than what is apparent, because the previous mechanics were really clunky and broken, making most of the styles just not work already in PvE, even less in the chaos of a RvR battle. So this small change is probably going to have a much bigger impact on the mechanics than what most players will expect and it will be interesting to see how things will change.

This is probably the first time that I see Mythic addressing effectively a problem at its core instead of just slapping a bandaid on it, breaking so many other things as a consequence. Instead this new mechanic is more solid, coherent and streamlined and it will fix other quirks in the use of styles. They did a really good work here, making the implementation correspond with good design and finally fixing a fundamental mechanic. I’ll try to find some time to test this to make sure that my expectations are met.

Then we have more bugfixes, some new animations added (another good point. DAoC needs more personality and variations for its generic and reused animations) and a graphic restyle of the Spiritmaster’s pets. All small steps that go in a positive direction, so I don’t have much to criticize.

Plus some tweaks to the newbie experience some of which I didn’t really understand. I’ll note that I really appreciate that Mythic is still trying to polish the game to make it more accessible and I will always support these changes even if most of the players will rant and ask the priority to be put on other parts of the game. But this is also something that Mythic has always done better than everyone else and that I believe is one of their best quality: keep imporving the game on all levels. In the specifics Cotswold (the Albion newbie starting town) and Mularn (Midgard’s one) are getting reorganized as it already happened for Hibernia. And two low level RvR dungeons (up to level 9) are being added to Darkness Falls to introduce new players to PvP.

This last change is the one that I didn’t quite understand because Darkness Falls is usually considered an high level dungeon and you don’t happen to “find” it if you don’t have already a decent knowledge of the game and its mechanics. There’s also the problem that the game has already low level RvR battlegrounds, but they are usually deserted and basically useless in the game. So I suppose that Mythic decided to streamline this part by making it more directly accessible. Probably opening entrances to these two RvR dungeons right by the newbie towns, as opposed to have to travel on the map to reach the border keep where you can port to the battlegrounds. These are all suppositions because the idea didn’t make sense when I first read it.

If my guess is right the idea is a nice one. New players will be able to have a taste of RvR right out of the box and without having to hunt specifically for this possibility, only to find that the battlegrounds are completely deserted. In this case the RvR dungeons will always be useful for some PvE in the case there aren’t other players around.

So the patch is shaping up rather well. The changes seem small but they are going to fix some major problems in the game and will probably have a much stronger impact than how it may appear at a glance. This is also the first part, the patch is supposed to grow and I hope there will be more interesting points beside the already announced work on the classes.

On the Herald a new “Producer’s Letter” appeared, confirming what I already wrote and commented here and what Sanya already anticipated in the Grab Bags.

Nothing in particular to rant about :) They are doing a good work overall.

(and I really have no clue why this took so much space to say nothing at all)