I wanted to post a quick update to let everyone know that Open BETA is officially on the horizon. We’ve still got a remarkable amount of work ahead of us to get things going but we are extremely pleased with where we are at thus far, placing us squarely in the final stretch.
Open BETA Goals:
This Open BETA push will largely be our way of getting large-scale file distribution to our player-base prior to launch, but will also be a milestone in our development. The majority of our major systems are in — minister control, heroes combat, world wars, artifact crafting, and so on. Closed BETA has gone far better than we could ever have hoped for.
We’ve got a few “major” things we’re trying to iron out and will be implementing them throughout Open BETA, and we’ll be doing it all while we tackle any bugs or errors you may find or any good ideas that you may suggest.
We want to heavily address the basic fundamentals of the game; and by heavily address, I do not mean: “make it more like the way other Ultima Online shards have been”. Farming and killing monsters in Ultima Online is a poorly developed system at its core, especially in regards to high-end monsters. We’re not claiming we are going to re-invent the wheel here, but we’re certainly looking to improve upon what is already there.
Yes, we will be testing everything right along with you!
What can you do during Open BETA?
I’d like to give you an idea of what we’re interested in achieving during Open BETA. First and foremost, whatever you’re ‘good’ at or want to do in Ultima Online, do it. Let us know how you like our systems, if you found any bugs with them, have any concerns, and so forth.
Beyond that, we’ve got a few key things we are very interested in..
Skill Gain
How is it? We want our combat skills to feel brisk. We’re not saying you’ll be fully fleshed out on a 7x GM character in a few days after starting from scratch, but we don’t want you to feel like you’re grinding away at nothing. When you consider stacking skill gain bonus potentials from dungeon gains and citizenship bonuses, things can get pretty quick. Conversely, we want our crafting to be difficult; the prosperity of a good strong crafting community relies on the fact that players have a community to sell their wares to. When everyone is able to be self-sufficient with their own crafter because it is too easy, they lose out on potential patrons.
Economy
Are you able to find anything that seems imbalanced relative to other methods of making gold? How does the economy, for a lack of a better term, feel to you? We’re looking to curb some of the rapid inflation that plagues Ultima Online.
Combat
This one cuts deep and in many ways. This extends to the hero capture system, to world wars, to simple combat mechanics. Can you break the hero capture system? Are any of them too overpowered? Are any of them simply too weak?
Ultimately, we want testing and feedback on everything. In the days ahead we’ll outline things more thoroughly and set up some focused test dates. We’ll also reveal some of the perks we’re planning for our BETA testers.
Open BETA is currently set to launch at 8pm Eastern Standard Time, on November 11th (yes, that’s tomorrow).
