An Update on the Party Update
Hi folks! Apologies for not talking about this earlier; I’ve been kind of head-down on the Party Update (the next big update for MT2) for much longer than I really intended; It turned out to be a lot more technically challenging than I expected – our AI systems were not designed with close coordination between players in mind, so it’s been a bit of a struggle to make them all work together!
About a week ago I put up the first attempt at the ‘Party’ build into the game’s ’test’ branch on Steam. (If you own the game on Steam, please feel free to give it a try if you’re interested!) But feedback from early testers showed a bunch of misbehaviours which have been causing heaps of problems; parties getting separated, leaders wandering off without their parties, and the whole thing just feeling a little flaky, so over the past few days I’ve been rebuilding the feature in a more reliable way, which keeps parties more tightly synchronised.
A party of players on their way to fight evil
I’m hoping to have this all wrapped up within another day or two; I’ll be putting that up as another updated build on the ’test’ branch to let people play with it once it’s ready to go, and then promote it to the ‘default’ branch once early testers declare it ready for prime time. Apologies again for how long this has taken!
Also over on the ’test’ branch right now, incidentally, is a new “Unsubscribe Reasons” report, which can tell you what players have given as reasons for unsubscribing from the game (along with tracking the total number of unsubscribers over time), and there’s some new AI logic which has low-income subscribers save up their money to pay subscription fees (which often they would fail to pay before, as they’d spent all their money at the time that the fee became payable), and.. there’s the other big news.
We’ve now got a new artist working on the game, so expect to see a bunch of new building model variants either rolled in as part of the Party Update, or within a day or two before or after. I’m super excited for everyone to see these!
In other news.. I’ve been thinking about adding a new major update to our roadmap. I’m calling this update the “Combat 2.0” update, and I’ve been thinking about putting it somewhere in between the Party Update and the Dungeon Update. This would be a big clean-up of combat customisation to make the whole system simpler and cleaner than it is now, and would also add debuff effects like slows, stuns, and other debuffs, as well as more visual configurability that we’ve needed forever.
I had previously been thinking about doing that work later on, sometime between the MS18 and MS19 milestone builds, but as I’m playing the game more, I’ve been feeling like we need it more urgently than that, so I’m thinking about bumping it forward. I’m definitely interested in what people would think of getting that into the game before even the dungeon update, or whether folks feel that dungeons are more important to have implemented first!