Arx Fatalis XBox Developer Diary part 3: On our way to GOLD
Sia' Garrett' Manzari, 2003-09-17

Arx Fatalis is a 3D first person dungeon crawler RPG by Arkane Studios, which has been released for PC last year and is currently in the process of being ported to the XBox. In this monthly series of developer diaries by Arkane Studios we will get to know about this process...enjoy the third entry:

On our way to GOLD

08/26/03
Finally. We've fixed this nasty "tweak mesh" bug. The game was suffering from this bug since the early builds. Our NPCs didn't have their correct mesh. Sometimes after coming back in some levels, NPCs didn't have the correct head and even women NPCs were naked…!.

08/29/03
Alright. This is our final diary before the game goes GOLD. We're now working on fixing the last of the bugs. We've also been spending these last days working on testing and improving some elements of the gameplay along with some AI bugs.

We've also added a quick "Arcade" magic system. We think it would be cool to give an easier approach to the magic in Arx so we've designed "direct casting" systems which allows you to cast spells without having to do the rune combos on the d-pad. However for the ones who will try the unique Arx "rune drawing system", there will be some secret spells to be found (which are not active through the arcade mode).

09/03/03
It is also time to check, for one last time, the forums to be sure we haven't forgotten any player comments about the PC version. By the way, we've finally increased the number of precast spells to five instead of three. We've also decreased some enemy strength, as some of them have been really difficult to beat for many players on the original version. The game looks well balanced now and we hope it will appeal most of you:)

09/08/03
The end of September will be a crazy month and have us hard at work. We have to finish the Xbox official playable demo. This time the demo will feature one level of the crypt, so you'll be able to go straight into the action. Indeed, we've re-designed the 1st level of the crypt especially for this demo, with some cool weapons and spells to be discovered. It's some kind of bonus level in fact, as this level won't be in the final game.

09/15/03
We have sent off our first master candidate to Microsoft; we're now waiting for their feedback. On the first week, they will check all the XBOX TRCs and, if the result is ok, the game will go on a second week for a gameplay test. We should have an answer from Microsoft in the coming hours, so we'll soon know if we're going on gameplay test or not. Finger crossed!