Asheron's Call: Status Report Q&A #1
Wouter "Hyrrix" Ryckbosch, 2003-07-31

In the Status Report feature we bring our readers a short Q&A on a regular basis with the developer team of currently active mmorpg's. It is our aim to provide them with a short overview of the changes and improvements that have been accomplished in the past few months or are still in the pipeline. Today we ask about the current status and future plans concerning the original Asheron's Call.

Jessica Mulligan: No comment.

Jessica Mulligan: Towards the beginning of this year, we made some sweeping changes to our creature content -- not the underlying technology, you understand, but just in how we created and organized our creatures. At one time, the creatures of Dereth made sense, both in terms of which environment they appeared in and of their difficulty, so that the easiest creatures to defeat appeared near newbie towns and the most dangerous creatures were in the Direlands. However, three years and several storylines later, much of the sense had been lost. The biggest issue was a maturing playerbase -- more powerful elder characters meant that we needed more dangerous creatures for them to hunt, while still preserving areas for the younger characters. In addition, a previous effort to redistribute creatures had ignored their natural habitats, which made it very difficult for a player to guess where they might find certain creatures. You'd think mosswarts would have a hard time in the deserts, what with their delicate amphibian skin, but there they were ... We knew that correcting these situations would take a good deal of work, but we also felt that having an interesting, logical and overall fun landscape was a great benefit for players.

We started by defining six different ranges of character: newbie, low, mid, high, extreme and uber. We use these labels to refer to character level -- newbie is 1 to 20, low level is 20 to 40, etc -- but because AC is a skill based game, this is really a shorthand for where the character's skills fall. For instance, you may be level 120, but if you are primarily a crafting character and you have the same sword skill that we expect of a level 40 character, then from our point of view you fall into the low level range when you hunt. At any rate, once we had defined these ranges, we laid them out in broad strokes on the map of Dereth. The lowest ranges occur right around the starter towns, of course, and the land becomes progressively more dangerous as you move towards the frontier. Within these broad level ranges, we set up creature enclaves based on the terrain type. So, a low level mountainous area is more likely to spawn low level mattekars, while a mid-level swamp is more likely to spawn mid level moarsmen. Some creatures occur all over, like drudges, but specialized creatures no longer occur far from their natural environment.



Once we had the map down, we had to figure out which creatures fit where. In many cases, this meant creating new variations. In other cases, this meant adjusting the stats on existing creatures so that they fit better in their intended range. We ended up with way too many low level Tumeroks, so some of them become mid or high level instead. As we designed the creature's skills, we used the expected player skills within each level range as a guide and also accounted for differences in buffs and equipment. This was quite challenging -- AC supports a wide variety of playstyles, and it can be difficult to define an 'average' player of a certain level. But through extensive debate and playtesting, we ended up with a satisfying balance. We were also careful to keep in mind the historical differences in creatures -- some are more vulnerable to missile attacks, some are more vulnerable to acid, etc. -- but we corrected some issues with the scale of these differences. We preserved the flavor of these creatures but softened the scale. Another part of this effort involved balancing risk versus reward -- the experience reward for killing many creatures in Dereth increased to better match the risk of hunting them.

The bulk of this effort was accomplished over two monthly updates, although we continue to add new creatures and to fine-tune our work. The end result was basically a whole new landscape to explore. Although the creature redistribution and rebalance was an awful lot of work, we feel that it was well worth it. Not only are the creatures of Dereth a lot more fun to hunt these days, but with luck we won't have to go through this process again for at least another three years.

Feel free to check out the redistribution map.

Jessica Mulligan: We're in the middle of a six month arc right now, which is scheduled to end in October. Knowing the team, there will be another one after that, . It is what they are famous for.

Jessica Mulligan: The balancing was actually accomplished before the new story arc began in May. The priority right now is the new arc, which includes adding new monsters, dungeons and hunting areas to Dereth, and some work of going back over existing dungeons and polishing them a bit. We've also added another engineer to the team (Zyrca from the community, for those in the know) and srand is bringing her up to speed on the code. Zyrca is already contributing by fixing some old bugs that have annoyed us and the players for a while.