Greetings Mortals,
With our latest patch now released, we are excited to announce a shift in our development focus and the entering of a new phase for Mortal Online 2, the Era of Refinement.
Moving forward we will be working on and releasing patches at a much faster rate, with the goal being to update the game at least once a month.
These more rapid and smaller updates will be focused on a few key areas:
- Analytics driven balance adjustments
- Small scope but impactful quality of life improvements
- Small scope additions to existing content and features
This phase, the Era of Refinement, is planned to span until at least the end of the year, with multiple patches between now and then.
More Frequent Iteration
As many of you in the community know, our development cycles in the recent past have consisted mostly of larger patches that take several months to complete which contain a lot of content, such as the Reckoning & Sarducaa Expansions. This heavy focus on bigger, large scope updates left little time remaining for smaller changes.
As such, the Era of Refinement represents us taking the opposite approach, affording us the ability to make numerous adjustments to existing features and systems at a much more rapid pace than before. There are many areas of the game which are not functioning or behaving exactly as we would like, and we will be taking this opportunity to, exactly as the name implies, refine and tune them.
This applies especially to gameplay and balance adjustments, as the most reliable path to finding good balance is through frequent and consistent iteration and close observation, allowing us to hone in on sweet spots much faster. This means you can expect to see many small adjustments to various aspects of the game, but at the same time be confident in knowing that should something be pushed too far, that it will be course corrected in a timely manner.
Low Hanging Fruit
Staying in line with what this quicker pace of development allows for, we will be identifying and working on small content additions to existing systems and features where we can, such as additional event groups as a basic example.
We have a lot of ideas to work with here though, and you will likely hear more about this side of things in the next Into the Vault development update, where we will be going into specific detail about some of the more key items we are working on for this first patch of many.
Timeline Until Next Patch
The first of these patches is currently planned to be PTR tested starting on the 14th of October.
We Want Your Help
As there will be a long list of tweaks and changes in each of these updates, there will be a lot to sink your teeth into on each of the PTRs for those who brave the test realm regularly.
As always, we greatly appreciate everyone who helps test things out on the PTR and gives us feedback as it goes a long way. For these coming updates especially, we will be very interested to hear what you think about them before they hit the live server.
Lastly, we are very excited to be refining and updating the game in a way that we haven’t been primed to do for a long while, and the team is dug in and hard at work on this first patch which already contains some great changes and tweaks.
See you in Nave,
The Star Vault Team