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EpicDuel PVP Game Design Notes
 | March 25, 2011 Mission Possible!Be Famous! This week we decided to give everyone their 15kb of fame. With our new and improved character pages, you can search, view win records, and increase the fame of different players. You can vote for as many characters as you like, once per day. We've even added an in-game leaderboard to list the most famous, and infamous, players!
Are you more famous than me? Probably. Grab Your Popcorn! To make EpicDuel more cinematic and create a more immersive experience for new players, we have implemented a short intro cutscene leading up to your first confrontation with a new and improved City Guard!
The new and improved City Guard would like to assert that his lawn is not an acceptible venue. You can also click on Oz in Central Station to view the EpicDuel Trailer. It's pertinent to the story, and it's been off the site for awhile, so we decided it was time to bring it back in-game.
There goes the property values! New Missions! While you're at Oz, you might want to try his latest missions, including our very first PvP mission! You'll need to win 12 challenge matches to prevail and win Oz's respect. Can you do it? We plan to add a new mission type each update until EpicDuel has a mission system to rival any other AE RPG! Server Lock! Anyone's who's played in the wee hours of the night may have seen very low player numbers on Doom or Legion. Few players means few matches, making EpicDuel especially frustrating for new players who don't know to log into more populated servers. Low population servers will now automatically lock if the number drops below a certain point, encouraging dense servers with quick matches. As an added bonus, it will make practices like dummying and piloting much more difficult. Where's Titan?! Titan and Nightwraith have been relocated to other parts of Delta V. We're starting a big renovation of Central Station to make it more streamlined and accessible. Also prettier. Much prettier. Ongoing Engine Improvement! We're still working to update the Engine to the new standard. Titan tells me it could be finished as soon as next week! Tags: Nightwraith Cutscene Character Page Fame Titan Engine Missions |
| March 17, 2011 Did you bring your green hat?Happy St. Patrick's Day, EpicDuelists! Did you bring your green hat? To celebrate, we've got a piping hot batch of new content for you, including new holiday rares, new Faction flags, and our very first EpicDuel quest! New Holiday Rares! Out with the old, in with the new. The Heartbreaker rares are going into storage for another year and for the first time in EpicDuel's history, we are introducing a whole batch of high level St. Patrick's Day rares to vanquish your foes and impress your friends.
Let's not forget about the centerpiece of the new rare set: the Celtic Cleaver. This weapon will replace Azrael's Bane as our new promo weapon, which will come free with the 10,000 varium package, in addition to being sold by Zedmyr in-game. This soon-to-be legendary sword will offer a +7% bonus chance to connect on regular strikes. For clarification, this means that you will be more likely to hit your opponents, and, conversely, they will be less likely to block you. It does not effect your personal block rate.
For anyone interested in how this awesome weapon was made, I created a time-lapse Toutube video of it's creation. I hope I made a better music choice this time. :p
Quests: After much sweat and feverish coding, quests are now a part of EpicDuel. Of course, we want to make sure it doesn't break first! That's why we are offering an achievement for completing this proto-quest and helping us test the engine: Mission Possible. This should be a gimme if you're lucky enough to talk to Oz while the quest is offered. Hopefully, it's only the start of bigger and better things for the quest engine!
Ongoing Engine Progress: Titan is still gradually shifting the Engine over to 2.0 standards. Again, it's a tedious, exhaustive process that goes largely unnoticed until it's finished. We don't want to do it all at once and risk not knowing what we broke, so it will continue in phases as planned and should be finished sometime next month. As usual, report any bugs in the EpicDuel forums. We are also experimenting with a new graphical change that could allow EpicDuel to perform much faster on slower computers and mobile devices. If it works, we could significantly reduce animation lag (which is based on your computer's CPU, not to be confused with server lag, which is based on connection speed and stability). |
 | March 15, 2011 Earthquake Disaster ReliefThe recent earthquake tragedy in Japan has affected people in all parts of the world, including here at the Underground Lab. Thankfully, all our family and friends in Japan survived the catastrophe. However, Japan is still struggling to provide food, shelter, and medicine to all affected people. In response to this tragic event, we at Artix Entertainment have donated $5,000 to the Japanese Red Cross Society. We hope this contribution helps in the relief effort. You can visit www.RedCross.org for information on how you can help too! Tags: Titan Earthquake disaster relief Japan donate Red Cross |
| March 09, 2011 What Is Your Quest?Probably the most glaring feature missing from EpicDuel since it's launch has been quests. Players are told through forum posts and bits of NPC chat that they're in some kind of war on some planet called Delta V or something like that. Well, soon that will all change as we work toward dynamic quest system that allows players to have fun within EpicDuel's PvP gameplay while driving the storyline forward. Quests: Launching quests today proved impossible as there simple was not enough time to complete the system and properly test it. We're still pushing hard to get this feature in-game soon, and hopefully we'll have it 100% ready for a St. Patrick's Day release!
New Weapons: While the quest system is still up in the air, one thing we can be sure of is this week will see the delivery of a nice fat pile 'o weapons! Many of these credit-only beauties will be available from the merchant just outside of the Bazaar!
Charfade has produced some wild new weapons for this release with a focus on mid-ranged weapons to help out our newer players. Leveling up is a daunting task that's made even more difficult by a simple lack of knowledge about the locations of the best weapons. Some players may even become frustrated and quit just because they don't know where to find a better weapon, a weapon that could literally be a few clicks away. Our goal was the create a new shop that caters to leveling players as they advance through the ranks. Security Improvements! We're continuing our effort to secure EpicDuel from hackers and exploiters by rewriting and patching a ton of code! Titan is working very hard to make the game same and secure, but in the meantime we ask you to do your part by reporting hackers to the Lawman! Bugs:
EpicDuel 2.0: You may be wondering why we haven't been delivering any "wham bang" updates lately. Where are 2v1 battles? Where are tournaments? Where are quests? I demand an explanation! Well, settle down champ, the answer is actually pretty complicated. EpicDuel was our first major project, and as with any first venture in anything, there were mistakes, or rather, things we would have done differently if we had more experience. Now, there are over 100k lines of code that are in dire need of an overhaul that we've put off for too long. In order to move forward and deliver those promised features, Titan has taken upon himself wade through the game's code and update it all to a new standard, essentially an EpicDuel Engine 2.0. This process is not easy or expedient, but it will make EpicDuel faster, more secure, and, of course, more fun for all players. We are planning to replace the engine in phases with each release until the entire engine is completely new, shiny 2.0. This gradual process will take roughly a month to complete. This update, after tremendous amounts of labor and intense bug testing you should notice...nothing! That's right! For this first phase of EpicDuel 2.0, if everything was done correctly, the game should appear exactly the same as before. That means we didn't break anything, which is a triumph in and of itself. Each subsequent update will hopefully be just as transparent. Because such massive changes to the Engine are taking place, we badly need your help for this release helping us squish any remaining bugs. Literally every line of code was altered and there aren't enough hours in a day to test every possible scenario. If you identify any bugs, big or small, please post them in the bug's section of the AE forums! St. Patrick's Day: Next Thursday is going to be a Massive release with a capital M. New St. Patrick's Day gear, quests, styles, faction flags, an open Bazaar, and an improved engine all in the same day! Since we're celebrating a new holiday season, all the Heartbreaker weapons will be returning to the ether where all seasonal rares go, including Azrael's Bane. This means that you'll have until Thursday at the release time to grab the last of the Heartbreakers before they're replaced by the new seasonal gear. Tags: quests pvp mmo EpicDuel Nightwraith |
