EpicDuel PVP Game Design Notes

March 17, 2011

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).

Tags: EpicDuel celtic cleaver pvp mmo quests Nightwraith