Patch 0.700a is out on Stable and Frontline!
Patch Info
Summary
The stable is finally updated! Tai Ming is now available in all its supposed splendor, together with a bunch of quality-of-life changes for stable users, like updated world map and damage numbers.
Details
For Frontline users, the only things that have changed are an added shield built from Thorn Worm parts, as well as Kinton's arm being healed and Sizou being a bit more vague on the subject of how long Zhamla has been gone.
Frontline users might notice that their version now also says Stable, and that's because they are currently one and the same! When new Frontline content comes out, the version will be called Frontline again.
As for DRM free Humble Builds, these will come in about a week! The reason for this is that there is no automatic updates or even update notification system on Humble, meaning if there's some major bug that slipped through, or is caused by getting all the major changes all at once, the game would have to be redownload and reinstalled. Thus, we like to treat the DRM-free version as an "extra Stable" build to save everybody potential extra headaches.
Also, for those of you who have bought the OST, it has now been updated with all the new tracks found in Tai Ming! (Though at the time of writing this it's stubbornly refusing to download for me inside Steam)
Patch Notes
For Frontline users, it's just the above changes!
For Stable users, it's the combined content of several patches, and the best way to get it all listed is to go into the game, view the patch notes and press TAB to aggregate them into one giant set of patch notes. There might be some spoilery stuff in there, though!
What's next?
It's been a long time now since we've put our full focus on anything but the story. Me and Vilya had a short stint of it while waiting for Fred's boss animations, and this resulted in the updated World Map and the various new gameplay options (damage numbers, hp bars, etc).
This moment after Tai Ming is a good place for us to do more base game additions and balance changes. At this stage, players have finally unlocked the gold charges on their skills, and there is only one regular dungeon/temple left, so if we want to get proper testing done on the changes we make, we can't wait any longer!
Also, since core- and mechanics changes are usually most intensive on code, and least intensive on animations, it's a great opportunity for Fred to get a head start with the next set of enemies! He's already started working on the foes you'll meet in the next area.
A while ago we toyed with the idea of having the community vote for what features we should focus on before continuing on with the story. However, when we listed all the things we wanted to do, we realized we had such a large web of feature dependency that there wasn't as much room for change as we had hoped. The plan as of now is to implement these things before moving on with more story again:
Player Housing, Support Skills, Major Rebalancing of Combat Skills, Potion Rework, Arcade Mode Revamp, Quest Skipping After Multiplayer Completion, and Some Quests, Secrets and Treasure Maps
For more information on each of these, please have a look at this post from the DevBlog!
These things combined will likely take so long that when they are in the game, both we and you probably want us to get on with the story!
Oh, and we'll also poke a bit at the process of potentially porting the game to OSX and Linux with FNA, both for the obvious cross platform benefits, and also to combat a certain set of bugs within XNA and .NET that's causing trouble for some players.
More Insight
If you want to follow the progress and get a glimpse of the wonderful hell/heaven hybrid that is game development, you can check out our DevBlog! Be warned that it contains spoilers, though!