Chris interview tldr

Some short info from interview with Chris:

Agent duplicates/Hexcoins. They know how many players are upset. There will be some changes soon.

Story updates will be always priority, but it doesn’t mean they would ignore group content. He want to add some more group stuff (old and new), but it takes time. Every new group content has to be scaled across all game audience. They cannot release content available only for endgamers, without story/lower tiers versions. That is why they are looking into some old instanced boss fights to make them suitable for high tier difficulty or group stuff. But not all of them are suitable for it (eg. Unbound fight is more likely for rework than fights with Mara or Beaumont).

PVP is not dead for devs. Before adding new pvp zone (most likely Fusang), there has to be some changes/rebalances.

64bit client is on hold.

Housing will never be available, due to massive amount of work. However they plan to make some updates and changes in museum.

There will be QoL/bugfixes/rebalances patch soon.

There will be first teases for anniversary event soon.

Agent system is success, game is much more alive. There will be new batch of agents soon. He would be happy if some of agents would become regular NPCs with their own quests in game.

He would like to look back into some unfinished stories from the past (incl. faction stuff) in story updates, not only updates tied to new/upcoming zones.

He plans better communication with community about actual upcoming stuff. He would like to start with newsletters, but it takes some time. If everything would go smoothy the first one would come around anniversary event.

His top priority is made updates more frequently as he is well aware how long waiting is dangerous for game. He will try to make team ready for 1 update per two months +/-.

There will never be alttab targeting option.

They will not alllow to pick up specific dungeon/scenario, because they don’t want to end like in TSW people running some dungeons only and ignoring others. Moreover it would make things difficult to those people who would like to queue for these less popular dungeons. And with smaller game population it would screw things up.

His most loved agent is Carter, his most loved weapon is chaos.

They don’t plan to change agent drops from the last boss blue dungeon chests/regional bosses only (players suggestion was to make them available from grey ones, but with lower drop rate). However they monitor drop rates and how many players have agents if there would be some imbalance, they are open to changes.

Rare purple versions of agents will never have better stats than blue versions.

There is an information embargo about Dark Agharta. They will not reveal anything soon. All things have its own time.

They are aware how wanted, rare and popular are some cache weapons. They are discussing possibilities how offer some stuff from older caches. There are several different options on the table how to do it, but nothing was decided yet.

EDIT: Added more things I remember.

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Unfortunately if it doesn’t come with estimate timeplan it’s like Chris Roberts once again :frowning:

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Anyway, I had quite good impression from this interview. He has no problem to say something will never happen or will be quite unlikely. He made no unrealistic promises, he was able to explain why some things require a lot of work (group content requires massive amount of work, even redoing some stuff from TSW is more difficult than a lot of people think). For new group content, something like minidungeon is more likely than completely full new dungeon. He sounded competent and well aware about a lot of stuff players are not satisfied with. And if I should compare him with Tilty, he seems to me more suitable person for managing position. Nothing wrong about Titly, but he has always seemed me as a more creative guy than a manager one.

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Any news about cosmetics, for example the missing faction deck outfits?

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I don’t remember. However he explained that few missing TSW weapon skins cannot be available in SWL due some system problems. However I don’t remember which ones.

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I haven’t seen the stream yet but this looks good to me.
Honest, just and forthcoming.
Very much what the community wanted and from what i see, realistic answers that aim at longevity
I’m beginning to like this man already…
:smiley:
Go Chris - Go Chris

Fusang, thou hath not been left, overgrown with weeds…
Let your trees grow tall and your moats fill with seed.
Your stone walls hold secrets of wars won and battles lost…
The blood of enemies left there, at what cost?
For your heart beats stronger with each passing day
“Soon”…she whispers
“Soon”…

M

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Thanks for the synopsis.

My main takeaway was that he’s being very careful to avoid overpromising on anything, but he’s also very open about that. While there were a lot of questions that he didn’t answer, he was mostly very clear about why he didn’t have an answer. The acknowledgement that the devs are aware of player concerns and discussing them is better than ongoing radio silence. Hopefully we’ll also get some updates on those as decisions are made.

Based on what he did say, I expect the roadmap looks something like:

  • Bugfix Patch: Likely around the end of the month, probably just bugfixes and minor balance tweaks.
  • Anniversary Event: Almost one year already? This one’s a hard deadline, though they could have a bit of flex by declaring the Steam release as the ‘official’ anniversary date. End of June-July? My memory’s shot.
  • Fleshing out SAF: In the pipeline, probably after the anniversary.

Which honestly, isn’t a bad roadmap for now, and gives them a bit of time to see if ramping up their release cycle is going to work out.

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It’s good to add he was quite clear that the main priority will be always story updates. And work on all other stuff - group content, pvp, museum etc. - will always depend how smoothly work for story updates will go.

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But ofc, things take time…

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A man of discernment!

What miracle is this?! We haven’t had that since well before Joel left, and its abscence was absolutely felt. This is good news indeed.

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I hope they make Glyphs work with EFB and giving max value per Glyphed item by Glyph type.

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That’s actually a really good argument for not rushing it, given they clearly need to figure out how to make actual tank glyph tanks more PvP viable, for example.

Here’s hoping Funcom will use the player-run Shambala events to gather more data and expose issues that need addressing.

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Here’s hoping that too and i also echo what @Sawo has mentioned.
The community seem to be the driving factor here so i am assuming they will glean info from such sources as more shambala events take place. The short time we have in the zone can at times make it hard to gather info for the longer lasting fights that would take place in Fusang.

IMO time is what i would like them to take on it.

Based on Dante's Circle Agent missions... post any info you have here I may be overly conservative in some of my estimates… this is not a bad thing.

[quote=“Peloprata, post:7, topic:4424”]
My main takeaway was that he’s being very careful to avoid overpromising on anything, but he’s also very open about that. While there were a lot of questions that he didn’t answer, he was mostly very clear about why he didn’t have an answer. The acknowledgement that the devs are aware of player concerns and discussing them is better than ongoing radio silence. Hopefully we’ll also get some updates on those as decisions are made.
[/quote]

I did appreciate his honesty and stating what he could/couldn’t say, but I heard alot of “under discussion”, “we’re aware and monitoring” type remarks - at least not many soons!

I do hope he will be keep us informed more and hopefully have some sort of road map for the next year or so. Even a very loose this is the direction we’re going…

The only thing I did find disappointing was he said to report bugs on Discord. Why not the “official forum”? That makes me wonder was the forum set up just to entertain the masses? There are people that are forum shy, but more that likely don’t use Discord. IDK, just found that an odd remark or direction.

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I am agreeably surprised. This seems to me the most open and clear statement about the game’s future we have seen since god knows when; in fact, it sounds sincere enough that I’m willing to go along with the lack of any time-frame. I can honestly say I feel more confident than I have in a very long time.

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This, by the way, is still massively aggravating on a “We can’t really be arsed to properly balance stuff, so we will force you to ‘enjoy’ even the content we absolutely can’t be arsed to balance” level.

With that attitude, they might as well just go add the remaining dungeons to the elite mix - after all, no need to care if they’re balanced, is there? :angry:

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He explained problem is not only with ballance, but how to make mechanics from these dungeon working on high tiers. And it is far from easy.

And with the fact he is a guy who designed and worked on group content/dungeons (Penthouse group versions was his work btw) he knows very well what he is talking about.

There’s zero reason to force private teams to use the randomizer. You can already retreat immediately and the only “penalty” you receive is the time it takes to zone and re-invite the group (which shouldn’t even be a thing for private teams to begin with).

If someone enjoys running the same dungeon over and over again, let them. And if you find that groups constantly avoid certain dungeons, there’s probably a reason for it (spoiler alert: there is) and your task as a game designer should be to smooth out that discrepancy.

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Well, it looks like they well not allow this. He was quite clear.