Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

One of our internal patcher boxes exploded magnificently last night, so I have a few minutes to write while it gets replaced.

Since Rise of Kunark is the only thing that’s been on my brain for the past few weeks, it’s time for an exception to “I won’t talk much about work…”

The expansion’s almost out the door. I’m really happy about this one.

The end of this dev cycle has had more unpredictable events than anything I think I’ve ever worked on. Wildfires, internal server death, and another internal software explosion last week. All surprise hurdles, all cleaned up well. It’s really a testament to everyone’s dedication that it’s going as amazingly as it is.

The beta NDA came down late last week. We took a little longer than usual to do so this time, and there were the standard predictions of both doom and gloom. The reason for the delay was pretty simple - For Kunark, I wanted the beta’s open issue count to be lower than any of our previous released products before the NDA came down. We blew past that mark to a record low count of open issues, then we opened the NDA.

Based on the tone of the comments about the expansion’s quality, that seems to have been the right call. MMOs being a long term venture, I’d rather we have an overall smaller number of comments living on the Internet forever and have them be more positive, as opposed to a deluge of the new standard “It Has Potential But Will It Be Done In Time?!”

Besides, it has LOLvargs.

Last week was also EQ2’s third birthday. There really was cake.

IGN has a new EQ2 restrospective video up, in which you can see a real, live developer cry.

I don’t feel bad about pointing that out, because she did this to my office on Halloween. Although I have to hand it to her - If there’s anyone who could make packing peanuts cute, it would be Tracy, our resident fae.

We give out 90 days Veteran Reward credit for each expansion that a person owns. That means that the day Kunark launches, it’ll be time for the 4 Year Veteran Rewards already. We also announced what those look like.

Rise of Kunark is also going to be on the cover of Massive Online Gamer this month.  That’s sweet.

Let’s see, what else is going on… We’re also in the middle of our last pre-launch Race to Kunark bonus XP sunday, which a large pile of folks have been taking advantage of.

I did an interview that appears to be the very definition of “tl;dr” with Michael at MMOGNation last week. Reading a transcript of an hour long phone call is an illuminating experience. Some people have an innate talent for speaking in brief, cogent sentences. I am not one of those people. (I pace around the room, gesturing wildly, while speaking what appears to be entire chapters.)

There are a number of more features coming up this week that we talked about in the most recent SOE Podcast (#25), but with all the attention on Kunark sometimes these equally cool things get overlooked.

• Some really handy usability improvements to the in-game maps. Zooming, panning, stretching, converting to a minimap…
• The long-awaited revamp to racial abilities, making them into things more people will actually find useful
• A new UI for all of those racial and special class abilities that people gain every couple levels
• Debumping(tm), smoothing, and otherwise improving the feel of the level 20-70 experience progression after all of the feedback from the last cycles.
• The tradeskill UI getting built-in reaction buttons and becoming a lot easier to use in general.
• And more things that I’m forgetting about.

Okay. This post has officially stopped looking like a list of random cool things about this release, and appears to have transitioned into patch notes. Time to stop.

Check that timing out! The internal patcher just returned. Back to work.