We've been developing, and here's what's new.
Nidbanes
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Added Nidbanes. Nidbanes are vengeful spirits which can be sent against criminals in attempts to kill them. Craft and place a Nidbane Fetter on a Runed Dolmen, using a scent -- Vandalism, Battery, Murder and Theft are applicable -- left by the criminal you wish to target, and a Nidbane will appear and begin seeking out said target. The Nidbanes move slowly at first, but pick up speed gradually. As soon as the spirit overtakes its quarry, it will initiate combat. If the target is not logged in when the Nidbane reaches it, the spirit will lie in waiting for when the target does log in (or until it has waited for 24 RL hours, whichever occurs the sooner), and then attack. The Nidbane will try to kill its target.
- You craft Fetters using crime scents.
- At any given time there can be one Nidbane per crime scent.
- A Nidbane persists even if the scent it is tracking expires. Once let loose the Nidbane always needs to be either destroyed in combat, or undone at the Runed Dolmen, by removing the Fetter from the Dolmen.
- Nidbanes scale in power with their target, the quality of their fetter, and the severity of the crime. The Nidbane has the target's stats, times a factor per crime -- 0.3 for theft, 0.5 for vandalism, 0.6 for battery, and 1.2 for murder -- softcapped by the Fetter's qualities.
- If a Nidbane is destroyed, its Fetter will shatter to indicate this.
- If a Nidbane kills its target, it will instantly return the skull of its target to the Runed Dolmen.
- Nidbanes are never blocked by objects, but rather move relentlessly toward their target until they reach it.
- Nidbane attacks ignore armor.
- Anyone may attack a Nidbane as it moves across the map, but perhaps best be careful with that, what with Nidbanes being of unknown power and lethal, and whatnot. Nidbanes will themselves only attack their intended target.
The basic idea here is that crime victims can send little cruise missiles against their offenders to try to get back at them, and the broader ambition is an attempt to somewhat untangle the issues of justice and siege from one another. From a design perspective it has for some time bothered us how the enforcement of law against crime has become entirely dependent upon siegeing and gaining entrance to the brickwalled compound of an offender, and while that task is more or less impossible, crime is proportionately more or less risk free. We feel that his situation has made siege mechanics more necessary to crime enforcement than they reasonably should be, and if this system turns out to be interesting it hopefully also allows us to design a siege system without relying on it for the enforcement of simple crimes, which I suspect makes the task significantly easier.
There are a lot of moving parts and points of balance in this. The ideal stats, general ferocity, and precise mechanics of the Nidbanes can certainly be debated, and some strategies may well be overpowered -- spamming Nidbanes from a Dolmen close to the target, or sending Nidbanes against oneself to block scents, &c --, Nidbanes may be too tame or too powerful, or both, but all of that has to be playtested. At the very least crime should no longer be entirely risk free. Do report your findings after trying it out.
In light of our unparallelled magnanimity, Nidbane fetters can only be crafted using scents left after this patch.
New Implementations
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- Added "Bouquet of Flowers", curio. Recently suggested here.
- Added "Elk Dog", sausage.
- Added "Butter Scones", baked good.
Small Fixes
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- Völva's Wand can be hung on walls.
- Added some armor penetration to Ants.
In the Pipe
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We're going to observe the effects of/response to this change for a while before we go too nuts with more PvP, but siege mechanics are most likely the next natural step in that line of development.
Some of the other things that have come up in our discussions are...
- Flesh out the quest system more.
- Work on the death mechanics. Reinstate some manner of ancestral worship and continuity between characters.
- Add more high-level crafting/content. Systems for weapons and armor. Crafting buffs.
- Add (more) active dimensions to both eating and, most especially, curiosities, to reduce their reliance on timed hurdles. In the case of curiosities we want to see some sort of active gameplay introduced, rather than just the passive offline studying.
- Develop animal AI further, and add scarier monsters. Make animals leave blood trails when they run, make them more aggressive when wounded, try to remove some of the obvious exploits used against them.
- Flesh out the wound system more. Add more wound types and make them less static. Have wounds develop, get infected, split off to new wounds when large enough, &c.
- Improve the barter stands to allow more exhaustive input type specifications.
- Try to solve some of the long-standing bugs with horses, and make it possible to tame them.
- Improve client performance.
Enjoy!