Friday Dev Livestream (October 4)

October 5, 2013 | Etaew | Viewed 5,609 times | Question and Answer,

Friday October 4, 2013 the Defiance Dev team streamed a play and Q&A session on the Trion Worlds Twitch channel.

In this stream dahanese and OverloadUT was joined by Trick Dempsey.

Alpha Server

This is an older build that only includes daily contracts, weekly contracts have now been ported over to the new system.

Completing these events will now earn reputation for a faction instead of being hidden behind a menu.

Weapons

Useful Bonuses

They have found that a lot of rolls on weapons that are not universally useful, and they could put it on a Mod and give the player a decision.

e.g. Melee DMG makes sense for being on a weapon stock, it doesn't make sense to be on a Sniper Rifle or Infector as that may not be your play style.

Also PvE / PvP exclusive have been taken off so they can be choices.

Self-revive on kill, or self-revive on revive have been taken off. Grenade recharge ones have been pulled off.

Existing weapons will change the grenade recharge, other bonuses will not change.

Blue Bonuses

There were no blue bonuses on items, they were effects, the nano effects and melee procs. They will be statistical increments on the gun for example rate of fire for weapons that make sense.

One shot weapons like sawed-off shotguns will no longer roll rate of fire increases, instead they will have reload bonuses.

Assault Rifles after 1500 EGO Rating got common bonuses, now that will appear on all weapons.

This will affect only new rolled weapons and will further increase the value of T4 lockboxes.

Damage Rating

We are looking at higher rarity weapons having a higher damage rating, that will come out a little bit later. This will affect all weapons.

Questions

Are you going to bring back episode missions? / will there be another rewind event?

There will be another rewind event, haven't released the date of that yet. We want it to be at a significant time.

Volge Weapons, was it intentional for new Volge Battle Rifles to not have random bonuses?

It was intentional, but I don't like that they don't have random bonuses. I have made a proof of concept that I can turn those on, so it would be a matter of patching that. It won't apply to any of the old weapons you have picked up.

Arkfall siege scores track serverside in case of disconnect?

They are tracked server side, you are probably being transferred to a lower population server when you log in. If you log in fast enough you should return to the same server you were disconnected from.

Scores are tracked by the Siege object itself, so if you get back on the server it should continue your progress.

Public Alpha

Will be up before DLC 2. Not public right now, there are a couple of terrible bugs that Trick wants to fix. Testing the "Arkbreaks".

Von Bach Reputation vendor items

The global buff for being on a vendor is present on all items, I can look into if they don't have the same overall effectiveness. We are doing a major pass at the moment at weapon effectiveness in general.

Indogene and Sensoth

We definitely want to continue to increase the available playable races and increase the diversity inside Paradise Territory but no time frame on those kind of things.

DLC 2-5 on track

We are still working on DLC 2 - 5, exact dates have not been announced.

Raider / Mutant / 99er Arkfalls?

Yes

Dark Matter Enforcers knife attacks missing?

The Enforcers were incredibly more deadly than any of the other NPCs in the game (pre Volge), and we did tone them down.

Yes they do seem to have removed their knife attack, it will be looked into.

Weapon Balanced across platforms?

We are not tuning weapons differently based on your key configuration. Increasing the mouse sensitivity does not increase the aim speed.

New PvP Outfits and incentive to PvP

Pursuits and gear. We are looking at improving the stuff on the Echelon vendor for PvP players.

Change single mods on weapons

There was a bug that was robbing them of their Synergies, we need to fix that. We don't have a time frame.

PvP Map pops

The Freightyard weekly contract is insane. We are changing the matchmaking system so that matches populate more quickly.

Offline Mode

We have thought about it, but the answer has always been no. We would be essentially making a new game at that point.

High EGO Content

Yes there is totally going to be hard mode things, please stay tuned.

Golden Gate Bridge in DLC 2

You can cross into San Francisco without completing the story mission in DLC 2.

Raptor Speed

It doesn't have much hill power, the overall top speed is pretty good. It is so much larger than the other cars the camera is further away and by the magic of forced perspective it looks like it going pretty slow. The acceleration is pretty terrible.

Contracts using old methods?

They will only be completed with the new locations on the map, they require specific events to be completed.

Echelon Rep without PvP

Presently no, we have a proposed event that will allow it to work the other way. More likely what we are going to do is continue to keep Echelon as a thing for PvP players to chase and instead take the requirements to get Echelon faction off the global game pursuits.

Advanced character customisation

Like armor and longer and shorter hair. Higher priority is actually being able to seen by people, a lot of the time you are seen as Captain Generic.

More customization options will come after improvements to being seen by other players.

Nano effects dont appear at certain EGO Ratings

You should be getting nano effects just as often, it is just a 50/50 chance on melee attack or shot. It sounds like you just got unlucky for a while. The line on nano effects is drawn at approximately 1500, some weapons start later.

When the rarity bonus fix goes in, it won't be an issue at all.

Driving Controls with mouse and keyboard

When we pull for those things, it is a mixed response. As long as the jury is split we are unlikely to do anything to address it.

Autorun

Almost certainly not.

When are damage reduction changes coming?

It had to do with having to change the client so that it can take new information when it comes to interpreting the damage numbers. The numbers don't wait for the server to confirm or deny what is going on, so a change in damage would have made the health go back and forward as a NPC received new health information.

So to make that a cleaner experience we are delaying that for a big client patch will will take considerably more time as it has to go through QA.