Friday Dev Livestream (October 18)

October 21, 2013 | Etaew | Viewed 3,296 times | Question and Answer,

Friday October 18, 2013 the Defiance Dev team streamed a play and Q&A session on the Trion Worlds Twitch channel.

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

Loot Changes

A lot of the time with the weapons we were rolling as far as the random loot goes, we weren't particularly happy with the variety of them or exactly how celebratory it was to get for example a grenade recharge or bonus to melee strikes on self revive. They weren't very satisfying to get.

We went through and essentially looked at the all of the weapons and broke them down into more specific categories so they could benefit from all of the bonuses they could roll. The most obvious one is weapons that have single shots or a low number of shots we took off rate of fire increases as it didn't make any sense.

Otherwise we generally just went through every single loot roll you can make on weapons that you can make in the game and brought them up to a higher standard.

Biggest of which I guess is the replacement of the blue rarity bonuses, they were previously elemental effects.

Topics

Work in progress...

Tutorial

I would like at some point to make a do you wish to play the tutorial button, it would also make testing easier.

Will Arkfalls get harder?

Just before coming to this livestream I was testing exactly that, but I can't give any timeline on that. It still needs work. We want the arkfall difficulty to adjust not just on the number of players but their EGO Rating as well.

Existing weapon upgrades

When you get a random weapon, it figures out how many random slots to fill out. Originally on most guns it would only roll 2 bonuses, very few rolled the white bonus.

Once they have rolled the bonus, they are storing a reference to a bonus, many weapons reference that bonus. The type of bonus is determined by the weapon type, and each weapon type can have different models for example a single shot rocket launcher wont use the rate of fire bonus, but other rocket launchers would find it useful. They can't remove a bonus that would be useful in some cases as it would apply to all of them.

When DLC 2 comes out, the grenade recharge on kill isn't going to make sense with the new cooldown on grenades. So the bonuses that are associated with that will apply to all weapons.

Mission rewards are specific bonuses, and when we get around to it we can adjust their bonuses for everyone.

Events

Outside of Extra Life we will not be doing anything special for Halloween, we have been trying to get something ready but it may not be ready in time.

New Outfits

We are working on new outfits, and we are working on a feature on the blog to announce things that have already come out.

Veteran Players

One of the things we are trying to do is bring a greater variety of events to the world, and some of that is going to include stuff that is going to increase the difficulty to some areas of the game. The equivilent of hard mode encounters.

Volge weapons in the second DLC are a significant improvement over standard weapons, I was dissapointed with the way that the charge weapons played out as they ended up being identical in effectiveness to existing ones.

UI and Chat Improvements

It's hard to talk about progress in that without showing you images. We have shown previously the changes to contracts.

Next development steps

The next 2 things that I think will be in the next big patch should be, the damage resistance adjustment in and the contract changes.

After that we will take a look at balance of shields and shield bonuses.

Nano converters at vendors

A lot of them are available at vendors, but it something we are looking at. Including converters with synergies.

Synergy bonuses

Bonuses 2 and 4 will take effect, we do acknowledge that it doesn't highlight active bonuses until 4.

Raptor slow and heavy

It has a high top speed but takes a while to get there. We can take a look at it and see if there is anything we can do to make it more pleasant to drive without making it overpowered in comparison to the other vehicles.

Private chat

It is in the improvement list, I would be suprised if that works.

Other elementals as converter mods

Yes. Syphon won't be.

Plague Sieges

No date, but it is being worked on.

Once you stop getting XP you don't get kill confirmations

It becomes a moot point with another update, we don't think we have it on our bug tracker.

Claim items don't receive mastery bonuses

We've tested it, and that isn't the case. There is another reason behind it that we need to investigate further.

Mastery bonus

Is calculated as you master the weapon, it has nothing to do with how you have been using it.

Rewards for conflict sites

Yes, people will be rewarded appropriately.

Crater lag

First time I have heard about it, it is a big texture load but there isn't a lot of stuff going on there.

To make cutscenes cleaner, we often pre-load them. We found that there were mysterious areas that were loading cutscenes even when you didn't need them. The Crater was one of our biggest victims of that, but it shouldn't be true anymore as we turned them all off. More information would be needed.

Why does the stock melee animation does more damage than the slash melee animation

Some poor thinking on weapon balance. Also generally that the charged up attack does the same damage as if you were to slash multiple times in the same timespace.

0.0 det grenades detonate in hand

I just fixed an issue where they detonated 10 seconds after being thrown, I'll need to investigate.

Particle Ultimag charge pistol mod slots

It doesn't come with slots unlocked after power rating 1625, we are looking at it.

Private messages

The private chat is supposed to be tells, but it's currently not working consistantly.

Melee Arkfalls

In our shooter, probably not.

Order of bonuses

Always modify the base stat, not a modification of the modded value. So a x0.15 crit and x0.25 crit will total up for a x0.40 crit of the base chance.

Patch Platform Orders

It would slow us down having to deal with seperate builds. Having to maintain different versions of code.

Shield Changes

That would be retroactive, as it would be changing base values. And we may not hit them too heavily. We have found that people are using a handful of special shields. The respark in pve and ironclad in pvp. We want the other shields to also seem like viable choices and to have their own identity.

We may delay the shield revamp because it is less important until we get deeper into our gameplay variety.