Ohai there!

We’ve got a lot of exciting things in the works, both short and long term, so let’s hop right in!

Experimental Server – Point Release 8: Part 1

We’re thrilled to be bringing the Experimental Server back online, along with the first batch of Point Release 8 features, very soon! 

This is only Part 1 of Point Release 8, but it comes with a bunch of awesome features for you to test out. Martial Abilities have been added in order to give a whole new depth to warrior characters, while crafting orders have been reworked so that rewards a more plentiful, feel more appropriate to the difficulty and material investment and distribute more consistently for skill level. The new macro system will allow players to quickly and easily create macros to execute in-game and, of course, we’ve added blessed Runebooks, which will offer players the opportunity to catalogue world locations for fast travel, to create rune libraries, and to serve as a safe place to store marked runes.

You can read up on the Point Release 8: Part 1 features here, and be sure to keep an eye on our forums for a full set of Patch Notes and a thread for feedback once the Experimental Server is live.

What’s Coming Up – Point Release 8: Part 2

PvP

In the guarded zone, as it stands right now, we have what we think of as a Risk vs Reward deficit. We feel that every day, and we feel that watching you guys play. One thing we want to do very soon is to ensure that there’s more Risk vs Reward taking place in the guarded zone. There’s a perception that we intended the guarded zones to be absolutely safe. In some respects, that’s true – we don’t want to force people to do riskier things, but rather we want to entice people to do riskier things. Allegiances is a really good way to do that. We’re making quite substantial changes to the way the Allegiance system works, and this is a big priority for us right now. We want people who prefer different types of gameplay to engage in different things. We want PvE players and crafters to engage in PvP – not necessarily in the competitive aspect, but in the initiative. We want people banding together and having team efforts in this regard. That’s currently what we’re looking to add in the second part of Point Release 8. We’re looking to get Allegiances to a point where there’s territory battles taking place within the guarded zone, and it’s going to incorporate everybody – and that entails a wide range of rewards for many character types. 

PvE

We have a dynamic spawner that we are currently building, which is a backend tool that allows us to create far more diverse and dynamic situations. It’s going to start from a very early point of allowing us to diversify and make our existing Points of Interest…well, a lot more interesting! It will allow people to level up certain mob areas and start to unlock things which aren’t ordinarily there. This will be the first implementation and, like our Allegiance system, we’re being very forward thinking in the creation of these systems. Both the Allegiance system that is coming in PR8 and the Dynamic Spawner that is coming in PR8 are the foundation of something much bigger that we’re building for Outlands and Frozen Tundra.

Crafting

For the second part of PR8, we’ll be focusing on finishing the crafting professions, finishing the crafter quests – and that’s going to include some new abilities for crafters. While we’ll be detailing this much more in our upcoming Point Release 8: Part 2 blog, we can say that one of the things that crafters will be able to unlock is the ability to refine materials more quickly.

What’s Coming Up – Beyond Point Release 8

It’s important that we balance Quality of Life and bug fixes and making the game more solid with adding new content. Here are just a few areas that are immediate focuses for us as we plan for the future of Legends of Aria.

• Complete the Profession System. Right now you see a lot of “Coming Soon” under some of the Professions in that window, so we’re working hard to complete that.
• “Complete the game.” We know that an MMO is never fully “complete,” but we have two areas of the map we still need to bring you. We’ll be focusing on Outlands first, because Outlands is a PvP-oriented area, while Frozen Tundra is a PvE-oriented area. Right now we want to create some big features for our PvP players. Our focus is to get everyone into PvP via incentives, and not just the hardcore PvPers.
• As far as professions, we got the Bard out, which was a huge profession that the game was missing. The other ones we’re talking about are Necromancer and Paladin. That sense of controlling the dead and having some attunement with the void side of the world, or holiness and light on the Paladin side, we have to have all that. So that’s all a focus down the road and, as we get Point Release 8 out, we’ll be shifting our focus towards some of that.

Community Stuff

Now that the whirlwind of Steam crunch, Steam release, and Steam critical bugfixing is behind us (for the most part), we are rededicating ourselves to being as transparent about our development as possible – and being as accessible to you as possible without taking time away from the development of the game. Part of this will be our second attempt at our Developer Fireside Chat over on Discord! We’ll be relaunching this on Wednesday, October 2nd, and will be kicking it off with Miphon, our Executive Producer!  This will take place at 4pm Eastern in the fireside_chat channel.

We will also be adding a Community FAQ in the near future, which will be a living document that details the top community questions in an effort to make answers to common concerns easier to discover. This will also include answers to questions we receive during our Developer Q&A live streams, for those of you who are unable to watch. 

In Closing

We want to take a moment to say thank you to all of our players. We are thankful for your support and for your continued feedback. We wouldn’t be here without you guys. We’re lucky to have a passionate team and a passionate playerbase – if we only had one of those, none of this would be possible. So thank you for helping us make it possible!

Discover a world forged by players, where your choices write the story. What role will you play?

Key Features:

• • A Living, Breathing MMORPG: Explore a true open world without limitation. Build, explore and adventure with thousands of players in a living breathing world defined by you.
  • Skill-Based World: Legends of Aria returns to a true skill based system. Build your character your way, be you a crafter, adventurer, merchant or humble fisherman. Hone your skills through use and play your way with a choice of over 32 unique skills.
  • Return to a True Sandbox: Legends of Aria is inspired by the original sandbox MMORPGs. Experience a world that does not hold your hand. A world that is driven by you and shaped by our community. A world of dangers, where friendships, enemies made and your actions written into legend.
  • Community Servers and Modding: The first MMORPG to fully support player run servers. Legends of Aria is designed to be modded from top to bottom including custom gameplay rules, custom content and even entirely custom created worlds.