Means says Thank You and brings news from the different teams working on AO.

Thank you for the giant pile of suggestions last week for the 10th anniversary. We'll be going through them today in a special team meeting (the artists are here!) and try to work through which ones we can add for this year's event.

Code:

The coders are now near the end of the second week working on the Visual Studio 2010 update. The launcher and patcher are now compatible and many of the libraries used by AO and much of the client is now working. There is still a great deal of work left. This is not even remotely fun and the coders are NOT happy...but they are doing it for us so we are grateful. Conversions are irritating as generally you do a huge amount of work...and then when you are done...if you are LUCKY...things work exactly as they did before. There are a million other things we'd rather have them working on...but we need this for the engine work and we can't avoid it any longer.

The massive meeting of balance code requirements is today...it is going to be interesting.

Design:

Kintaii and I had further discussions this week about the new Pandemonium addition. I thought I would share a little more detail this week.

First off, this area will not be instanced as this would go against the basic idea behind the encounter. This will be a first for AO in that it is a new form of competitive PvM. Many people have written to me over the last few years to tell me of how they miss the competitive action that DD wars brought to the game...and DD wars have been much less a part of AO with the addition of proper instances a few years back.
SO..with this mind the basic idea is this:

3 Towers, accessed through killing a miniboss in one of the end-passages of Pandemonium. On the death of the miniboss three portals will open and the competitors will be able to decide which tower they would like to challenge. The three towers will be identical...with only the group to reach the top floor first being able to challenge the final boss. The start of the ascent will begin at the same time for all three locations...who will win access will come down to the group with the best team DD, Crowd control and teamwork. It wont be that easy on it's own...but getting there first will add a certain element to the experience. I can't wait to see how this turns out.

Art:

Both artists are finally here...and despite being horribly jetlagged they have begun working their way through some of the new birthday items for this year. The first week in the building is always tough and I don't envy them. Great to have them here again...we missed these guys.

Have a great weekend!


Colin "Means" Cragg

Game Director, Anarchy Online