Along with the date, Tur­bine has also posted up a few more devel­oper diaries con­cern­ing Siege of Mirk­wood. They’re really worth check­ing out.

Skir­mishes

Zom­bie Colum­bus has a two-page diary that cov­ers the new Skir­mish sys­tem. It will be fol­lowed by even more Skirmish-related diaries in the weeks to come. Be sure to read the whole arti­cle (it’s not too long and I found the sec­ond page to be espe­cially inter­est­ing), but here’s a bit on their vision for the system:

To cut right to the chase: Skir­mishes are short, acces­si­ble, ran­dom­ized, scal­able, story instances with incre­men­tal rewards. Why Skir­mishes became this can best be explained by dis­cussing what the designer’s goals for the sys­tem are. Every­thing we added to Skir­mishes was done with a high level “vision” in mind. By shar­ing this vision with you, I hope that you will see why we made the choices we did, and how we ended up where we are now. Our goals were to:

• Cre­ate finely crafted instance con­tent that can be played by dif­fer­ent group sizes and levels.
• Keep play-time short, allow­ing Skir­mishes to fit into other activ­ity cycles. Inter­nally we’ve called them– “Pop-corn” expe­ri­ences. If one is short and good, why not try another?
• Add ran­dom­ized ele­ments into Skir­mishes to keep replays interesting.
• Encour­age a rota­tional play of Skir­mishes, to keep them fresh and pre­vent them from over­shad­ow­ing exist­ing playstyles. Skir­mishes should com­ple­ment the game, not alter it!
• Set up an incre­men­tal reward struc­ture, like the instance barter systems.
• Allow play­ers to feel that any amount of play time was a step closer to a desired reward.
• Give play­ers a feel­ing of par­tic­i­pat­ing in epic strug­gles, and of being lead­ers of small armies.

I like the idea of Skir­mishes. In some ways, it’s like hav­ing a Leg­endary NPC in addi­tion to a Leg­endary Weapon. I’m always big on ran­dom­iza­tion in MMORPGs and I hope that Tur­bine con­sid­ers using it in more addi­tions in the future.

Stor­age

By now you’ve prob­a­bly heard about the addi­tion of Shared Stor­age, but Tur­bine is offer­ing more details (and some images) of the sys­tem in action. I like the over­all con­ve­nience of it, espe­cially because the it hooks into the exist­ing Vault sys­tem. You can trans­fer items to and fro as you please. It can even han­dle bound items, although as you may expect, only the char­ac­ter who that item is bound to will be able to see it.

Mounts

This change is a big deal, in my opin­ion, as it really opens up a lot of future poten­tial for mount use. The Devel­oper Diary on these changes is the most inter­est­ing to me, espe­cially because it gets a bit heav­ier into how and why Tur­bine makes design and usabil­ity decisions.

For those inter­ested in the end-results, the new sys­tem most directly offers the following:

• Mount Skill: Rid­ing mounts is now a skill, not an item.
• Less Items: Once you use an item to learn your mount skill, that item dis­ap­pears. You’ll no longer need a spot in your inven­tory to ride your horse or goat.
• Item Free­dom: Some item types will be usable while on a mount. This includes potions, food, your map and more.
• Inter­ac­tion: NPCs can now be inter­acted with while on your horse. The only excep­tions are Stable-Masters and Bards.
• Doors: You can now open doors and go through gates (such as the one to Moria’s exte­rior from Ere­gion) while on a mount. If the door leads to an area that doesn’t allow mounts, you’ll be auto­mat­i­cally dis­mounted. Some spe­cial types of ”doors” may not be usable while mounted, such as lad­ders. Horses and goats aren’t quite that nimble.
• Skill Usage: Many skills can now be used while rid­ing, includ­ing crafting-node track­ing and the Hunter’s track­ing skill. Combat-based skills can­not be used, as Tur­bine notes this would be “mounted com­bat”. Hmmmm! Addi­tional skills may be dis­abled in the Ettern­moors, but cur­rently this only affects the Hunter’s track­ing skill.
• Emotes: Play­ers can now do emotes while rid­ing, some ani­mated (Bother, Bye, Calm, Cheer, Drink, Eat, Munch, Fid­get, Fol­lowme, Hail, Look, Lookaround, Salute, Think, Wave, Cry, Roar, laugh/lol, Sword­Salute and Shake­fist) and some not. Mounts will have three of their own e-motes, which will play when a player presses the space bar when stand­ing idle.
• Improved Mount Health: Mounts have always had health, but Tur­bine has devel­oped an improved sys­tem. Mount health can now regen­er­ate over time; pre­vi­ously you had to dis­mount and remount to refresh their health. Finally!!
• Mount Names: Mounts come with a ran­dom name and can be renamed by the player.
• Level 20 Mounts: All play­ers can pur­chase a mount at Level 20. This mount will be slower and have less health than the typ­i­cal Level 35 mount, but that’s fine by me!
• Repeat Cus­tomer Dis­count: All other com­mon mounts will be sold to you at a dis­count after you buy your first Level 35 horse. Nice.
• Mounted Fel­low­ship: You no longer have to get off your mount to be sum­moned by your fel­low­ship. I repeat, you no longer have to get off your mount to be sum­moned by your fel­low­ship.  A long time com­ing, I say. Thank you!
• Gray Horse/Pony: Eogar will sell replace­ments for this horse if you’ve got­ten rid of it in the past.

I was also glad to read that this sys­tem is more exten­able and can more eas­ily han­dle changes made in the future. Awesome.

Any­way, we also have a bunch of ques­tions pend­ing with Sapi­ence at Tur­bine. A good por­tion of them have been answered through these devel­oper diaries now, but hope­fully we’ll hear about what’s left soon.

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