Salut­ing on a Horse — Yeah, that’s right.

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.

Shared Stor­age in Action

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:

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