ArkCo News - 4/20/15

Hey ArkCoNauts! Boy have we been busy since you last heard from us! The next patch is shaping up to be a very fun one, and we think the community will love what we have in store. I do want to take a moment to extend my personal apologies for the lapse of the Spring event this year, it was due to a very unexpected leave of absence on my part, due to some serious issues I was faced with. To make it up to the community now that I am back in action, I am planning another of my big giveaways, and hopefully a few other fun surprises in our summer event. I'll be sending out more details on that once I lock down dates and times. Let's get down to the real fun now: hints for the upcoming patch. One of the things that some have considered lacking in Edge of Space, has always been that the world did not feel “alive” to our players. People were left to wander the world, wondering where to turn and what to do. The last patch saw the introduction of some of the framework for quests, and now the real fun begins in that regard. NPC's are on their way! This first implementation will be just a small teaser, introducing a few of our crazy new friends and testing the core functionality of this new system. Once we pound the bugs out, with the help of our ever loyal ArkCoNauts, we'll be bringing in plenty more where that came from. http://i.imgur.com/4gQeBKS.png Another focus right now is a complete overhaul of the looting system, which allow for better balance, and a much more robust system coming into play. Loot will become more consistent and easier for us to work with. This will lay the groundwork for world loot chests, and future opportunities for sweet loot, which we know is very important! In addition to these highlights, our sound wizard Jens has been updating sound across the board, to ensure that Edge of Space continues to dazzle the ears and that the new content and features coming in are as pleasing to hear as they are to play. If that still isn't enough to look forward to, you can also expect some changes to the death system. I can already hear the collective cheers of ArkCo operatives everywhere as we do away with having to craft cryorods, and instead move to a more player friendly regeneration over time method for renewing cryorod supplies. In this way, players are rewarded for staying alive for longer spans of time, and valuable materials are not lost to player death. We will also be adding higher max cryorod counts to higher level pods, to further encourage you to stretch for those high tier goals. Putting in the work for a high level pod will mean much less worrying over your cryo count. As you can see, we have a flood of content and features in the works, and plenty more we haven't talked about here. We used to talk about reaching the point where content was rolling out at breakneck speed, and you can see that becoming more apparent now with every patch. This is where the game really starts to show what it's made of, and we're very excited to see you all playing with the new features as we go. Thanks for reading as always, and we'll see you next time for ArkCo News!