Into the Vault #154 | PTR Next Week!

PTR Date Next Week

The PTR for the upcoming update will begin next week on Wednesday the 25th of February!

If you missed our last development update, you can view it here on our website to learn more about what we have been working on:

Into the Vault #153 | New Lands Revealed, Next Patch Details

As usual we will be making a post just before the PTR goes up on the day with instructions on how you can get involved with the testing, along with the patch notes of what you can expect to find on the PTR server.

New Patch Information

As we are now further along in development of the update, there are a few additional things we have been working on which we couldn’t mention in the last update, but that we will now describe below.

Voice Chat Improvements

The new VoIP upgrade is coming along very nicely, and we have been able to explore and tackle a few new additions that we are very excited for. One of the new things we are currently working on that wasn’t possible before with the old system, is affecting player voices in different ways based on things like whether or not your head is under water, or if you are wearing a full faced helmet or one that covers your mouth.

Additionally we are looking into detecting whether or not the environment is occluding a direct path to someone you are hearing, such as being on the other side of a wall or around a corner and having that affect the sound. These types of additions can quickly become rather complex however, and there may yet be any number of reasons or limitations that result in us having to make sacrifices here for the sake of for example performance or stability.

These changes should serve to make VoIP interactions much more immersive, and we can’t wait to see them in action!

Plate Armor Stat Normalization

We are also taking the opportunity in this patch to address a long standing issue related to armor variety and validity of choices.

As many of you in the community will be intimately familiar with, certain heavy armor styles, namely Mercenary Plate, have long been slightly out of balance which results in the other plate armor styles being chosen far less often in favor of it. It is natural that hardly anyone, aside from enthusiastic fashion purists, would choose to use a style of armor that they know is less optimal competitively.

As such, we plan to adjust the stats of the lesser used plate styles to be much closer to each other, making your choice of armor style mostly a cosmetic preference rather than for its stats.

Now, there will still of course be differences in stats between the plate armor styles, we are not simply giving everything the same values. Instead, we have preserved the key differences between the styles while simply shrinking the amount that they vary between one another. For example, the Draconigena Armatus style will still maintain the highest piercing defence, however it will no longer have such abysmal slashing defence by comparison. In general, we have increased the viability of the lesser used styles, rather than simply “nerfed” the best one.

Our goal with this change is to allow all of you to choose the style of armor that you enjoy most aesthetically, without having to make compromises in terms of competitive viability in doing so should your preferences not align with the “meta” option.

We will