Got a lot of news today so let's get moving...
While Artix is off at GDC showing the AQ3D pre-beta off to anyone who will look, the team is working on our first instanced dungeon. I don't want to spoil the surprises but here a few things that are going into Shatterskull Tower in Doomwood.
You can kind of see the shine on the handle that lifts the gate but this will be our first moving obstacle and updating moving blockers isn't as easy as it sounds but Zhoom and Llussion got it working!
As you climb the floors of Shatterskull Tower, you have to avoid an army of the undead while you defeat a few bosses and solve a few puzzles.
This statue looks like he's about to crown me for being the King of Awesome.
Who sits at the top of the tower? If you have done Artix's, Gravedigger Loth's, and the Ghost of Heath's quests then you might think you know...
This is our first dungeon and like most things, it's a work in progress and just a first pass. This is only the first stepping stone to much larger, deeper, story-driven instances so don't expect mind-blowing tales of adventure and miles of winding corridors just yet. This is a small, intimate dungeon perfect for date night.
We've been talking a lot about GDC but some of you have no idea what that is so I'll explain.
The Game Developer's Conference is the world's largest yearly gathering of game developers (like us), gamers (also like us and like you) and game journalists (like neither of us, unless you are one in which case WHY DON'T YOU INTERVIEW US?!). It started back in 1988 in a dude's living room and has since become a MASSIVE event with tens of thousands of people gathering to talk about what's new and what's cool in gaming, network, get inspiration and introduce their best work to the rest of the gaming community at large.
Artix is there RIGHT NOW!
He's doing interviews with gaming press all about AQ3D! Wish him luck and I'm SURE that he will have some awesome stories for us when he comes back next week.
Recently it popped up that some people were using a simple hack to get an absurd amount of gold. This wasn't a big deal for AQ3D. We're still in pre-beta and expected some less-than-cool individuals to break the rules and try anything they could to cheat.
Thanks to our white hats and devoted testing staff, we're aware of a lot of the loopholes that normal players would never encounter but someone looking to cheat might notice and all of these possible weak points will be sealed up by release time. The only reason that we haven't increased our security to release levels yet is that we're not ready for release yet and we're spending most of our time building the groundwork for a fun game for you to play and adding content.
We don't have a lot of rules in AQ3D yet, but the ones we do have are pretty simple to understand...
We have already deleted a handful of accounts of those who were found to be using the gold cheat with a few more deletes coming. These accounts will not be allowed back in the game under any circumstances. If we find alternate accounts being played by the same people, these will also be deleted without warning. It does not matter if they donated $5,000,000 to the Kickstarter. It does not matter if their little brothers used the cheat instead of them. This may seem rather ruthless to some of you who have played some of our other games. We don't like to be the bad guy. We like to give people chances. But this is a new game and we all agree that we're tired of fraking around.
They knew the rules. They chose to break them. There is only one consequence. It's that simple.
Cool? Cool.
Undead Legion Ruler
Scribble Scribe
