Producer’s Letter – October 20, 2006

Now that some time is passed since the launch of The Serpent's Spine I thought it would be good time to send out one of these producer letter things. Overall, we are pleased with how the expansion has turned out. If you haven't tried creating a Drakkin and going through the lower level content I would really like to encourage you to give it a try. There are an incredible amount of play styles out there now and I think we managed to get a little bit in there for most of them. I should also mention that the pick up for the expansion is quite brisk and is definitely outpacing Prophecy of Ro.

Let's also talk about some more zone re-vamps. We really wanted to get more done with the launch but ended up wanting to put that time into the expansion content instead. So, you should be seeing a new Commonlands (East and West combined) and Ocean of Tears in just a little while. Why Ocean of Tears? Well, we needed to do that one in order to get the new boats working. And I mean new boats because the old boats have also been rebuilt from scratch. All of that is currently going through QA but it shouldn't be too much longer until we get that up on the live servers.

There are a lot more zones in the pipeline but this is a process with massive iterations and some may not see the light of day anytime soon. It can be a little scary when an artist diligently redoes a zone then a designer gets a hold of it and sends back 2 pages of "feedback". Things like "Wall needs to be 30% taller" And "You forgot the courtyard".

Now it is that spooky time of year and our Halloween events will be appearing shortly. We will be bringing back a lot of the old favorites and also adding in more quests and fun things to do. I hope you enjoy them!