Yesterday saw yet another ACE Q&A livestream from Crowfall’s J. Todd Coleman and Thomas Blair, which offered up a short-term development roadmap that promises a number of updates due for the throne war MMO’s beta at sometime in the near future.
One of the first features the devs discussed are hot zones, which will be the game’s answer to having PvP opportunities outside of siege events. For those who have played Shadowbane, hot zones should be familiar; they’re a single area that highlights to everyone in a campaign, promising double rewards, loot, or XP when taking on other players. The plan is to have hot zones consistently running, changing location on a rotating two or three-hour basis.
The stream then went on to talk about more new player experience adjustments, with Coleman noting that the number of different worlds that new players can hop in to is causing the limited beta playerbase to be broken up too much. With that in mind, plans are in motion for the next build to merge some of these separate pieces together, like including much of the Infected gameplay into God’s Reach. There are also plans to improve the flow of new player guidance and provide better teaching of Crowfall’s many systems, particularly in relation to territory holdings.
Finally, the devs talked about new guild and social management UI features. Players can look forward to the ability to set up friends lists, block lists, plans to move guild creation from the website to an in-game UI, and a variety of the usual guild management functions.
