And it’s live: Shroud of the Avatar’s 65th release rolled out to players yesterday, meaning you’ll have all weekend to break play it. Notably, Portalarium’s Starr Long says the studio has been working on improving performance, especially with the terrain and foliage shaders. “Performance work will mainly focus on improving frame rate and reducing hitching during gameplay,” he writes. “Work will also continue to be done on load time reduction on the few outstanding scenes that are not meeting our 15-second load time target.”
There are also new dragons, dodge tweaks, wave battle improvements, new rare merchants, paper-making recipes, an item weight balancing pass, and the planned taming update and pet rebalance.
“Last release work was done to bring summoned pets up to a more respectable level. For R65 we took a pass at evaluating tamed pets. The primary thing that stood out was their lower than expected DPS in combat. All tamed pets should see roughly a 25% increase in DPS. Additionally, the Wyvern’s poison attack now also adds a weakness effect and drains a small amount of focus.”
Do note that a few things originally planned for the release have been held back, including the addition of fertilizer for farming and brand-new paintable homes: “Although we were able to get the supporting tech in for Paintable Homes, work on patches for Release 64 delayed our work on the User Interface and content work on the homes for the Paintable Homes feature.”
Stay tuned for our upcoming MMO Cartographer this weekend, as we’ll be dipping our toes into the game once again!
