Forums: Announcements

Aethorians! Grab your weapons and your forks – dinner is served, and it seems to think you’re on the menu!

How can you help? Each of the four cities in Hopilus have some sort of food storage facility and they are overrun with ather-infused, edible monstrosities. You may also want to be wary of travel – the three highways between the cities are reported to have some unnatural predators as well.

Hints:

• The healing rate for inactive NPCs has been tripled for this event!
• For each group of festive monsters out there, there’s a rare chance of encountering a “boss” – and each of these bosses has a chance to drop something special – so keep your eyes open.
• These creatures operate on a whole other ather wavelength – even the highest level players will probably want to seek out the lowest level festival monsters at first (in other words, try Hopitan)
• Feel free to share information with each other – this festival only lasts a week! It’s November 26th, 6pm PST, and this festival will end on December 3rd at the end of the day.
• Don’t forget to watch the Stats Board and see how high you can get your Festival skills!

Other things of note:

• Hospitals are now selling some med kits
• Some actions now have a minimum range of safe usage
• Some missions now incorporate your PCs’ names into the text. For this reason, you now have the ability to set a leader for your party from the Party Management screen as well as set the gender on any of your characters (from the character detail screen, where you can change their name or image)
• Some maps might randomly distribute obstacles such as rocks or trees – let me know if anyone has any trouble with these random distributions (like if they wall you in!)

Many thanks to Kranodor for his help in designing and testing things for this event – I could not have pulled it off without his efforts!

“# These creatures operate on a whole other ather wavelength – even the highest level players will probably want to seek out the lowest level festival monsters at first (in other words, try Hopitan)”

I found that out the hard way…the roasting turkey almost wiped my party…

Yay, it started! And Nero? My hint to at least retreat from Plateney Woods was for exactly that reason (you were in chaduk, but hey, you survived) – fighting Plateney festival creatures without anything else Festival-related before that ends a bit like a fight against Gladiators in the Hopitan training arena with a group that usually visits the Plateney – just the other way around.

For those who want more info, right now, I’ve tried to put together a small list of stuff (possible loot and such) as a SPOILER (WARNING!) page on my log. So, if you want to peek, you can go directly to my spoiler post to check out what different loot you may find.

I was trying to run to Hopitan…and got caught…

At least I killed the Roasting Turkey (boss)….

COOL

It was really wonderful :)
It’s a shame i caould play only for a couple of days…

I can’t wait for the Winter edition!

If i’m guessing correctly the festive skill tree will be like:

Festive
-Autumn
—Three skills
-Winter
—Three skills
-Spring
—Three skills
-Summer
—Three skills

Is this what’s planned?

Glad you liked it. We’re not sure what festivals we will do, or if all will have exactly three special skills – we may have less or more, as required or possible, and we may add new ones if we re-do an event after a year or so.

Sadly, it looks very bad for a Winter edition… at least around the time of christmas/new years where such an event would traditionally take place. We faced some horrible bugs with Autumn Harvest and we won’t do such an event again without more thorough testing, and that testing would require that the content is already finished, and that there’d be dev team members to thorougly test it. The other dev team members have been very busy and thus silent, lately, and this likely doesn’t change in the pre-christmas stress.
As for myself… I won’t be able to do anything noteworthy until January 5th, and after that only little bits.

The only way I see a winter edition coming… would be a VERY small mission (about the size of Welcome to Hopitan – two textboxes, one battle, no noteworthy decisions to make) OR maybe ONE arena. I could now make a promise that I see what I can make happen if enough players would endorse one of these ideas, but you’d likely be disappointed, so I won’t do that. Maybe a winter’s end event? I don’t know. It’d still leave room for snowmen and disgruntled (and discarded) trees…

Let’s see… Autumn Harvest had about 18 different foes, with ca. 50 droppable and undroppable items, plus 14 accessories (droppable and undroppable) and no less than 32 unique festival actions… whew. A lot of stuff.
Even if I’d make that promise I mentioned (which I don’t do) we’d be looking at 2-4 different foes with appropriate amounts of equipment (10-15 pieces, mostly undroppable, no accessories) and maybe 8-10 unique actions for that festival tree. That’d be lame, wouldn’t it?

Yeah, the “Festival” root skill is meant to be generic enough to cover all events. “Autumn Harvest” was more about the “Harvest” than “Autumn”, so other events won’t necessarily be tied to seasons (probably many will, but not all). The next couple of weeks are going to be extremely busy for me so it’s not a good time to squeeze another event in.

BTW – WB, WS – good to see you around again :)

Sounds like a “dead cold of winter” festival is in order? We just got through a nasty freeze here in Colorado…

Hey, I live in Colorado. What city you live in?