On the Upcoming Patch
In the latest developer journal from the folks at Atlantica Online, Lead Game Designer Joon Kyung Oh talks about what players can expect in the game's next patch.
To keep any game fresh and exciting, we have to constantly produce quality experiences for the player to remain interested. Otherwise, it will quickly grow old and stale, and we’ll lose our competitive edge to the other hundreds of quality games in the market. We don’t like to wait around for massive quarterly content updates so we try to squeeze in every little bit of excitement—or mini content updates—into every little patch we can. Ironically, this next patch is insipidly named Patch 3.1.
Aside from usual tinkering and bug fixes you normally find in patches, players can really look forward to a couple major additions to Atlantica in this upcoming patch. The first is a brand new, level 120 scenario dungeon called the Mysterious Inn. You’ll immediately be able to tell that inspiration for this dungeon was heavily drawn from the old Kung Fu movies. NPCs will be seen running up buildings, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, all to immerse the player into this Kung Fu world of ancient China. And when you encounter enemies in battle, they’ll pull off fancy acrobatic moves in strategic turn-based fashion.
The Mysterious Inn dungeon introduces a new NPC, Yayul, a dreamer who hopes to one day travel the world and hone his skills to become a master martial artist. But for now, he is merely an innkeeper who provides solace to the many weary travelers in his hometown. This dungeon also continues the development of the evil organization, Chin Tai Dong Do, which was previously introduced in the Women’s Village quest. Members of this group have forcefully taken over Yayul’s inn, believing that it houses an ancient relic that gives its wielder amazing power. So Yayul takes it upon himself, with the assistance of good Samaritans, to reclaim the inn and restore it as the peaceful hospice it once was.
This dungeon took about two months of actual development time, which includes crafting of the story, the NPCs, and the design of the inn itself. Then we spend about a month testing the dungeon to ensure as few bugs as possible. Players who wish to immediately begin this dungeon may speak with NPC Sogang and Modan.
The second feature we’re introducing in Patch 3.1 is the Jackpot system, and we came up with this idea because we wanted to players to have a chance at obtaining just the items they want or need. This does indeed raise possible economic concerns, so to take advantage of this system, a player must purchase the Jackpot License for a fixed price from the market. For these players, all accumulated items collected from battle will go into a separate jackpot window, where players can then choose to acquire all, or take the Jackpot Challenge. Selecting the Jackpot Challenge will direct the player to select only one of their items from the Jackpot Window. The player will then receive just that item in multiple quantities, depending on the total value of the other accumulated items.
The Jackpot system was just a simple idea that grew from the concept of making players collect items in a more enjoyable fashion. After a few brainstorming sessions, we found this idea to be the most feasible without hurting balance or the economy. Development of this feature only took a week, but we made sure to spend more time with this feature in the test phase.
So these are just a couple of many new additions to come in Patch 3.1, and we hope everyone enjoys these updates.
