Fractured Online’s free play ‘week’ has gotten longer, as the team extended it in order to give everyone a taste of the new engine and quality of life update. The team has also released a new roadmap through the end of September.
The new engine and QoL update is scheduled for sometime later this week. This is why they are extending the free play event period through September 1st at 10:00 a.m. CET, with major feature updates in the new roadmap.
Dynamight went into the technical reasons for the change, and essentially, they’ve been stuck using an old version of Unity that is not fully stable. This is separate from their backend and not tied to Unity, but these pieces need to work together. This is likely one of the reasons for the series of crashes and instability issues that they've had so they will be porting the game to Unity 2022.3.
The quality of life update is also coming, and this will add a series of new options to the Settings menu, from the ability to change to MOBA/RTS-like controls, disable quick casting, adjustable mouse cursor graphics, and visible monster names on mouseover. There are additional changes like smarter targeting that ignores allied creatures that are near the target, the ability to interrupt instant pickup, and faster mounting (one second, down from four) for Peaceful characters. On the other hand, if you are an Aggressive player when you dismount and other Aggressive players are nearby, your abilities will go on short cooldown.
A frequent community request is a dedicated hot bar for consumables, and there will be an expansion of consumables to add value to some of the items and events already in game. In the last patch of September, the team will add a number of incentives to upgrading cities.
City shops will get populated with NPCs that will require crafted T1 items. Those NPCs will have daily requests that you can fulfill for rewards. Some of these requests will be easier to do and others will be more complex, and of course those will be more rewarding. One of the reasons to upgrade your cities is that higher level cities will get better requests and bigger rewards.
Fractured Online will also add a system to take Legendary items and turn them into artifacts. Not only will you have to get a recipe, you will need to collect certain items from battling Legends in PVE content. The artifacts you can create will give you certain bonuses, for example an Armor of Strength will increase your strength score by two points.
The team is also planning an upgrade to the tax system to equalize things, and since this is a large change there will be a deep dive later.
