Spring Alpha Retrospective & Plans for Summer

Earlier this month, Game Director Alexander Zacherl posted an interesting retrospective on the recently held Spring Alpha event. In it, Zacherl wrote about the successes and about the lessons learned that will drive improvements and additions as the team plans for the next event to be held this summer.

Among other things, the team acknowledges that retention of the newest players is problematic and are actively working to find ways to ease entry into the game.  In addition, progression is being addressed with long-term features that will give players reasons to keep playing.

The letter goes on to show a long list of changes and additions that are currently in the works:

• A out-of-game-progression / achievement system that will allow you to unlock avatars, titles and skins by performing certain feats during the lifetime of each game world.
• New and improved ways to find friends, mentors and a clan plus a ton of social features (/whisper, friends-lists, friend invites etc.).
• A re-design of the current XP system that makes it very easy for late-comers to catch up to veterans but also is way less confusing and more rewarding than the old system.
• Easier character re-training and multiple character slots for more experimentation with the new upcoming abilities and ability sets.
• A system to distinguish between newbies and veterans that makes it very explicit to people when they’re dealing with newbies. And a couple dozen ways of making it less desirable of ganking too many newbies - without resorting to the usual safe zone and PvP flag mechanics.
• We’ll also increase the protection you have while using buildings (dojos, workshops) so that just backstabbing someone while they change their skills is a bit less … easy.
• A “show the zerg on the map” system similar to what you might know from Albion Online which allows solo players and small groups to evade large groups of players (if they wish to do so) and that encourages smaller fights.
• A proper tutorial that allows new players to learn the basic controls of the game and how character progression works before getting dropped into the main game world. It will also allow for more experimentation with your class combinations before locking those in.

You can read the full letter with many more details by heading to the Das Tal site.