The DEV team had a round table yesterday and we wanted to share some information on the ongoing development, plans and ideas we had during the meeting.
Epic 3.0s
First thing first, we plan to release Epic 3.0 for one of the most popular class pretty soon. Without any spoiler, this journey will be up pair with the predecessors but I can safely say GM Ydiss is raising the bar for the upcoming epic 3.0 quests as always.
Expeditions vs. Guild instances
The other big thing on the horizon is the complete overhaul of our raid progression from tier 1 to tier 10 (Soon™). GM Peterigz did some magic and implemented the new Expedition system and seeing it's potentials, simplicity and advantages, we decided to replace the current guild based instancing with Expeditions. This will basically result in a way more 'simple' and fun way of progression as all players regardless of their guild tag will be able team up and join their forces while raiding. I'm personally super excited to see this being implemented. We finally can say goodbye to the old, rusty and restrictive guild instances!
Custom Server Code
This is a rather 'invisible topic' but I wanted to mention this because it's not as obvious as a newly released custom zone for example. GM Peterigz put in tremendous work to polish, update and extend our server code and well, he did magic..least to say. The server never ever had so few crashes or stability during its 12 years+ of uptime. He also implemented new features as the Tier System and frameworks for zone and NPC scaling for further development, making things a lot smoother, easier and better in any way for the rest of us devs. While we don't usually post about things like this, the magic he's doing is on a daily basis and our server code keeps evolving almost every day.
The tale of The Hidden Forest
This is something precious to me personally as I've always been a big fan of fantasy books and tales and while back in the days my initial goal was to create a charming fantasy background, a rich storytelling along the way as players adventure in The Hidden Forest, I had to realize while I'm a good reader, I'm a bad writer.. Thankfully we now have a talent in the team, GM Ydiss, and if anyone is interested in the lore behind the game, I encourage you to visit Azakir the Storyteller in the hub zones and talk to him. While his tales are already more than what we ever had, it's just the beginning as more and more stories are revealed and explained about The Hidden Forest.
Solo-group progression pathway
This topic was never forgotten and we keep coming back to it.
Starter/Hub Zones
We had plans to to revamping the starter/hub zones and while there were quite a lot of brainstorming and work put into it already we decided to take a different approach and won't change the fundamentals of our 10+ years old starter zones, rather we'll try to spice them up and introduce new features and fun touches to these zones to keep them up par in quality with other zones and custom content.
Mounts..
We had lots of discussion about introducing mounts but of course in a custom, THF way. GM Ydiss already made great progress setting up the base for this new and quite huge custom feature we plan to implement. The Hidden Vale will give home to a stable type area where players will be able to see most of these mounts, purchase selected ones but there will be many other ways to obtain them. Some of the ideas we've been playing with were rare mounts appearing in random zones that players have to tame to obtain (unicorn, anyone?
), mounts coming from raid bosses, from merchants, from achievements or AAs just to name a few.Their functionality will be rather different to the original EverQuest like mounts given we are a custom server and well traveling is all different here. So let's say, instead of just running fast with your mount, maybe you are one of the lucky adventurers to obtain a rare mount that can actually take you from one place to another, that's hard to reach and would considerably lower your traveling time (did someone say VT?). Some mounts could give you beneficial effect for battles while others could just look great so you can show it off to other adventurers.
Of course, these are just early ideas for now but we are gathering them and started to think about what we will actually implement.Treasure Goblin v2.0
To be fair our good old goblin is running out of treasures and compared to the new features and quality of custom content we have he's rather rusty too. We plan to rework him and make him appear more often, more unpredictable and offer more fun for to deal with.
Something different..
We've been thinking about new ways to offer custom content without the feeling of doing it once and being done with it forever. Diablo like endless dungeons or ways to reward our most loyal players for doing the existing content again on alts or even on their main teams. Nothing certain here but it's a rather top priority topic we keep revisiting in hope to implement something fun and rewarding.
Tier 10
We've been discussing more topics during our round table but this post is getting rather long so that's it for now.
Finally, as always we would like to hear your opinion and ideas about any of these topics above and even more. If you think something would awesome and would fit into the THF lore and custom content, please do share with us! You can do so in this topic.
Thank you for reading, see you around in The Hidden Forest!
-The THF team