Letter from the Producer LIVE Part LVIII Digest (05/01/2020)

[Zhexos]

Updates to A Realm Reborn



(00:55:49)
The A Realm Reborn main scenario has been streamlined overall, while maintaining scenes featuring important characters who are relevant later on.

Roughly 13% of the quests will be removed in this revamp, which may not seem like a lot. In addition to this, however, we’ve greatly reduced the number of steps featured in many quests (such as going to a specified location, or talking to certain NPCs several times), making the story experience much smoother.

The content that was added in between Patch 2.1 and 2.2 was being developed before we received player feedback, and the quantity of quests was determined based on the time it would take to complete them all. This resulted in many tedious and roundabout quests in the 2.1 and 2.2 main scenario. For this section, we cut out anything that wasn’t directly relevant to the story.

If you’re progressing through A Realm Reborn when Patch 5.3 is released, you may run into a situation where a main scenario quest you’d accepted is no longer available. Should this happen, the next step in the main scenario will be displayed for you.

The amount of EXP gained during the main scenario will be increased so that you won’t have to do side quests in order to progress. We plan on eventually applying this change to quests in Heavensward and beyond. As a note, if you use the Tales of Adventure: A Realm Reborn optional item to complete the main scenario, all Crystal Tower-related content will be unlocked but not marked as complete, so you’ll still need to complete them.



Flying mounts will be allowed in A Realm Reborn areas. This revamp was very expensive in terms of development manpower cost, but the Level Design Team worked on it whenever they could throughout the development of Patch 5.0 - 5.3.

We believe seeing veteran players flying around will serve as motivation for new players to keep going, so we wanted to implement this at the same time as the A Realm Reborn main scenario revamp.

Additionally, A Realm Reborn was not designed with flying mounts in mind, so the Sound Team graciously reimplemented the ambient sounds for these areas from scratch. We also did our best to make sure there weren’t any unexpected sounds while flying through the air in these areas, but we didn’t have enough time to do a fully detailed check before Patch 5.3, so we’ll be fixing any issues as discovered.

Unreal Trials and Faux Hallows



(01:10:34)
In Unreal Trials, not only are primals scaled up to level 80, but they are also re-balanced accordingly. If we were to keep introducing new Unreal Trials, we’d have to spend a tremendous amount of cost to re-balance every trial all over again when the level cap is increased in the future. As such, our solution was to change the featured primal with each patch.

Some members of the development team felt that Titan deserved to be the first Unreal Trial, but Titan’s difficulty on release was around that of current Savage fights, which we felt was too difficult for the first Unreal Trial. Instead we decided on Shiva, as she had recently made a sort of appearance in Eden’s Verse.

Miscellaneous Updates



(01:18:24)
In addition to the points listed in the slide, we’re also considering making it so that only augmented versions of previous tomestone gear is available for purchase.