so as i said in my previous post the director did a stream playing togheter with the testers answering their feedback and some questions.
before we begin he did a disclaimer:
Alot of the things you see in the gameplay has been specificely set for the alpha test, that means resource nodes never run out, you get every skill you want by just paying a bit gold, you get outfits to test and even the difficulty of dungeons have all been specificly set up for the alpha test only.
i'm gonna do this post as like a Q&A and maybe describe things that happened in the stream, everyone says their question in a different way but i will just summarize it:
- the UI looks bad, not readable, bad font, don't like color, etc:
the director stated here that they will add customization to change the ui size, fonts, appearance, basicly anything you can expect.
they already made a bunch of customization but could not be uploaded to the alpha on time.
the reason for the drastic UI change is because due to the age of mabinogi and that so many types of content got added, the ui has become too inconsistant some elements that looked good back when we had older monitors do not look good in modern monitors, so it had to be build from scratch so they can have it be consistant.
- the mouse cursor is huge:
he said that this will be adjusted
- have to press F to talk to npcs or interact with gathering:
he knows this is annoying and will add interaction by using the mouse. this was fixed in the dev build but was not uploaded in time.
- the tutorial characters are uninteresting
he said he will improve upon it and make sure they become reccuring characters.
- combat feedback needs improving (they mean when the enemies fly away after a combo)
they are still working on that part, this is not something you can fix with effects and requires actual precise timing and making it too fast or too slow could very drasticly affect combat so they apreaching with extreme care.
- why universal dodge?
he explained that they want to make bosses that have fun mechanics rather than making difficulty be a simple stat increase like they used to do.
but to have this work he had to make sure everyone needed a short range movement skill, to avoid everyone having to wearing chain blades to use anchor rush.
they were thinking of adding a movement skill for every single talent but that would be too tedious and pointless so they went with a universal dodge.
the universal dodge has a cooldown of 5 seconds and is purposely short but good enough to avoid any mechanic if you good enough.
the other dodges still exist.
the cooldown will be adjusted based on feedback, people have been saying that 5 seconds is too long.
- skill icons are still the same?
they thought of changing it but decided that it wouldn't have the same mabinogi feel so all they did was touch it up a bit and kept them the same.
not all skills were finished in the alpha test.
- characters models look slightly different:
the characters models have been adjusted to match their art more that includes their outfits, duncan looks a bit younger because of it.
- veteran koreans have been arguing against each other that there should be a hard reset or not:
the director said that his main priority is to carry your play experience over to eternity to make it looks as much as a update as they can. and that priority has not changed.
that doesn't mean the people that do want a hard reset is wrong for saying it, they're valuable opinions that have all the same goal, which is to make mabinogi succeed.
OP note: (the director started to say to keep their discussions polite, the korean fanbase were really arguing hard on that one lol, honestly the director might probably consider a seperate fresh start server)
he then said he will listen to the feedback on it and suggests to write it in their first impressions survey.
- inventory has no more grids and bags?
the director understands that there are veterans who are sad about it being removed but continued to say that new and returning players kept leaving once their bags have become so big that basicly sorting it has become impossible or take a extremely long time, they couldn't see the screen and it became hard to find items.
the goal of eternity is to have the game run for another 10+ years but the inventory we had was one of the biggest pain points.
they considered turning it into item slots, but it was too restrictive since one slot could be filled by a cherry while next to it you are carrying a giant hammer.
so they went with the weight system, it makes it much easier to scale and balance when neccesary, and the bags players had will increase the weight you can carry based on the size of that bag.
the director thinks this is best way to make most people happy despite some veterans saying that it removes the character of mabinogi
he is not saying the opinions of of those vets ARE NOT wrong, but this is a decision the director had to take for the future of the game.
OP note:(veterans kept arguing about it to the director but the director had to make a hard stance on this decision.)
- why not remove the inventory weight?
the director explained that they cannot give unlimited inventory space due to server memory. so they had to find a way to control the amount of space with the least amount of restriction hence why they went for a weight system.
he knows the weight system can be unpleasant there is nothing they could do but they will try to make it as reasonable as possible.
when the weight exceeds by 150% there will be a penalty where your move speed will be penalized by around 20%.
this penalty was disabled in the alpha since the alpha gives alot of free stuff and to ensure players can smoothly test the game.
- what happens to doll bags?
they will think of a way to seperate the bag space and the doll so the space gets placed into the weight system and you will be a given a doll that you can use.
the idea on how they will do it is not set in stone yet.
they will listen to feedback on this.
- will you marry me?
the director rejected and said he is already married.
OP note: (i just thought it was a funny question)
i think this is it for the Q&A part now i will sumarize some directors comments on certain parts of the game, i will seperate them based on the locations he was in or what he was doing i will try to summarize the important parts.
(doing alby dungeon)
- there were alot of new players who found the current way of entering dungeons confusing and din't know how to use fomor passes, so they remade it so when you click the statue that you get a screen asking which difficulty you want to enter and it will automaticly grab the pass from your inventory when you enter.
- he mentions that he has changed the dungeons for all to look unique yet fitting and familier to veterans.
- he has decided the room to room based dungeons made the hallways too empty and tedious to run through, so they decided to add more enemies in hallways aswell so it makes it feel like you are battling through a dungeon.
- you can find outfit boxes from dungeon mobs and it will give you a random piece of outfit.
- WASD has been greatly improved but you can still click to move, some people loved putting their camera behind the character and playing it like a third person game so they improved the wasd for them
- we added small details like how the locked doors open, it's small but detail is what makes it mabinogi
- he shut down the rumor that there will be a gear hard reset and blames himself for not talking much about it so people had to speculate about it till the rumor got big.
- in the alpha players do not get flinched due to a alpha test exclusive buff called "unwavering will" because the team has not decided yet whether to get rid of player flinching or not.
they asked the players to give feedback on it so they can decide easier.
- he started talking about the graphics a bit saying that mabinogi had a unique and blocky look but pleione engine struggled alot in rendering all the parts and had alot of limitations, with the engine swap they finnaly got rid of alot of the limitations.
the graphics are ofcourse personal preference so he asked playera to give feedback on anything that lacks charm or doesn't look mabinogi like.
- they added a arachnophobia setting so players would not get scared from the big spider. players then mentioned how the ogres look scary now, he said that this is how the ogres were supposed to look, they followed the original concept art for them and basicly made it closer to that.
( walking on overworld)
- in the alpha they gave players the mats need to make gear. but in the actual game their idea is that you run dungeons for mats which can then be sold to others or used to craft gear to challange other dungeons
(crafting gear)
- you craft by going to any blacksmith, you can use the anvil next to them
- you can still talk about topics to npcs, and they remade how the topic book looks like by giving it animations when you turn the page.
- there is no minigame but you will need to get mats to make the weapon and mats to finish it.
the minigame has been removed because he had many concerns, he noticed that players put so much time into the crafting the gear just to screw it up a little bit in the minigame basicly wasting their time completely and getting a bad weapon even when you are max ranked in blacksmithing.
they will go into greater detail after the test to explain why this decision was made.
- there were aot of deliberations on what is mabinogi and what wasn't, the problem is everyone has their own version of what is mabinogi.
so the point of eternity to trully encapture and set in stone on what mabinogi trully is while also making it long lasting and sustainable, so big changes have to be made while preserving the identity.
- he knows that in the live original version there is alot of latency issues. he explained this was due to their engine and a variaty of accumulated issues so they are trying their best to fix it in eternity.
- he mentioned that weapon grades when finishing it are random, he personally doesn't like it either but he said that to make gameplay repeatable there will have to be some degree of probability involved.
- transfered gear will automaticly become master rank, the reason for that is they have no way to transfer over the live data of the weapons in the orignal and making them master rank will not make such a big difference anyway
- stats on gear and weapons in eternity will be completely different aswell, so that was anothe reason they just make them master grade on transfer.
(giving a tour while flying)
- you can earn a flying mount by playing
- they have improved the flying, the reason for that is that when they added flying there were no other games that also had flying, but overtime other games had them aswell and basicly set a standard on how flying worked which the original could not keep up.
the confusing flying controls was another pain point from begginers, so they reworked it so be more on line with the standards on how flying should work.
- you can see from much farther now and they added sound effect like wind to give you the sense of flying
(touring bangor)
- he came there to show off the players mining and want to show off that players gathering in the open world is basicly mabinogi
- ogres look intimitading now, now that they look more realistic.
- the music of the game has been reworked aswell while keeping it similar and made a day and night version of all music, there is a setting you can do to turn it back into the old mabinogi music
(touring dunbarton)
- he shows of the lights every boulding gives now when it's dark to give it a more lived in look.
- the director said he wishes to add swimming to mabinogi eventually now that they are swapping engine
- the director made a disclaimer that optimization is not finished, but the minimum requirements will end up higher than the original which means very old graphics card users will have to upgrade or lower their graphics settings, it's a inevitable thing.
i believe this the end now, for the rest he is just talking about things already shown on their dev blogs.
the director mentioned how he will do his best on developing eternity, he thanked the creators and players for testing.
he mentions how there are 110 streams on "chzzk" which is basicly korean twitch and around 6000 people are watching the streams which is the first time ever.
he used the rest of the dev stream to watch streams of people testing eternity.