News

Hi, fellow gamer and MMO enthusiast!

Alpha 2 – Test 3 is getting closer, and we have a big surprise announcement for you, plus a few other news we know some of you were waiting for.

Before moving to the meat of the post, don’t forget to fill the survey on the May Open Playtest if you haven’t already. That’s really important for us, so thank you! 🙂

City Claiming

Yes, it’s live, and it’s not just a website game: through the new world map page, you can start Alpha 2 – Test 3 being already a citizen or governor of a town!

Here are a few more details on this new functionality:

• Only owners of a Governor pack or higher can become governors of a town.
• Everyone with access to A2-T3 (be it through a founder pack or a key, including limited ones) can become a citizen of a claimed town.
• Claimed towns are protected by a “citizenship password” that can be changed or disabled by Governors. This was added to allow Governors to only accept specific players, even though the Governor can actually kick players out of the city once A2-T3 starts anyway.

Please note that the new web page isn’t the only way to claim a city. Once Alpha 2 – Test 3 starts, you’ll be able to apply as Governor of a city in-game, without having to own a Governor+ pledge pack, even though entering a candidacy will cost you some gold (the in-game currency).

City Planning

Yes, my dear Governor, you can’t claim a city and be its only citizen 😉

When Alpha 2 – Test 3 begins, a city claimed on the web page will be actually set as claimed only if it has enough citizens. That’s 5 (including the Governor) for small cities and 15 for large ones. If the number is not met, the city will be set as “unclaimed” like all others, which means you have to recruit your fellow players now.

To help you do that, we have created a forum section and a Discord channel dedicated to city planning. We can’t wait to see how many cities will be able to reach the threshold before Alpha 2 – Test 3!

Aristocrat Packs

When it comes to city density, our plan in the days of Kickstarter was to have 30-40 spots per continent. We soon realized that wasn’t enough and changed the structure of cities to be able to fit way more in the same landmass.

As of today, the continent of Myr features 121 city areas – that’s 4 times as planned! Because of that, we can safely release a few additional Aristocrat packs.

The option is not available on the Fractured Store, since re-implementing it would be quite cumbersome, so please reach out to support@dymstudios.com if you’re interested in upgrading your pledge to Aristocrat.

You can find all the details on the content and price of the pack on our Kickstarter page.

Other News

Alpha 2 – Test 3

We’ve mentioned this in the previous post, now it’s official: the start of Alpha 2 – Test 3 has been moved to July due to a few quirks that are making the implementation of player cities and the talent tree more complex than expected.

Some of the issues are performance-related, both in the client and the server:

• The client is hit by framerate drops due to the rendering of constructions and calculations of pathfinding in cities;
• The server is using way too much bandwidth, which becomes particularly problematic when a lot of players are close to each other.

We have already figured out a solution to all of the issues above – the bandwidth fix actually relies on a “new” feature of SpatialOS we never used. The implementation will take a few days, however.

We hope you’re not too upset by the delay – we could have released the fixes during the test, but we want your experience to be as smooth as possible from the start 🙂 We’ll let you know the exact starting date as soon as possible.

Community Management

There have been a few discussions regarding community management (or lack thereof) on our Discord in the last few weeks. Since the start of the year, we’ve tried to release blog updates regularly – that’d be 12 so far, quite an improvement over the 14 we released in the whole of 2019 😉

Aside from that though, we are aware that our presence on the forums and on Discord hasn’t been great. Our previous community manager Znirf has left the studio in January, and we haven’t been able to find a replacement yet, both because of covid-19 and because we’re trying to focus all our resources on game development.

While it’s likely going to take a bit before we have a new community manager, our beloved moderator Specter is going to step up in community management duties. He is already planning new community activities, so stay tuned! 🙂

Foundation Titles

A couple weeks ago, the assignment of Foundation forum titles and daily post points broke. We’ve been aware, but we haven’t had time to fix it until today.

Well, it’s fixed now, finally! You’ll get all your missed titles by tomorrow, or even earlier if you open The Foundation. We can’t give you the missed daily post points though, but those are a very small portion of the points you can “farm” in The Foundation nowadays, so we hope you’ll understand.

That’s all for today. Stay tuned for the Alpha 2 – Test 3 start announcement!

Enjoy Fractured!

DISCUSS