News

Hi, fellow gamer and MMO enthusiast!

Alpha 2 – Test 2 is ending on Sunday, April 26 (yes, that’s official now!), and we are already looking forward to the next testing phase.

While we usually wait until after a test is over to reveal the roadmap to the following one, this time we’ve decided to move it up – development is progressing faster than ever, let’s make blog updates follow suit!

Before getting into the details of what’s coming in Alpha 2 – Test 3, we have some great news: the next test is going to launch in June already! Two testing phases have never been so close to each other, and we’re really excited by that since it gets us closer to the moment we’ll have servers running 24/7.

..and now, let the reveal begin!

Player Cities

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Note: planning your city? Looking for a city to live in? Head to the dedicated forum section! There’s a map of upcoming cities on Myr, too!

Many of you likely know already that player cities are the main new feature coming in Alpha 2 – Test 3, since we’ve covered that in a live Q&A just a couple weeks ago. If you are interested in up-to-date info on the topic and haven’t watched the video yet, we warmly suggest you do so!

The next testing phase will only see a first iteration of Player Cities, which are a very long system to develop in full. Nonetheless, even this first iteration will add a ton of gameplay to Fractured!

The continent of Myr of planet Syndesia – the only one currently available – will contain 20+ large city plots and 90+ small city plots. The process of claiming a town works as follows:

• Any player can apply as Governor of a town interacting with the ruins in the center of the town area;
• If enough players support a candidacy, the city becomes claimed, the candidate becomes Governor and all his/her supporters become citizens of the town;
• The ruins turn into a blueprint of a Town Hall, which has to be fully rebuilt before any other construction can begin.

We’ve turned a few of the existing dirt roads in the world into main roads, which are now paved and grant a movement speed bonus. Each town is crossed by a main road, and the roads citizens build in a town must be connected to it, while all buildings must be adjacent to a road.

Speaking of buildings, the governor (or a delegate) will be able to place the following elements in a town in A2-T3:

• Public buildings: bank, tavern, barracks;
• Personal land parcels (to be claimed by citizens);
• Fortifications;
• A few decorative elements such as fountains, vases, etc.

To wrap it up, in the next test we’ll be evaluating the basics of city building and city management, without the thrilling competitive side (which will see the light as soon as possible after A2-T3). As for the elements of advanced crafting, we’ll try to throw in a little to give you an idea of what’s to come!

The Talent Tree

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The Knowledge System has been first introduced in A2-T1, but only its core – ability learning – has made it into the game then. In A2-T3, we’re adding a secondary (yet very impactful) component to it: the Talent Tree!

The Talent Tree adds a ton of variety to your character builds and strengthens the feeling of character progression by allowing you to exchange Knowledge Points for Talent Points instead of spending them to learn discovered abilities. The current conversion cost is 1,000 Knowledge Points : 1 Talent Point.

Each character can unlock up to 60 Talent Points, which can be assigned on a tree consisting of 90 different nodes, which each node providing a different bonus and accepting a different amount of points. In sum, a classic RPG talent tree, with the peculiarity that you can create multiple talent presets and memorize a different one each time you rest – just like with abilities, no timed or paid respecs!

Character Death

Up until now, death (= hitting 0 Endurance with 0 Life) has meant little in Fractured – your character would just respawn home or in the starting area. Things were never meant to be that easy, though.

From the next testing phase onward, a character dying will leave its body behind, including all the items it was carrying (both equipped and in the backpack). The corpse will stay for a while before decaying and disappearing, so you’ll have plenty of time to get back to it and loot it – unless you respawned on the other side of the continent, that is!

Speaking of respawn locations, don’t worry about endless corpse runs: after death, you’ll be able to choose to resurrect at home or at the last tavern you rested in. This makes paying a visit to the closest town a key step when exploring a new area… and if you really can’t make it back, you can still allow your party/guild members to loot your corpse!

Quality Of Life

On top of all the new content, we have a handful of additions to make your life in Fractured easier:

• The possibility to split item stacks (holding CTRL when releasing a stack);
• The possibility to craft multiple items instead of 1 at a time;
• Direct trading between players;
• Protection from monster attacks and damage after being knocked down and standing back up;
• An option to toggle combat mode manually. Combat mode prevents accidental clicks on resources and corpses when fighting and is currently activated automatically, but we know many of you didn’t like that;
• Spell and menu hotkeys rebinding;

All the changes above have been frequently requested by our community, so we know they’ll make many people happy! 🙂

Client & Server Performance

Here we are at the boring chapter of any roadmap – the technical stuff 😉

Thanks to all the performance tweaks we’ve introduced before and during A2-T2, we’re satisfied with the current framerate of the client. On our benchmark machine, a equipped with a FullHD screen and rather old Nvidia GeForce GTX 970, the client now hits ~100 FPS at Ultra quality in most circumstances – not bad for an alpha!

The major issue left in the client is the very rough way asset loading/unloading is performed today, which leads to high RAM usage and sporadic stuttering. A must fix for A2-T3!

Server-wise, our February Open Playtest saw hundreds of players in logged in the world at the same time, and everything was running smoothly thanks to the power of SpatialOS. We know there’s still room for improvement however, particularly when AIs are involved, so we’ll spend some time on those too!

So ends our roadmap. Stay tuned, because there’s a handful of other exciting news coming in the next few weeks!

DISCUSS