Rose Online : April News - Late Edition
Its mid April and the news is just being posted? Yes its true, but its not that we have forgotten its just that things are so busy with the development side that Leonis has not had the chance to sit down and get to the news post. Leonis has been doing the monthly news since we took over the development work from Triggersoft, and its been something he has always set aside a significant amount of time to share some of what is going on. Lately his time for the forums has been very limited, the whole dev team is busy with the next project and has not had the time to post or check the forums as often as I am sure they wish they could.
Many of you over the years have PM'd him with questions and suggestions or bug reports, and this has taken a lot of his attention at times because he does not want to leave the community waiting for answers. I have to ask that if its something that needs urgent attention that you send a PM to myself as I check this way more often; as if I am addicted. If you have a question about how something works or why something might have changed or should change then I suggest posting as its best if everyone in the community can get the answer to those questions. We don't want to bog Leonis and Zeppelin down with questions that are done over PM's as it takes away from the projects they are working on.
Now on to the projects that I have mentioned. Well there are a few things in the works that are both new content, new features and some system changes to improve on stability and functionality. April is just about passed, and I can tell you that there will be no big changes in April though there is plans to do a small update to the Sikuku Ruins map to address some bugs. May will be a challenging month for the development team as they are working now on the next project and running on a very short time schedule. The goal is to get the update out early Summer, the current plan is late May, but it maybe pushed to early June as some times things just happen and when they do they tend to push schedules back.
What is this content? Well its being called Oblivion Temple. This maybe familiar to some of the ROSE player base that existed before the dawn of time. Work on the Temple has already started and a number of art assets are already finished, this tends to be the longest part of any content update. The storyline for the Temple is being worked on and there are already 5 good storyline quests that are written and setup. This is just the start to the quests for this update as the goal is set much higher. There will be a few maps to this dungeon and even though this is not considered end game content, this will be the bridge for players before the final levels.
Aside from that, there is other work going into the system side. Some work is being done to how drops are handled by the system. For a long time now we have not been able to do 2x drop events or even offer drop rate modifiers to items or the item mall. This is something that is being fix as the system has an odd way of handling "rare" drops and the "quantity" of what you pick up when the rates are changed. Also a change to the refinement system is being worked on, I can't give specifics but its going to be a pretty big change we believe.
The team spent the first part of April finishing and launching the Sikuku Ruins, and since the first of April they have been in planning for the Oblivion Temple and have finalized a number of things and working on getting new maps made and more quests written up. As we come into May, expect some updates to the Sikuku Ruins maps to fix a few bugs that were reported as well as some smaller updates to that content. Through out May the team will be focused on completion of the Temple maps and testing and planning for the next content update for the development team.