Welcome back to our Game Design Blog!
Last time we updated you about our vision for Potterworld in 2023. If you’ve missed our last update, you can find it here. Today, we’ll discuss the progress we’ve made, updates about the world and events, as well as sharing additional details about Potterworld 2.0 and 2024 that will affect us moving forward. So, without further ado, let’s jump in!
Last time we updated you about our vision for Potterworld in 2023. If you’ve missed our last update, you can find it here. Today, we’ll discuss the progress we’ve made, updates about the world and events, as well as sharing additional details about Potterworld 2.0 and 2024 that will affect us moving forward. So, without further ado, let’s jump in!
2023 Thus Far
Looking back at our initial roadmap for 2023, we're proud of the progress we've made. This year, we’ve seen the release of Woodshire, with a lot of incredible quests, as well as new daily repeatable activities, and new ways to interact with the world. We learned a LOT from Woodshire, and want to take these lessons into the future with Potterworld 2.0.We’ve also released our first two Adventures: Legends of Longbay Landing and Nature's Call. This was our first test of what we’ve internally referred to as our “Living World Initiative'' - Essentially pushing our world so that towns, people, and the events in them feel more alive than ever before. You’ll continue to see the results of this initiative as time goes on, as we continue to iterate and create new ways for our world to evolve.
We released a revamped Appleby Village with our Butterbrew event, to great success, which has allowed us to begin designing some new ideas for content to come to Appleby in the future.
We’ve also released our usual events for the year, which have always acted as a way for us to experiment with new ideas. As many of you noticed, we experimented with new techniques for many of our events this year, and we’re taking that feedback into account for some new systems in Potterworld 2.0. For example, Pride was the first time since the Adventure Update that we used custom recipes in crafting tables. We worked with the wonderful Development team to bring this feature back, as well as fine-tune it with new features that allow us to better integrate it into the world we have now, instead of the world of yesteryear. We’ve also been working to find new ways to make quests easier to navigate, simpler to understand, and more.
Lastly, to touch on the one element that we did not make it to this year, that being the Repressed Evil Gauntlet. When we initially played through it, it did not feel up to the standard that we would want for our Gauntlets, and as such we got to work redesigning it. While this was happening, we came up with the idea for the 9 Hells Gauntlet for Halloween, and thought that debuting a Gauntlet that all players could experience would be a fantastic idea, and got to work developing it. This meant that our resources had to be shifted to the 9 Hells Gauntlet, and as such, the Repressed Evil Gauntlet has not seen as much progress as anticipated. To that end, we know many of you enjoyed the 9 Hells Gauntlet, and as such, perhaps the gates of hell aren't as permanently closed as they appear to be...
So with all of that being said, we’re focusing most of our efforts now into Potterworld 2.0… And we believe that it’s finally time to reveal some further details. Let’s dive right in!
A Whole New World... Literally!
Much of our work for 2.0 for this year has been pen-and-paper design work as we await the Development Team to have a 1.16 server we can work on. In this time, we’ve conceptualized and further detailed systems for Subjects, examined what content we currently have that can easily be taken into 2.0, as well as which pieces we need to further examine or rework. For example, as we’ll likely be redoing mobs for Potterworld 2.0, we’ll need to change out which mob drops are used for specific quests.On the Main Storyline side, we’ve spent a ton of time conceptualizing characters. We want to make all of these characters feel real, and interact with players and each other in unique ways. Not only that, but we’ve also spent a ton of time writing and rewriting our outline for the Main Storyline itself. We have an incredible story to tell, and we’ve begun work on designs for specific quests. We’ll share more information as we have it, but we don’t want to leave you with no further details, so we’ll show you an early piece of concept art of some of our main characters, who we’re referring to as our “Fab Four”. Meet Garrett Godffrey, Ryleigh Rickards, Savannah Strider, and Hugh Hearthstread. You’ll be finding out more about them soon!
Credit: Elias (MilkBones_)
Balancing Revelius and Potterworld 2.0
Now, we know that’s a scary topic to consider - but we don’t want to give 50% to our current version of Potterworld and 50% to Potterworld 2.0 - that creates two very unsatisfactory games. Instead, we’d like to focus most of our attention towards Potterworld 2.0, with only events being released in our current version of the game. This will allow us to turbocharge our efforts to get Potterworld 2.0 released sooner rather than later, while also providing some content to our current players.
So when will we be making this change? We’re not quite sure just yet. For additional context, our Development team will have to copy over our entire backend server - the one that contains the copy of the world we play on, and it will have everything from our current version, just updated to 1.16. Once this happens, however, anything we add on the old world, would need to be added to the new world, which requires an extensive amount of work. To that end, once this copy is made, we will cease releases for all Revelius content until Potterworld 2.0 is ready. Fear not, we’ll keep you all updated as we approach this time, but we wanted to give you all the heads up as we want to make sure we continue to be transparent with you all about the state of our game.
On another note, we’re also examining how much energy we put into events. Now, that’s not to say we want to stop making event content, but we do want to free up some resources for Potterworld 2.0. In order to do that, we’re working to strike a balance between new content while also having us return to previous locations, including returning old quests, such as what we did for the May the 4th event this year. In the coming year, we’ll work with Kevin to send players back to some fan-favorite locations! Returning to old locations means we can enable old quests for everyone to play again, as well as adding a few new quests or activities for everyone to enjoy. Who knows where we may find ourselves? The Enchanted Valley? The Haunted Hollow? Only time (and Kevin) will tell! We’ll have a separate announcement in the new year regarding which events will be going to new locations and which events will be returning to fan-favorite locations.
So that’s where we stand now. In our next blogpost, we’ll be giving a closer look at our Systems work for Potterworld 2.0, and providing an update to the pieces that Droobledore shared some time ago. We know there may be quite a lot of questions about our path moving forward, and we’d be happy to answer them, either on our forums or on our discord!
Thanks for reading!
Game Design Leadership
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