Friday, February 23rd Design Notes: Book 2: Reimagined - A Brief Respite (Full Version)

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Laeon val Observis -> Friday, February 23rd Design Notes: Book 2: Reimagined - A Brief Respite (2/24/2024 0:05:18)

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[image]https://www.dragonfable.com/images/DF/author/Verlyrus.png[/image]
Friday, February 23, 2024
Book 2: Reimagined - A Brief Respite
Hey there, heroes!

This week, we return to the Book 2 Reimagined project! With the conclusion of the Rift War, and the sun high in the sky, there's nothing left to do but rest and recover with your new friends... and hear their harrowing tale of escape.

[image]https://cms.battleon.com/DF/images/2024-03-23-RESPITEdn.png[/image]

Enjoy A Brief Respite, accessible from Book 2 in the Book of Lore!

Note: If you're having trouble accessing "A Brief Respite", you may need to first go to the Rift War and play "The General's Arrival" and then re-play the Rift War boss fight. There was a bug where you could access the Rift War boss fight without playing The General's Arrival. However, doing so would not progress your quest tracking. Apologies for the inconvenience. The early Rift War boss access issue has been fixed.



Also this week, we have a new catalyst and cosmetic items available!

The Prototype Snugglemech Helm unlocks the Snugglemech and Snugglemech (CC) customization options for the Student class!

[image]https://cms.battleon.com/DF/images/Promo-SnuggleMech.png[/image]

The Prototype Snugglemech Helm can be obtained from the Catalysts shop in the Book of Lore!

We also have some new cosmetic items that match the recent Virtuoso Epoch release! These will be available from the Time Shop and the Customization Shop from Cysero's Superstore of Savings!

[image]https://cms.battleon.com/DF/images/Promo-VirtuosoItems.png[/image]


Speaking of Virtuoso Epoch...

Virtuoso Epoch has been updated! The Virtuoso Epoch widget has been updated with its new style, and (we're working on giving it a new unique final animation)!

Also, Virtuoso and Underworld Epoch skills have been updated!

The primary goal of this update is to make the debuffs from double turns more interactive, while also simplifying the system a bit.
  • Underworld's Call/Song is now a permanent effect.
    • Instead of rotating between the three debuff types, all debuffs will increment each turn now.
    • The debuff amount per turn has been decreased to -1 All/-1 Boost/-2 Avd, down from 3/3/6.
  • Final now consumes all Momentum (minimum 3). For each Momentum consumed, the attack will deal 33% more base damage, and reduce a stack of Underworld's Call/Song.
    • Using Final at 9 Momentum will reduce Underworld's Call/Song by 9 stacks.
  • Final now always grants +60 Defenses, +10 All, and -20 Health, rather than a variable amount based on Momentum thresholds.
  • Timeshift now purges effects before healing, and no longer purges The Death Note buff effect.
On-Demand Specials have also received an adjustment. Changing to a different On-Demand Special will now always use the new Special's charge time, rather than the longer of the two.

This means you can more effectively use a Special with a long cooldown, then swap to a special with a shorter cooldown.

However, when swapping to a different special, the new intiial charge time is not affected by LUK. LUK will only affect recharging the same special without swapping, and initial charge time at the start of battle.

Huge thanks for the testers for helping to collate and test these changes!



This week, there have also been a number of other bug fixes and updates!
  • Fixed a visual bug where swappping to On-Hit specials from On-Demand would not clear the cooldown field of the Special button.
  • Mid-combat attacks (Such as punting Twilly vs Rolith, Carnax allies) will no longer interrupt "combo" attacks.
  • A number of Epoch tooltip and effect description issues have been fixed.
  • Retro Base Classes now have updated tooltips!
  • Student now has updated tooltips!
  • Anything else I may have forgotten!


And that's all for this week! These past couple weeks have been a little light while I've been recovering from COVID, but I'm doing much better now! Back to work!





TFS -> RE: Friday, February 23rd Design Notes: Book 2: Reimagined - A Brief Respite (2/24/2024 4:07:12)

I'm really glad Book 2 is being revisited! The original quests had a ton of cool concepts that were either woefully underdeveloped or scrapped entirely, and it's exciting to see them potentially get a second pass. I’ve got a lot of strong opinions about Book 2 and love writing huge bloviating textwalls that maybe two people will read, so I’ll take this opportunity to rant about what I think the rewrites have been doing well, what issues with the original I hope are addressed in the future, and what pitfalls I’m worried future releases could fall into.

First off, I’m enjoying the greater focus the Ateala have gotten so far. Like much of Book 2, they weren’t really given much explanation nor elaboration in the original questline - and after a few quests just disappeared, never to be mentioned again. I think the rewrites do a good job of introducing them as individual characters, as well as providing a more coherent backstory for why they’ve arrived in Lore – all while still leaving more lowercase-l lore for the player to discover in Book 3. This was one of my bigger issues with the original Book 2 questline, and I’m looking forward to seeing Atrea properly introduced as well!

Book 2’s brevity has more victims than just the Ateala, though. I believe that some of the less-developed aspects of Book 2 don’t do a good job of setting up Book 3, and that re-addressing them would substantially improve the game as a whole.
This biggest victim of this is obviously Jaania. Over the course of Book 2, she has no characterization, almost no dialogue, and ends up contributing nothing to the plot. Though there’s an effort to insert her into the story (a whole dedicated quest in a very brief questline), she doesn’t actually do anything - she isn’t instrumental in stopping Wargoth, nor is her reunion with Xan even shown on-screen. It’s clear that her only purpose in this questline is to set up Book 3, which begs its own question – why? Why designate Jaania as a future antagonist when her motives and character traits have to be retrofitted on? Her only defining trait in Book 2 is her relationship to Xan (which isn’t actually shown, and is only told to us by other characters) – who has almost no presence in Book 3 regardless. Given that she’s now a pretty well-defined character as of Book 3, I really hope her Book 2 incarnation is significantly re-written (or just written); it’d be nice if her Book 3 incarnation felt like the payoff of an arc and not just something completely arbitrary.
I also don’t feel like Jaania’s experiences in Book 2 properly inform her choices in Book 3 (though this is, again, more about the story itself than the character writing). The only harmful uses of magic she actually sees in Book 2 both come from the same one guy (whose power is extraneous to the rest of the game’s world anyway) - wanting to regulate the use of magic for the everyday people of Greenguard doesn’t seem like it logically follows. Nor does controlling the Mana Core, for that matter, as Wargoth generates his own mana anyway. The brief mention of Elemental Dissonance™ that does occur in Book 2 is said to have been caused by the Fire War and the Final 13th at the end of Book 1 – I think if this plot point was expanded upon, so that Elemental Dissonance™ and it being caused by magic had more of a role in the story, Jaania’s goals and motives in Book 3 would be better contextualized. As it is, Book 2 doesn’t do a very good job of setting up Jaania and Book 3 feels a bit weaker for it; I’d really hope to see this addressed by the rewrites.
Related to Jaania, I also feel like Book 2’s ending is super abrupt and unsatisfying. It doesn’t feel like it’s set up by the events preceding it, nor is it reconciled with the events following it (though this is a failure on Book 3’s part, not Book 2’s). The only acknowledgement of it present in the entire game is an extremely brief exchange about halfway through Book 3, which doesn’t provide much explanation regardless (How did the protagonist give Jaania the impression that they were dangerous? Why didn’t Jaania go back and unfreeze them when she learned that they weren’t? Why was Drakonnan allowed to walk free? How is Jaania capable of one-shotting Warlic? Why wasn’t the ice block moved? Why didn’t Xan and Warlic show up after the protag thawed?) Obviously this isn’t something that a rewrite would change, as so much of Book 3 is contingent on it, but I think properly building up to the ending would drastically improve Book 2 and possibly mitigate some of the issues with early Book 3.
I also feel like expanding on the actual Elemental Dissonance™ and how it affects the Avatars would be a good way to recontextualize their appearance in Book 3. I think one of the bigger issues players have with the Maleurous saga is how the Avatars are handled – they’re incredibly hateable after their sole appearance in Book 1, they don’t show up frequently enough beforehand for players to have a good grasp of what to expect from them nor their role in the world, and the fact that they show up to assign trivial tasks after being deadbeats for the whole game makes it seem like the game itself doesn’t have a good grasp of how to use god-like figures. I think all of these problems could be alleviated if the Avatars’ appearance in Book 2 was substantially expanded – maybe with the goal of making them more sympathetic to players / more clearly defining their role in the world. Honestly, anything would be better than Fiamme showing up just to job twice and then never be mentioned again lol.

As for future concerns – I’m worried about what might not be addressed. I don't think there's been any official statement about the projected scope of the Book 2 reimagined releases- if there has and I just couldn't find it, someone please link it. I'm mildly concerned that, as more quests are released, this might end up being similar to the Sulen’Eska reimagining – where each individual quest is polished up but the underlying issues with the story and its structure are not changed. Considering that these are just Reimagined releases, and not something that followed the end of Book 3 and its command of development resources – I’m not sure how likely it is that Book 2 will actually be built into its own Book and not just a single questline.
I think the big pitfall with the original Book 2 is that it’s not a book. DragonFable really only has two distinct story chapters, despite labeling itself as having three. The plot of Book 2 isn’t bad by any stretch, nor is the lore or the writing – it’s the breakneck pacing, and resultant lack of development each concept gets. If Book 2 has to be rewritten, this is what the rewrites should be aiming to fix – there’s nothing else that ‘needs’ to be fixed.
You don’t need to read Geo’s old DN post to tell that a lot of content was planned and then scrapped. The titular Elemental Dissonance™ is only present in a single quest, and relegated to a line of throwaway dialogue that doesn’t actually have any bearing on the story. The Ateala are completely forgotten about after the first few quests, and then never mentioned again until… the Void Ship. Only one of the weakened Avatars shows up, and only once, before never being mentioned again – same with the portal to the Elemental Planes. What an Infernal even is isn’t explained until the latter half of Book 3. While Drakonnan and his redemption arc are technically present, he’s more like background scenery than he is a character – all he ever says is “…” and “!” while the Professor monologues (I’m not kidding, this is literally all of his dialogue for the entire storyline). Jaania, like Konnan, is also closer to furniture than she is to a character – and the lack of any meaningful dialogue between her and Xan is probably the biggest missed opportunity in the game. The reborn baby Akriloth at the end of Book 1 never actually segued into Book 2, as the plotline with the Great Dragons and warring elementals was scrapped entirely. None of these story beats are given the attention they need to properly develop, and feel incredibly abrupt as a result - I don’t think it’s possible for just a single general questline to incorporate this many elements in a satisfying way.
If Book 2 were to track with Books 1 and 3, these plot elements would all have their own separate storylines and be tied together with a finale arc – instead of having to cohabitate in a matchbox. Having several questlines’ worth of story squished into one questline is itself the problem - there wouldn’t be very much of a point to a Book 2 rewrite if the story structure isn’t overhauled.

I’ve also got a few miscellaneous talking points that I couldn’t really fit into any other part of this post:
-Why does the most recent quest reveal that the Professor is from Lore? This makes it immediately obvious to a new player that it’s Warlic, kind of weakens the reveal later lol.
-this will affect the wrath of wargoth economy i think

Um, I think this is all I have to say about the Book 2 rewrites. I think they’ve all been a pretty marked improvement so far, and even if Book 2’s underlying issues aren’t ever addressed I’m still definitely looking forward to these releases in the future. Also I can point back to this post in like four years to say my opinions were always accurate :^)




Flabagast -> RE: Friday, February 23rd Design Notes: Book 2: Reimagined - A Brief Respite (2/25/2024 6:35:39)

That was great!
spoiler:

It's nice that we have the clearest version of Atealan history involving Wargoth ingame now. It never actually occurred to me that Warlic defeating his father was how the Ateala were liberated; for some reason I'd always assumed they were separate events. But it makes far more sense that he and the Ateala worked together to overthrow Wargoth Sr, and would eventually return to Somorah upon being split. It was great to see that animation of Somorah get some screen-time too - that along with Alz'ein's table slam made for an effective moment.

Though seeing Serenity again was... bittersweet. ;-;


TFS has made some excellent points, and I agree that Reimagining Book 2 is a great opportunity to flesh out Jaania and the Elemental Dissonance. I feel the latter especially is the most crucial part of the story that lays the groundwork for the ideology of the Rose. A magical disaster almost, if not as catastrophic as that one time the sun was swallowed. I very much doubt the team has the time or resources realise all of those old ideas for Book 2, but it is still encouraging to imagine the elements of Book 2 that are present getting the time and love they deserve.




Vaalirus -> RE: Friday, February 23rd Design Notes: Book 2: Reimagined - A Brief Respite (2/27/2024 6:36:33)

We certainly have been eating well with these Book 2 reimagining quests.

spoiler:



As the others have pointed out, it's genuinely nice that both old and new players are getting a much more polished scope on the background they get for Atealan people, from their history with Wargoth, to what they lost and got up to after his defeat, and how he seemingly returned out of nowhere. The art that's meant to give exposition on this information highly compliments those retelling of events. Like no, seriously they were that good and I especially love how they hide certain details as well that new players wouldn't be privy too until much later in the saga. It all just makes for a much more complete experience.

Furthermore, I'm desperately loving the characterization we've been getting from Alz'Ein and as anticipated once things calmed down and she learned the truth as to what happened to Somorrah that air of frustration she had about her, in the version Book 2 older players would be familiar with, returned albeit this time we saw it properly emerge in the narrative this time around. I'm eagerly waiting in anticipation to how we will see how her characterization is evolved or modified as we draw closer to events of the Rising Fire war.

I must say I have to concur with TFS and Flabagast in that it will be great if the devs are able to allocate the resources and time necessary in fully fleshing out other elements of Book 2 that sort had to be axed because of the way things were proceeding for the development of the game at the time. Chief among them, as TFS points out, is the title by which the saga is named: Elemental Dissonance. A title of which was meant to describe the elemental imbalance that was meant to take place due to the fallout of the conflict of the Orb Saga. Reasons that were on really lightly touched upon when Xan mentions that the planes of Fire and Darkness were left weakened and the actual chaos of the elemental imbalance receiving only one quest in which we just fight a bunch of elementals, I suppose there also is the events of the Rising Fire war and Nivalis, if you count the latter but I feel the overall elemental imbalance of Lore, at this time, could be a bit expanded upon more. Though obviously not everything can be as fleshed out as previously planned as some direction for certain characters or aspects of the lore has changed. For example, I'm not sure how well the introduction of some of other Great Elemental Dragons would go as they were originally planned given a potential candidate of one of them and that's not even considering that some ideas were simply blended into the early days of Book 3's releases. Of course, this all assumes there is sufficient time to work on these portions of Book 2.





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