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Friday, April 18th Design Notes: Book 1 Revisited: Undead Assault & Robina!

 
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4/19/2025 0:34:05   
Laeon val Observis
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quote:


Friday, April 18, 2025
Book 1 Revisited: Undead Assault & Robina!
Hey there, heroes!

This week, we return to the Book 1 Revisited project! From your first visit to Falconreach to retrieving the Black Dragon Box, the quests and stories have all been updated!


To help streamline the story and reduce the chances of new players getting lost, various restrictions have been added to exploration, which are slowly lifted as the story progresses. There have also been updates with music and typo fixing to a number of quests and characters!
  • Falconreach will now be more restricted prior to completing Undead Assault, making it less likely for you to accidentally skip it or get lost on your first visit.
  • The Book 1 Inn at the Edge of Time rift will now no longer appear until completion of the Book 1 finale. The Book 3 rift is unchanged.
  • Ash has had his dialogue menu cleaned up a bit. The Letters have been removed, as they were completely anachronistic and confusing. The Mighty 100k Scythe has been moved to Serenity's Inn Shop, and other changes!
  • Ash will now allow you to revisit Falconreach during previous war events (to be updated with more as the story continues!) If you revisit a war and click "Done" instead of "To War", you'll see the war version of Falconreach until you re-enter the town!
  • Surewood Forest (Robina's zone), has received some updates, separating the Dragon Egg saga from her other quest opions.
  • Robina's main story quests now drop one reward from each quest.
  • Undead Assault, A Golden Opportunity, and Give 'Til It Hurts now scale with player level.
  • Robina's Precise Arrow skill now has 2 turns of cooldown at the start of combat.
  • Various characters have had their dialogue adjusted.
  • Opening the Black Dragon Box is now more easily replayable, and the Drakath and Krakhim boss fight has been significantly updated.
  • Undead Assault now returns you to the town you came from, rather than Falconreach south.
  • Basilisks in Give Til it Hurts now have a rotation and can no longer chain stun you.
  • Music has been added to Surewood Forest quests.
  • The path east of Falconreach (Valencia's zone) is now restricted until after completion of Robina's quests.
  • The path north of Surewood Forest (Warlic's zone) is now restricted until after completion of Valencia's quests.
  • The Bk1 Travel Map is now restricted until the dragon egg has hatched. (You can still manually explore if you want!)
Many of these changes are intended to prevent new and returning players from getting lost or overwhelmed amidst a decade of game updates. That said, exploration is a big part of DragonFable's gameplay, and getting lost is part of the fun. That's why although there may be more restrictions early on in the story, once it opens up, expect fewer or none such restrictions.

As usual, there have been dialogue changes and typo fixes throughout the revisited areas and quests!

We hope you enjoy the update! And if we missed anything, or if you have any feedback, please let us know!



A new cosmetic weapon is now available!


The Forgotten CryptKey can now be purchased for 450 Dragon Coins from the DC Cosmetics shop! This mysterious key can be color customized with your base color and your dragon's eye color! Or, you can click it to use your trim color and dragon's eye color, instead.



And that's all for this week!

DF AQW  Post #: 1
4/20/2025 12:53:54   
TFS
Helpful!


I thought this release was really well-done and only have nice things to say about it.

-New mandatory drops tell you what more esoteric stats like Immo and -Health do
-Drakath's prevalence is increased and his lore is clarified (though I guess this canonizes the AQW version of Sepulchure's backstory)
-The Krakhim fight tells you to kill the more dangerous enemy first, which was notably missing from Sir Pent
-Krakhim also tutorializes shields and the Crit/BPD mechanic.
-Music is probably the single most important inclusion to the play experience, and I really appreciated the careful curation here. The bandit quests all using the same track is a good touch!
-Old Falconreach versions being added back through Ash is an excellent inclusion and the most exciting thing in the DNs. Currently we're at a weird point where new players get to 2011 Falconreach at the beginning of the game (and see stuff like the Demento/Warlic statues...), but then see the 2006 or 2009 versions of Falconreach within quests as they play through the story. This would be really cool to address! Though I'm gonna stop myself here before I also start yapping about the old Innkeeper and the early Friday the 13th events

Overall this release was really well done and does a great job streamlining the new player experience. Last month's had a couple hiccups but this one is perfect, no notes.

actually, one note. the end cutscene for undead assault hard cutting to the Final 13th music for what's supposed to be a quiet and contemplative scene is kinda jarring lol. but that's a tiny nitpick

< Message edited by TFS -- 4/20/2025 16:50:39 >
DF  Post #: 2
4/20/2025 15:39:53   
FireyBombz
Member
 

Big fan of this release, the items are useful as a stats tutorial as TFS mentioned and getting useful gear while progressing story just feels satisfying (especially +bonus early on feels nice to never worry about missing into base mpm/bpd again). The Drakath and Krakhim fight is also very well done. I think if this additional challenge of bosses continues it will feel a lot nicer than just steamrolling major arc villains that are supposed to present real roadblocks in the story.
Post #: 3
4/21/2025 3:51:18   
Dratomos
Helpful!


I like that a lot of feedback was taken from last month's Book 1 Revisited and used here. Like Firey and TFS said, gear drops were great, infoing players what they do and also just been generally really good. Book 1 early stages suffer from having really poor gear and the better ones just cost too much.

All in all, excellent job on this release! I agree with music, it's inclusion adds so much and also streamlining Dragon Egg Saga is also another good choice. Book 1 previously had the trouble of maybe giving new players a bit too much (like Inn that was wisely locked until Book 1 completion). And DNs mentioning that exploration will still be a big part is also great to hear. And bosses actually doing something now and not just doing variations of "one hit of 200% damage" or "two hits of 100% damage" is also great, as it prepares players for more challenging bosses in Book 3, possibly Book 4 and Inn. This kind of tutorial instead of just wall of text is much better implementation!

Can't wait what you guys do with Revision next month when you focus on Valencia stuff!

< Message edited by Dratomos -- 4/21/2025 4:07:23 >
DF AQW  Post #: 4
4/21/2025 22:24:46   
Baron Dante
Member

Some of the stuff I'll bring up may be stuff that will be covered later on during this project, but I'll put it out anyways.

With most of Falconreach being blocked off when you first enter, while it makes sense to have access to the inn, it itself has a bunch of weird content dropped on the players, like access to a few random quests, Braughlmurk and then a whole storyline about cheese. Which has no locks on progression. I don't exactly remember what this story entails, but something in the back of my head says that it has some kind of spoilers?
This may be difficult to implement, but indeed this would be a prime time to allow the original innkeeper to be present.
Speaking of things that may be difficult to implement, but would immensely improve the overall experience is the evolution of Falconreach with progress.
Falconreach burns down, slowly gets rebuilt etc. etc.
Hypothetically if this was to be implemented, Undead Assault would need to be remade again, without the protective walls. However, this would also allow instancing this OG Falconreach with the OG INN as part of the war, maybe, for replayability purposes.

Falconreach itself is a mess with how much stuff there is, and how messy it is. Entering Yulgar's gives players a shop with "high" level gear in it before seeing the gear meant for newbies, an absolutely horrendous grind that requires a rare drop from who knows where and the Fire War.
As was noted, statues of Warlic and Demento are present, but curiously the statue of Celestia in the Guardian Tower IS absent (Though you can't walk where it will eventually be, but nobody will think twice about that)

All of the stuff for Robina is great. Though, and I think this was done earlier, and not a part of this current update, the Treefort, which is an insanely long quest to begin with, has scaling that makes it even longer, as opposed to the Sneevils being low-level enemies that you can and should dispatch easily. Tuning that down would probably be good.

It would be extremely funny if Giving It Back gave you a starting amount of Gold and killing the enemies gave you negative Gold to deduct it, but this sounds like a nightmare, if not impossible, to implement.

quote:

actually, one note. the end cutscene for undead assault hard cutting to the Final 13th music for what's supposed to be a quiet and contemplative scene is kinda jarring lol.

This did feel pretty off though. The song is something that associated almost entirely with Final 13th, and I think it should stay that way. The situation also doesn't really call for this level of intensity. Maybe insert wind.mp3 instead.

Since I'm back Undead Assault, it's a shame there's no reward here. I really do hope that later stuff does look into bringing back certain old items, at least in some form. The Last Board of Falconreach stuff and Ice Claymore come to mind first.
AQ DF MQ AQW Epic  Post #: 5
4/22/2025 14:49:36   
TFS
Helpful!


quote:

This may be difficult to implement, but indeed this would be a prime time to allow the original innkeeper to be present.

Yeah I was gonna mention this too, there are several main-story plotlines later in both Book 1 and Book 3 that assume the player knows who the original innkeeper is, even though she hadn't been in the game since 2005. This plus the Friday the 13th events and original Doom Weapon lore are just completely gone from the game (Undead assault -> Sabrina plants the axe (Caitiff) in the Inn -> Friday the 13th -> Serenity appears -> Mysterious Stranger appears). It's also kinda weird that Spirits in the Inn isn't mandatory - or even on the timeline - while the dumb rat quests are.

However I highly doubt the files for this actually still exist (I believe it was explicitly stated... 10 years ago, jeez... that they don't). If it were to be implemented it'd have to be written from scratch, which is likely outside the scope of the Book 1 revisit lol

< Message edited by TFS -- 4/22/2025 14:53:09 >
DF  Post #: 6
5/7/2025 12:12:30   
Glais
Member

Agree with what others have said on the music, it is a nice addition for the main quest, but the track chosen for the Klaatu/Sepulchure cutscene is a bit odd.

Sabrina is also a very deep callback. I started playing in 2006 and she was already gone by then, I was only aware of her because of other players' speculation on her back in the day. Locations that progress with you would be a great addition, I'm not sure if this was already added to facilitate Yulgar and Konnan's moves with the Great Fire War, but if not it would really improve the flow of things.

This is the most minor of nitpicks but I never understood why Warlic's zone was removed from the Falconreach portal, that was always the main Portal destination for years when it was introduced, and you leave the zone via the portal as well.

_____________________________

DF MQ  Post #: 7
5/9/2025 18:21:20   
TFS
Helpful!


quote:

actually, one note. the end cutscene for undead assault hard cutting to the Final 13th music for what's supposed to be a quiet and contemplative scene is kinda jarring lol. but that's a tiny nitpick

Weird time to follow this up, but I've just noticed a couple bugs/issues with this cutscene.

When the And so it Began... cutscene was copypasted into the Undead Assault quest, the sprite for "Klaatu"'s face wasn't correctly ported over, so his head is just missing. This isn't an issue in And so it Began..., though.
And I say "Klaatu" because this NPC model isn't Klaatu , it's Nicto. Not to be confused with Undead Klaatu & Nicto, of course. It was a cool fix to have the spelling of his name corrected from Klatu to Klaatu, but maybe it should have been corrected to Nicto instead lol.
DF  Post #: 8
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