The roaming NPCs we introduced in the last patch became an instant hit with most of the player base. They are quite rare to find, can be in a lot of varied places, and have a very low respawn rate, making the sighting of an Observer on any island a rare moment. They also pack quite a punch, taking down a single one of them often needing the cooperation of several players, but the loot they drop is well worth the effort for everyone involved. Due to the very positive feedback on these high end enemies, we're currently working on some upgrades to the roaming NPC system that will allow them to move in a much more coordinated fashion. Observers will in many cases be accompanied by other enemies, and they will move as a group, which was impossible in the previous system.

How do you like the Observers so far, and what do you think of this update? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Here is what player movements on the alpha islands looked like in the last few days. Can you find your trail?

New Virginia
Attalica
Daoden

Also, the new dev server is finally up, so development pace can pick up again. The next patch is going to be exciting!

We’re going to deploy the first patch of the year tomorrow, and it brings a number of changes to the client and the gameplay.

We’re very happy to announce that the client will be available in two new languages, French and Slovenian after the patch. We’re delighted to see the French community grow so rapidly and hope to see more of you guys online after this update.

Now for the stuff more interesting to most players, the gameplay changes:

One for the money

Be prepared to activate your prototype facilities, as with the patch we’re introducing a new heavy mech class robot, called the Lithus. This robot can be thought of as the big brother of the Sequer, and will satisfy all your hauling needs.

Two for the show

Due to popular demand we’re also introducing a trophies and losses section in the character screen that will show your kills and deaths, and the parties involved in the fights.

Three to get ready

Since the launch of the game the number of people involved in Intrusion events and PvP fights has been constantly growing. We really like this trend, however as the number of players reaches a critical mass in a single fight, tactics seem to go out the window and the fight turns into a simple numbers game.

Our aim has always been to create a PvP environment where tactics, smart maneuvering and coordinated teamwork get you superior results, so we’ve discussed the issue in length over the holidays. We traced the core of the problem back to a simple fact, and that is that for a variety of reasons Perpetuum employs a limited simulation of the real world. The main factors at play are that we don’t have robot collisions or friendly fire, and these two factors allow for large numbers of players to move as a single, small unit and one-shot-kill anyone they see. Fixing this issue is quite a tough challenge, as robot collisions and friendly fire are missing from the game for good reasons. Introducing robot collisions would severely limit the movement of players and give rise to a whole lot of possible exploits with people standing in each others way just for the laughs. We’ve explored the possibility of friendly fire, but all the solutions we looked at would have had a huge performance impact on the server, so this side of the issue can’t be fixed either.

We decided to look at the problem from an other angle and discourage the kind of behaviour we’ve seen. There will be several changes coming in the future, all of which combined will make big fights a lot more tactical than they are today. We’ll be introducing area of effect weapons, and robot explosion area of effect damage/debuffs, but tomorrow's patch only brings the very first of the systems designed to combat the problem: Interference.

The Interference system simulates the effects safely fighting in a close group would have on the combat effectiveness of the group in the real world. Basically members of the group would have to be more careful not to shoot any of their comrades, and thus be slower to fire and would have to devote a lot of their attention to working together with their unit. The Interference system simulates this with locking time and sensor strength debuffs on large groups of robots moving in close proximity. Each robot in the game has an interference range and strength, and emits an interference level which affects each other robot within this range. The interference accumulates and as it reaches critical levels (different for different robot types) it manifests in the mentioned debuffs. This mechanic, coupled with later area of effect mechanics will discourage the one-shot-kill setup that has mostly taken away from the gameplay experience above a certain number of people involved in a fight.

Comments on the patch and the above mentioned issues are welcome!

Now go, cat, go.

Well, this has been coming for a while.

As you might know, we, the developers of Perpetuum are a quite hands-on bunch of guys. We like talking and interacting with our community in various places, be that our forum, in-game mail/chat, or somewhere else. However this kind of communication has resulted in an uneven flow of information about the development and our current goals with the game. In order to even things out, we give you:

The Official Perpetuum DevBlog!

Here we’ll be summing up the state of the game, things we’re working on, our thoughts on issues, interesting things, inside jokes and a lot more from time to time so you can stay informed on what we’re up to.

The first article about the January 13 patch will be up soon, see you in-game in the meanwhile!