Defiance Developer Q&A: July 20
Welcome, ark hunters! You’ve asked, we’re answering. We’re back with another action packed Defiance Developer Q&A!
- We got firework spikes and launchers with Midsummer Mutiny. Do you plan on putting more fun novelty items in the game for Holiday events or otherwise?
We always wanted to try and see how novelty weapons would be received in the game. In the beginning, we suspected most players preferred to keep the game serious and not be surrounded with novelty guns. However, we do believe that this sentiment has shifted over the last year with the addition of the Holiday Events. We believe there would be a high probability of more novelty weapons being added in the future. With that being said, please note we do not intend to have the game overrun with novelty weapons. This is one of the key reasons why the novelty weapons from Midsummer Mutiny had the stats they had.
- I think Midsummer Mutiny highlighted the growing phasing problem that Defiance has had since F2P launched. What is being done by the team to combat this?
Yes, we have noticed an increase of concentrated players during these holiday events. We have considered refactoring existing events to where they will end up in an Arkbreak to deal with whatever menace the players were dealing with. This way, we would end up capping each instance at a certain number of players. The unfortunate down side of this is the fact that a few players might not make up a full group. Hulker Hell with 5 players would not likely end in the favor of the players.
- It is very common for users to not listen to instructions in Warmaster instances, can a group vote kick be added? The framework is already in place for this.
We won’t put in a Warmaster kick function at this point. We will have a private instances function for the Warmaster instance, they should be active on the Public Test Server by the time you read this.
- Has the dev team tracked the source of the issue with consoles locking up? Seems to be getting worse every day, a regular occurrence ever since MM launched.
Our engineering team found some code recently that wasn’t optimal for non-high end PCs and consoles. The next major update will include some of these changes and we hope the this will resolve a decent chunk of the performance issues consoles and some PC players were seeing.
- Any chance we may see any new jackpots weapons added with the Pandemonium synergy?
At this time, there are no plans to re-release a weapon with the Pandemonium synergy.
- Is raining in the game still going to be a thing?
So rain was something we did try in Silicon Valley – but as you may recall, it hit a few snags. One of the major ones being frame rate performance on lower end PC as well as just plain not showing up. We have seen some weather related performance issues last year with the snow effect during last winter’s Solstice Strike event. If we do use the rain weather effect, it would need be isolated to rare events such as Solstice Strike.
- When will render distance be able to be modified for PCs?
We were just discussing the proxy memory slider on PC earlier today – we are looking in to expanding memory pools on PCs with more modern video cards. This may not change the hard draw distance set in some instances though, but it should help with objects dropping too soon if you have a PC rig that can support it.
- Will you be bringing anymore specialty boxes to the in-game lock box vendor?
It depends on what you are after from the boxes. For specific synergies, they will be available via the new synergy boxes and those will be bit store only. For cosmetics, we are planning to balance these both in-game and in the bit store.
- I noticed a lot of comments from players who were less than happy with the decreased RNG rates for the Midsummer Mutiny event. Is this the standard that should be expected from events moving forward?
In terms of drop rates, we will be adjusting events moving forward as we are still balancing the drop rates for participation. In the previous events, we saw that more players than expected were getting what were considered rare weapons in the community, something that made the player feel unique from other players. It isn't a rare legendary jackpot weapon if everyone has one, so we decided to adjust drops based on that. This also includes the changes that were seen with the weekly and daily contracts.
- Will there be any story content related to Season 3 of the show?
Season 3 of the game is mainly the expedition content, in terms of crossover it was a little more difficult this year due to multiple factors. Nolan and Irisa were in a stasis pod until episode 1 of Season 3, which is part of what made this more difficult.
- What are your thoughts on a couple of Etaew's "Hypothetical Features"? I think something like Instant Adventure (similar to what RIFT has going) would be a huge boon to Defiance.
As one of the original designers from the Rift team, LoCarb is pretty fond of this idea of “Instant Adventure” type system for Defiance. We’ll see if we can work out something similar to happen, but keep in mind these two games are built entirely differently.
For the "I'm busy with Inventory" indicators, we have concerns that this feature might be shut down by many players due to it creating clutter in certain instances.
- Are there any plans for new missions or quests?
We are in the planning phases with art and design to add some additional story content in the future.
- What are the plans to improve the Arkbreaker DLC experience?
With the next update, we plan on releasing Private Instances that will allow you to enter one that is a fresh instance that you control who can enter. This feature is currently being tested on PTS. For now, this only works on the Major Arkbreak.
- Is there a possibility of the spinal tap synergy becoming available again?
At this time, retired Synergy boxes that have been taken off are not planned to return.
- Will there be any passes at the vendors anytime soon? Will we see any more content added to DLC 1 such as a unique synergy?
While we do plan to evaluate vendors in the future, we don't have a date in the near future pinned down for this. When we make a pass at the vendors, we can also evaluate making additions to DLC 1.
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