By Jason Everett, game producer.

During Phase 1 of the Beta test I spent hour after hour with Bilgeratte, an amazingly durable Pirate who, considering his eyes and face, might be a long-lost descendant of Sao Feng – or, allowing for his Fu Manchu moustache and broken nose, might be a pretty recent descendent of some scary biker guy.

I kept a running diary during the Beta for the game developers – what was working and what wasn’t, what was fun, what was confusing, and because no self-respecting Producer can resist, a list of things we just had to tweak. Here are a few sample entries:

• I got into a Mayhem PVP match with Allan today (and completely kicked his butt… he forgot to bring health tonics with him). I died during the match more than a couple of times, and each time I re-spawned with 0 HP. The recharge time to get back to full health from there needs serious tuning.
• The bartender in the Faithful Bridge needs a rag – he's cleaning the bar with his palm. It would also be nice if the guy near the harbormaster on Port Royal flipping a coin actually had a coin.
• The Black Mac quests need tuning. His initial dialogue needs to be more direct, telling the player what they are going to earn when they complete the quest. Requiring players to win 150 gold seems fine, based on the way the economy is balanced now, but I'd up the number of skeletons that need to be defeated in the second quest to the 10-15 range. Ideally, the amount of gold Black Mac makes you win and the number of skeletons you have to defeated should be tied to the card you’re going after.

After Phase 1 of the Beta ended, the development team spent two solid weeks reviewing everything we’d seen -- feedback from the beta players, thoughts from the development team, bugs, feature requests, balancing and tuning needing to be done, game systems needing refining, client and server performance and stability issues, features that needed to be added, and features that needed to go -- at least for now. Here’s an overview of the work that’s gone into the game since we closed the doors on Phase 1 of the Beta test:

A lot of time has gone into refining the UI and the game’s control schema. Players don’t need to use the TAB key to switch been combat and interface modes anymore, and the mouse-look camera controls are now optional. At the same time we did this we also improved the combat interface. The old radial menu that held each weapon’s special skills has been killed and replaced with a simpler interface that’s always on-screen. It’s faster now to get at your special skills and easier to watch your recharge times – both of which are good things when you’ve got a dozen undead Carrions charging you.

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