Greetings, warriors!

This week we are happy to introduce a further extension of the player stalls system, which will become the first steps to implement a new branch of ingame economy, fully related to mounts. From now on, you will trade your horses using a stall and make some coin out of horse catching and training.

There are also a lot of changes and improvements for mounted combat, especially horse movement, hit detection, and related animations. The ways of fighting while mounted and versus mounted players will change, and become fairer between players on foot and mounted ones.

Earlier this week, we also officially moved to an updated client engine version globally. Our next focus is addressing your feedback and reports to find and remove any issues or bugs that the engine upgrade could reveal. But we have not found any critical regressions yet and are already receiving very positive feedback. Your reports and help are much appreciated!

And now, let’s move to the details of our weekly update:


The screenshot’s authors have been awarded. Vox, Apophys, Yurtin and Siegbert – check your Ambers!

Changelog v.0.9.6.7 Beta

Horse trading

From now on, you can sell horses via player-made stalls introduced in recent weeks. Stalls are receiving additional special slots where you can put your horses for sale. It will create a new branch of the ingame economy designated to create a horse catcher and breeder profession.
With the upcoming changes to mounts, where they will receive additional colors and customization, the possibility to sell horses will be a great thing to have, especially when some types and colors of horses will be much more unique and harder to find in-game. Who would not want to have a black stallion, dotted gray mare, or massive Arabian horse with a black mane?

Please have in mind that you cannot sell a horse whose aging reached 100% and that the system needs good external testing, so we are hoping for your cooperation!

Mounted combat improvements

Regarding mounted combat, we have been observing it for a long time, and are still receiving quite contradictory feedback. Horses were able to bypass slows using jumps, desync a little or use strange and non-expected moves like running backward or changing movement vectors in air.

No slowing down related to hitting the horse was changed. Horses are being slowed down by every melee attack, like it was since the introduction of the horses.

Jump!

One of the most unexpected and problematic things in horses' movement was their ability to jump (Literally). Horses were able to spam jumping, jump backward, change direction in flight, and that just opened many ways to bypass the assumptions of the combat system and any tweaks that were introduced to balance the mounted and infantry combat.

From now on, we are blocking the possibility to spam jump while mounted, and introducing 3 seconds cooldown to jump (the same thing as in shield bash). Additionally, it was possible to bypass received slow when horses would jump downhill. Horses can jump longer than infantry, so they would beat longer-range faster and run away, bypassing the slow from hit and after combat mode expires during flight time. To fix that problem, mounts will now receive a slow after landing. Jumps should be used to beat any obstacles, not to be faster.

Horses used jumps and turn to do a small desynchro and instantly changed the vector of movement in flight, which made their movement unpredictable. Because of this, people were able to miss jumping horses, so we blocked the possibility of turning the horse while jumping.

Running backward while mounted will no longer be possible. Moving backward speed will be clamped to walking speed. We also blocked the ability to jump while moving backward, so while the horseman will try to jump back he will receive an error message on the screen.


Siege engines to the frontline!

Further Changes

Players had to aim to the horse collider or to the player on the horse depending on what they wanted to trigger. To deal damage to or stop horseman attack, players have to aim at horseman collider, while to slow the horse they need to hit the horse. While they will hit the player instead of the horse, he could run away. This isn't good, especially that aiming the swing on a third-person camera is not absolutely precise and our game is an open-world MMO, which is a reason that our colliders have to be better optimized and less complicated like for example arena or dueling games. So, right now when the horseman will get damage, he will be slowed the same as the horse will get damage.

The hit detection pivot was in the same place as for melee. Because of this, our hits start on the "boots" level and this gives some differences for gameplay. New players, while riding horses were aiming down to hit any target on the ground - leaning out their characters, like most of us were taught in Mount & Blade - and this was only cutting their range, while experienced players were slashing horizontally maximizing their weapon reach.

Changing this pivot to the right place (on player arms level) will be more intuitive, but also there will be a little harder to hit targets on the ground (or impossible to kill a chicken with a short-ranged weapon) because the reach of the weapon will feel slightly lowered.

No collider size for horse nor horseman was changed

Horseman Archers

One of the best choices for solo roaming players and guild spotters, horse archers are still one of the most difficult classes to play in-game, but experienced players can ensure relatively good damage output with very good mobility and agility in open field skirmishes. On the other hand, they have trouble adjusting their gameplay to sieges or events in closed areas. We believe it is worth it to give horse archers some additional tools, but not making the class much stronger.

To shoot someone, mounted archers sometimes had to stop and turn before aiming, because of turn angle limits. This was quite irritating, so we gave them the possibility to turn 15 more degrees on the left turn. Angled shots from horseback were also missing a lot because of wrong crosshair behavior: The crosshair was disappearing too slowly and it was possible to aim with it to the place where our shot angle was not reaching, which led to arrows moving far to the side while shooting over the edge of maximum turn angle. Right now the crosshair will disappear faster to give the proper information about the clamp.

Horsehead collider which is blocking the shots is something immersive for players who play in the first-person mode. But most of the players use third-person mode and in this mode, it is not even well visible if we are aiming through the horse head or not. We received some reports about disappearing arrows and similar issues and we found out that all of them were related to arrows being blocked by the mount head. Because of this, the horse head will no longer block shots, as it is not blocking melee attacks.

Mounted archery skills

As you know, it is impossible to make this class run&gun one like in most of the other games because it could lead to breaking the game meta completely. We need to find a perfect place in the game for mounted archery and limit it a little, to balance the very good mobility and ability to deal damage from the relatively safe spot on horseback. As mentioned before, horse archers already have to slow down while shooting, and of course have a similar system of arrows regeneration like classic archers. But regarding passive abilities, it was possible to create a hybrid build of an archer, that was moderate on foot and not that strong on the horseback because some of the abilities were working only in one of the scenarios and were wasted if the player chose to change his archer from foot to mount or otherwise.

Due to that, mounted archers were almost useless in any siege battles, especially on the defenders' side. Their passive skills forced them to stay on the horseback on the walls because of their small number of available shots while dismounted. It was strange and uncomfortable for them and for other players too.

To fix that problem, we decided to divide the skills related to archery and change the ways of counting the bonuses. From now on, when we have a passive skill that grants more arrows cap in our quiver from the classic archer skill tree, and we will be mounted, we will still have more arrows thanks to this skill if it grant's better bonus than the one in the mounted skill tree, but when we will add two skills from classic archer and mount tree, they will not stack. The system will check which one is giving you the better bonus and ignore the one that is giving less. Thanks to that, mounted archers will be more useful on the walls and this will create a new possibility to make a hybrid. But have in mind, that only one of the top skills can be added, so still - hybrid archers will never be as good as fully specialized, infantry and mounted ones.

And there is one more important change to the skills of mounted archers. Steady Hand passive skill will add a - 15 seconds, two minutes cooldown (like battle rage and other skills) - buff to the mounted archer, which will allow them to shoot without slowing the horse. Of course, this change is introduced to balance other changes explained earlier.

Changes summary

Those fixes and improvements should fix the possibility to bypass some combat mechanics related to horses and will for sure make the mounted archer builds more player-friendly and viable in other types of gameplay. After those changes, we will observe how this will work and as always, we are open to your feedback to find further ways to improve the balance.

Quality of life:

Tweaks to Crafting quests (all nations):

– Reduced the number of fishes needed to catch
– Fisher is giving the materials needed to craft a fishing rod
– Fixes to herb markers - some of them were not displayed correctly
– Reduced the number of herbs needed to collect and given to herbalists
– Moved the woodcutter closer to the herbalist at Dunfen
– Moved herbalist closer to the woodcutter at Baalhammon
– Updated dialogues

Party:

– Sorting party members works on the UI party window and the party settings window [P]
– Battle commands window has been moved to the relative center of the screen
– New icon for party leader
– Fixed the refreshing of the icon at the map legend

Abilities changes:

– Added a possibility to have more arrows, adding to mounted passive skills playing as infantry, but the effect from infantry and mounted skills is not cumulative
– Descriptions of passive skills impacted by the changes have been updated

Other Quality of life improvements:

– Added the visible model of the player-made stall
– removed the “tools” tag from Giant’s Club and Heavy Giant’s Club
– Max characters limit for players and mount nicknames reduced from 32 to 21
– Disabled step-navigation by right/left arrows on character creation while input field is focused

Fixes

– Fixed the issue causing missing guards on 4th Skergard’s Keep upgrade
– Fixed the issue causing some Sangmar guards at Skergard were lower level than they should be
– Fixed the issue causing siege engines to have default rotation on the client after being deployed unless someone started controlling it
– Fixed the issue in some edge cases causing mounted players to have rotating animation due to not saving certain transitions
– Fixed the issue causing the Wings of Glory skin model to act weird
– Fixed the issue causing bushes movement glitch


Spring is in the full swing at our place, so from that position we want to wish you a happy Easter! We will be back after a short holiday after the weekend! Stay safe!