What's up, gamers? Welcome back to Tico Talks Throne and Liberty. My name's Tico and I'm the Globalization Design Manager at Amazon Games for Throne and Liberty.
It's been a while since our last chat, and I hope all of you had a chance to get some rest over the holidays and enjoy some Throne and Liberty. I might have played a little too much, but hey, when you get a break from work, it's hard to resist. I want to start by thanking all of you for your patience during that holiday period.
I know how eager you are to hear from us about many topics, and today we're going to address some of them. So grab your favorite drink and let's dive right in. I want to waste no time and start with what's top of mind for many of you: server consolidations.
Yes, they're coming. And I want to be completely transparent about what this means for our community. Our goal with server consolidations is twofold.
First, it's to ensure we maintain a competitive landscape within servers. And second, we want to widen the pool of people that can play together on each server. The approach to server consolidations will be a multi-step process that includes merging auction houses between early access and launch servers, offering a free server transfer period, which includes removing the restriction of transfers between early access and launch servers.
And then finally, the consolidation of existing servers. I want to emphasize here that any servers impacted will be consolidated into new servers rather than merging one server into another already existing server. I know you probably have many questions about what happens during consolidation, which servers will be affected and plenty more.
So to address this properly, we'll be releasing a comprehensive article later this week that will outline all the details, steps we're taking and planned dates so you'll know exactly what to expect. Now, I've seen a lot of discussion from players wondering what we've been working on over the last couple of months. Well, all of us are AGS and NCsoft have been focused on making fundamental improvements to Throne and Liberty as we get ready for Talandre's launch, our upcoming free expansion, and I want to share some of those details now.
First, let's talk about combat improvements, which is something I've mentioned before but can now share more specifics. We're making foundational changes to our combat mechanics with a focus on improving fluidity and intuitive feel. So what does this mean in practice?
Here are some of our planned changes. Players will now maintain their regular movement speed while attacking, we're eliminating the functionality that forces your character to face your target when attacking, and introducing line-of-sight requirements to attack players and monsters. Movement controls will now be consistent both in and out of combat.
Did anyone say backpedal? We're increasing base melee attack range and changing from camera-based to character-based relative movement. Additionally, we're making core changes to our targeting system, so you can expect targeting to feel more natural and intuitive when tab-targeting and more responsive and precise when targeting with mouse clicks.
These changes are going through multiple rounds of extensive testing to ensure we deliver the highest quality combat experience we can. We're targeting for all of these combat changes to arrive with Talandre. The next major improvement I want to discuss is Open World PvP.
One of Throne and Liberty's core elements is epic-scale open world PvP. While this vision has worked well with our Castle Sieges, and our PvP community is having a blast there, we've noticed something interesting - and that's the incredibly positive reception to our Guild versus Guild content. That's also coupled with concerns about how Alliances and Mega Alliances are continuing to impact the overall PvP experience.
So in an effort to lean into Guild versus Guild content and make their distribution of rewards more fair, we will be making major changes to how field bosses work. Field bosses will transition from an open world PvP format to a Guild versus Guild format, similar to what you may have experienced in intraserver riftstone battles where two guilds will be matched one versus one in a boss fight. As Throne and Liberty continues to evolve, we want to adapt content to lean into what players are organically enjoying.
And I'm personally very excited and optimistic about this new direction. This is a substantial change and we're still fine tuning the matchmaking and reward system, so look forward to February when we'll share more detailed information. Now I'd like to talk about a few topics that I've seen a lot of speculation about in the community and address them directly.
Starting with Tier 2 gear, players will be able to begin acquiring Tier 2 gear at the time Talandre is released. And when that Tier 2 gear does arrive, players will be able to upgrade them all the way to +12 from the onset. The ability to increase gear to +12 will also apply to Tier 1 Arcboss weapons.
And yes, these weapons will also be buffed to match the power of Tier 2 weapons. The other speculative topic I want to cover is the new Weapon Mastery System that many of you have probably heard about from the Korean service. I've seen plenty of guesses for when it will arrive to our service so I will tell you now that it will also arrive with Talandre.
With all this talk about Talandre. I know you must be wondering, when is Talandre coming? Or maybe even, What is Talandre?
Well, make sure to tune into godspeed's next episode of Eye on Solisium on January 28th for the big reveal. And between you and me, I wonder if she's going to drop any other information about upcoming content. Okay, we've just covered a lot, but that's not everything we're working on.
Let me highlight some other key improvements in development. First, we're implementing changes to reduce situations that can lead to toxicity, especially in co-op dungeons. We're also tackling key quality of life improvements like streamlining inventory management for both regular items and runes.
And along those same lines, we're analyzing the game's materials and working to reduce the current material overload that many of you have experienced. And finally, something I know many of you will appreciate. We're expanding the ways you can approach gear progression.
While PvE content is the current primary path for progression, we want to give you more flexibility to progress to the content you enjoy most. Whether that's PvE, PvP, or a mix of both, we're still iterating on the finer points of all of these efforts and their release timing. But I promise to share more information as we make progress.
Now I want to talk about some promises we've made to you in previous discussions. Back in October, I mentioned we were working on new UI elements to show contextual information about Guild contributions during conflict mode bosses. That change is arriving in just a few days on January 23rd.
For our console players, in November I promised mouse and keyboard support and we're now targeting to deliver this feature on February 6th. In my recent holiday letter in December, I acknowledged your feedback about daily activities feeling overwhelming. Let me share some initial steps we're taking to address this.
Starting January 23rd, you'll be able to open normal end-of-dungeon chests even when doing dimensional trials. Then on February 13, we're adding the ability to open multiple chests within a single dungeon run. This change will be initially applied to 1-star dungeons.
We're still working on improvements for contracts and abyss dungeons for best Dungeons. Specifically, our focus is less on reducing time spent inside of the dungeons and more on improving the fun factor of the dungeons themselves. On January 23rd, we're adding night time chests to Shadowed Crypt for our PvP players to compete over.
I'm expecting we'll be able to share more details next month about more of the changes coming to Abyss Dungeons that impact all of our players. Let's jump over the Castle Siege timing. Based on your responses to a recent survey, it's clear that players won't see this to occur later in the day.
With our upcoming maintenance this week, a new Castle Siege start time of 8 p. m. will be reflected in the end game schedule.
This change will impact the Castle Siege on January 26th and all subsequent sieges. And speaking of surveys, I want to remind you how seriously we take your survey feedback. As you can probably tell from today's topics, many of these changes came directly from your feedback in our survey.
So please keep giving us that feedback. And thank you all again for your continued feedback across all of our platforms. If you haven't already, please help us out by leaving a review on your game's platform.
We're going to continue to do our best to listen to your feedback, action that feedback and communicate with you openly and honestly. All right. And now that brings us to our community question.
Throne and Liberty currently has cooking and fishing, but if you could add any other form of lifestyle content to Throne and liberty, what would it be? I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on that. So please like and subscribe if you want to see more of these videos.
I read each and every comment, so please let us know what you think down below in the comments. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in Solisium.
