Game updates/2022-04-16

Game Update #2 for April 16

This is a quick patch to address some bugs in today's earlier update, including a fix for teleportation.

Kalaba Logic Fix:

We fixed a bug that let you start Kalaba's quest "Phlogiston Basics" from his Favor menu, before he taught you Transmutation. If you did this, he wouldn't actually teach you Transmutation! If this has happened to you (meaning you have this quest but you don't know the recipe the quest refers to), just cancel the quest in your quest journal. That will fix the NPC logic and you'll be back to normal. Kalaba will give you this quest automatically after teaching you the skill (after you finish his two panther-related quests and he asks you about a "business opportunity").

Werewolf Fix:

Werewolves were randomly losing their Norala buffs and Tokens of Norala. We can't reproduce this bug, but we think we fixed the root cause. We'll keep an eye on things to make sure. We don't have an easy way to restore the exact number of Norala Tokens you lost, so we've just decided to give every werewolf a dozen extra tokens during this full moon. Type `/redeem` in chat and you'll see a redemption called "Werewolf Fix: 12 Tokens of Norala".

Other Bug Fixes:

- Fixed: some recipes (including common Teleportation recipes) could not be used

- Fixed: some portals in Serbule Crypt had sunk into the ground

- Fixed: some title scrolls caused client errors when dropped on the ground

April 16 Update Notes

Continuing our focus on improvements for new players, this update makes some changes to Transmutation. We are also premiering our new glamour mechanics (which some other games call transmogrification). And we have exciting news :- we're going on sale for half off!

P:G is on Sale!

Project: Gorgon will be 50% off from April 18 at 10am PDT (1pm EDT) to May 2 at 10am PDT (1pm EDT)! This is a bigger discount than we've done before, because the game is in better shape than ever and it's time to get more players involved! (And as we talked about in the latest dev blog, we need more mid-to-high level players to help us balance combat. You can read the dev blog on our forum, or you can read it in-game by typing /blog in chat!)

So this is a great time to get friends into Project: Gorgon! If your friends are on the fence, remember that our free demo lets you play a BIG portion of the game, and your demo character will auto-upgrade to a real character when you buy the game.

Transmutation

Transmutation is an important skill that we expect all high-level players to take advantage of. It allows you to randomly replace treasure effects on your equipment, fine-tuning them to your specific gameplay style. But for such an important skill, it's been pretty obscure.

Higher level combat requires transmutation in order to keep up with the difficulty curve. But transmutation was hard to find on your own at the appropriate level, and confusing to boot. We found that players who discovered how to use transmutation to their advantage tended to stick around, while players who missed it tended to stop playing when they couldn't keep up. This is a huge problem, so we've made some changes:

Previously, you learned Transmutation after becoming friends with Makara, a hermit in the Ilmari Desert (a level 50+ area). Makara is still the advanced Transmutation trainer, but now you can learn the basics from Kalaba in Eltubule, a level 20+ area. Kalaba offers to teach you Transmutation after you complete his second panther-killing quest; he teaches the basics and has Favors that give more XP, recipes, and prisms. Eventually these favors culminate in a request to meet Makara in the Ilmari Desert for advanced Transmutation training. (If you have previously learned Transmutation through Makara, you won't be affected by this change.)

In addition, some of the mechanics of Transmutation have been tweaked to remove some of the frustration: now when you use Transmutation to replace a power on an item, you won't roll the old power again immediately after. We track the last two replacements on each item and prevent them from being rerolled. (Since we weren't storing this info until now, existing items have no history, but it will get filled in as you transmute.)

We also realized that new players often don't even know what an enchantment *is*, because items have their own built-in powers (which are non-fungible) as well as enchantments which can be changed. We've redesigned equipment tooltips to help make this more intuitive. (See below for more on that.)

Other related changes:

- Added a Transmutation table to Kalaba's work area in Eltibule.

- The Transmutation level requirement for "Distill Rare Magical Item (0-30)" is now 5 (instead of 10).

- The Transmutation level requirement for "Repair Transmutation Damage 1" is now 10 (instead of 5).

- We now allow transmuting when shield wax is on an item.

- Fixed a bug with the transmutation animation swipe not working correctly.

- Changed "power" to "enchantment" in the Transmutation window, for consistency.

Glamour Berries

Glamour Berries are a nifty cosmetic feature that let you make your equipment look like other equipment. This can be really useful when your tired of wearing non-matching armor! (Some other MMOs call this process "transmogrification", but that word seemed too close to "transmutation", so we call it "glamouring".)

Glamour Berries are magical fae fruit that can permanently make any one piece of gear look like another piece of gear. This is only an illusion, though -:- the glamour has no effect on the item's stats or behavior. This includes NPC behavior: NPCs automatically "see through" glamours, so they will react to you as if you were wearing the original item. For instance, if you're wearing "hideous" clothing that's been glamoured into something beautiful, NPCs will still think you look hideous.

Here's other important details:

- Any piece of armor can be glamoured to look like any other piece of armor that goes in the same equipment slot. Main-hand and off-hand items can be glamoured to look like similar items (e.g. you can glamour a sword to look like another sword, but not a hammer or a shield).

- Glamoured items can't be dyed (because glamours hide the original paint, so dyes wouldn't do anything).

- You can glamour a piece of gear as often as you like, as many times as you like.

- Glamouring the equipment doesn't attune the equipment; in fact, attunement doesn't affect glamouring at all.

- Glamours can be copied: if you glamour an item to look like another glamoured item, the new item will have the same glamour as the other item.

- If you glamour an item to look like something that is animal-only (such as Werewolf Armor), the glamour will only be active when worn in that animal form. It will look un-glamoured in other forms.

- We haven't yet implemented UN-glamouring, so the effect is very permanent! (But you can always apply a different glamour on the item.)

The VIP Program gift for April is 12 Glamour Berries -:- check the Redemptions button on the Persona window (or type /redeem in chat) to get them. Glamour Berries can also be purchased for 20 Event Tokens from Riston in the Red Wing Casino, or rarely found in the high-stakes casino Match-3 games. In the next update (or soon thereafter) we'll also be adding a way to obtain some with Guild Credits.

Related changes:

- Due to internal changes, certain "head gem" items, such as the Orbiting Gem, are no longer shown on your character when you're in an animal form -:- they are only visible when you're a biped. The old behavior was accidental, but it was fun, so we expect to add new animal-specific floating gem items soon. Affected items are: Orbiting Gem, Rohina's Mind Gem, Monger's Boon, Ever-Hateful Jack O' Lantern, Ever-Glaring Jack O' Lantern, and Fae Navy Communicator.

Item Tooltips

Items - weapons and armor and potions and foods and all sorts of items :- are extremely important. They're information-dense, and getting all that information into a readable, comprehensible form can be really tricky. We've rewritten the item information blocks that are shown when you hover over an item (called "tooltips") to help make some of that info more understandable. These tooltips are a work in progress, so we'll be reacting to your feedback and suggestions, and we really need your bug reports!

Changes:

- There's now a "short description" right underneath the item name that tries to point out the most important aspect(s) of the item. Some items do not have a short description.

- "Attributes", "Enchantments", "Augment" and "Shamanic Infusion" for equipment are now grouped together in a display that's easier to digest and (hopefully) makes the underlying mechanics more obvious.

- Augment rarity is now displayed in the tooltip.

- Augment tooltips now explicitly indicate the required rarity of the item it can be placed in.

- Dynamic stats (durability, doses, waxes, & craft points) are now more obvious when they show up.

- Added an indicator to tooltips for items that can be used, such as "Right-click to Drink".

- Shield short descriptions are now accurate (instead of "Level X OffHandShield").

- Crystal color now displays in the tooltip.

Known Issues:

- When you raise the Tooltip Font Size to the higher ranges allowed by the slider, equipment tooltips don't fit on the screen well. We'll be working on this in future iterations.

UI Features and Bug-Fixes

- Added an "Always compare items?" setting under GUI/Features. This auto-compares items without having to hold the Alt key. Defaults to off.

- Added a purchase confirmation to player-vendor purchases. The amount over which the confirmation presents itself is set by the "Purchase Confirmation Amount" setting, under GUI/Other. Default is 10,000 councils.

- Active combat skill levels are now displayed on the bottom bar.

- Skill tree collapse states are now character-specific.

- Skills are now added to the Skills & Abilities window when you first earn XP in them, instead of when they first hit level 1.

- We now show skill levels in the skill list on the Skills & Abilities window.

- We now display your new skill level in the pop-up message when leveling up.

- Loot Mode is now displayed properly in the UI; previously it would reset every time you logged in.

- Monster info should no longer get cut off in the combat info window.

- Inventory items can be used via double-click while the Crafting window is open.

- We now account for XP mods when displaying the addition in the crafting XP bar.

- Sped up the minimum crafting repeat time from 2 seconds to 0.5 seconds.

- The "repeat" feature of the Crafting window now takes into account durability and consumption rate when calculating the max number of times you can repeat the recipe.

- The quest tracker respects the "Show Quest Tracker" setting again.

- Tracked quests are now saved properly.

- The quest log now displays the associated NPC's name in the list of quests.

- The chat channel of the current tab will now remember when it is switched via a command, such as '/p' or '/n'. So if you switch to another tab and then back, you will remain in that channel. This should reduce mistells.

Physics & Graphics

- The "High-Quality Anti-Aliasing" graphics option now uses a different anti-aliasing algorithm that doesn't cause as many visual artifacts. (The old one could cause a type of unintentional "motion blur".)

- We now properly set camera effects (vignetting, blur, etc.) when entering a new area.

- Fixed a bug that caused heavy framerate loss when certain static objects were selected in the world.

- Removed the "Overhead Name Fade Distance" setting for now, as it didn't actually do anything.

- The change in moving upward to falling during a jump is now smooth instead of instant. (The jump physics still isn't 100% realistic but it should look a little better now.)

- Added particles to Fire Shield ability to make it more obvious when the effect ends.

- Polished fairy Free-Flutter animation.

- Fixed several bed sleeping animations.

- Polished Brambleskin particles.

- Animated Crafting XP & NPC Favor bars.

- We now do better handling of your currently-selected entity's appearance changing (such as Vendor Fox coming out of its box).

- Fixed mounting/dismounting bug that would enable infinite jumping.

- Reduced lag, and fixed a bug that caused the screen brightness to change, when mounting the first time.

- Prevented ice fishing holes from falling through the ice or being un-clickable.

- We now only reduce selection box size when entities are behind the player. This should make things like large doors and trees easier to click on.

Other Changes

- Added keybinds for corpse actions, such as Autopsy, Bury, etc. They default to keys 1-6, and can overlap with non-corpse keys (such as ability keys). The corpse action keybinds are used only when the corpse window is open.

- Added a "Loot All" hotkey for corpses that defaults to Spacebar.

- Werewolf-altar buffs now last until the next Full Moon (instead of the next Waxing Gibbous Moon). Note: since this patch is happening DURING a full moon period, things are a little weird :- if you logged in yesterday as a werewolf, your timer is currently set to end on the next Waxing Gibbous Moon. If you log in today or tomorrow, your timer will be updated so the buffs last until the next Full Moon.

- Werewolf's "Lunacy" buff ("You feel powerful.") now buffs Max Health +30% instead of +30.

- Fixed bug with treasure effect "Tundra Spikes deals +19% damage, gains +8 Accuracy, and lowers targets' Evasion by -16 for 20 seconds". The evasion debuff did not stack with itself (if you had this effect on two pieces of gear).

- Uncommon items in loot now glow green, but do not have an associated humming sound.

- Characters now have some control over their jumps while mid-air (e.g. jumping with no momentum and then moving forward).

- Higher-level poisoned blades can now be used for lower-level Poison Knife abilities.

- Loot bonus related Words of Power now last 1 hour instead of 15 minutes.

- Dead pets can now always be interacted with.

- Enemies can no longer sink into the floor.

- Corpses of sheep and floating skulls can now be walked through.

- Fix typo in Spider Speed effect.

- Sarina, the enslaved fairy in the Goblin Dungeon, no longer just pretends she is leaving after you free her. She now uses a nearby teleporter to leave. It's also now possible for multiple players to finish the quest by talking to her as she leaves (or before she leaves) rather than having to re-kill the goblin boss.

- You can now loot fruit trees even if your inventory is full (in which case your inventory will become overflowing). You cannot loot fruit trees when your inventory is overflowing.

- Bone Meal can now be stored in gardening-related storages.

- Work Orders for Healing Potion Omegas are now correctly labeled Mycology instead of Alchemy.

- Work Orders for werewolf armors are now correctly labeled Armorsmithing instead of Blacksmithing.

- Cloth enhancements now require a tanning rack.

- Changed references to "Enhancement Points" to "Craft Points" for consistency. "Craft Points" is shorter and thus easier to display in the UI.

- Changed Serpentine to an Orange Crystal instead of Orange + Green.

- Hiral now gives juices at each favor level-up.

- Added durations to pineal juice descriptions.

- Torches in Eltibule now turn off when they're not lit.