Upcoming Content: Long-Term Mission Vendor
We’re two weeks into the Explore the Realm event, and so far the progress bar toward unlocking the new island zone is steadily ticking up! Later in the summer we plan on uncapping the weekly personal point max to allow players to earn more points toward unlocking the island sooner.
If you’ve been hitting the personal point max each week, then this week you should be on target to unlock the next tier of personal rewards: the bejeweled chop axe harvester.
With the Explore the Realm event well underway, focus has shifted to a number of other projects. The dev team has been working on finishing up the island and its new monsters so it will be ready to roll out when the community unlocks it, as well as some quality of life and bug fixes. In addition to these, the team has started on a number of other projects that we are excited to share with you over the coming weeks. The first one we want to discuss is a new long-term mission vendor.
Long-Term Mission Vendor
Currently the game has seven mission vendors who hand out daily, weekly and level-based missions. While the weekly missions keep players coming back week in and week out, we know these missions are usually quick to complete for seasoned players – which is why we wanted to offer missions that present more of a challenge and require a larger investment of time to complete.
Long-term missions will have lofty goals that should take several months to complete. (We know some of you will take that as a challenge and try to finish them as soon as possible – to which we say, GO FOR IT.) For example, the first long-term Monster Kills mission will require players to hunt through multiple zones to kill 7 different kinds of scavs for a combined total of almost 1,800 kills.
The original goal for weekly missions was for players to pick them up as "fill in" to work on while questing for other things in the overworld. While long-term missions will certainly require a more dedicated approach, we wanted to keep the concept of having something to work on in the in-betweens. To that extent, we’ve taken care to spread the mission objectives throughout the overworld, while still having some overlap between zones. So if you’re waiting for another Public Event to start in the Flooded Rainforest, for example, you can take out your fishing pole and make some progress toward completing your long-term fishing mission.
A bigger mission requires a bigger payoff, so we’re creating special rewards for the completion of each mission. Rewards are still in development, but here’s a sneak peek at two of them.
Ethereal fishing rod, for completion of the long-term fishing mission.
Jet pack mount, for completion of the long-term public event mission.
Long-term missions will be handed out by a new NPC who will be found in a new shop in the underground market of Highsteppe. The first set of long-term missions will include missions for critter capture, harvesting, kill monsters, public events, and fishing. We are hoping long-term missions will provide our community a motivating goal to work toward, as well as spread more players throughout the overworld. The plan is to eventually roll out a second set of long-term missions (depending on how long the first set keeps the community occupied).
Patches Moving Forward
The new long-term mission vendor will be rolling out in a large patch with other new projects in the coming months. On that note, we are planning on releasing larger but less frequent patches. We tend to lose out on development time with the smaller, more frequent patches, and the hope is that these larger patches will help us maximize the amount of time we have for new features.
Although we may be putting out patches less frequently, that won't change the frequency in which you'll hear from us regarding what we're working on, as well as seeing us in game interacting with the community. We will continue to keep the community updated on what we are working on and when it will come out, as well as take feedback on these new features we're developing. In addition to long-term missions, we have some other exciting features we are working on for this year that we are confident the players are going to be excited about.