Hey all! The end of the month is fast approaching, and, yes—that means CT is starting. When, you ask? The first phase of Closed Testing begins on Wednesday, February 24th. So let’s talk about what that means.
We’ve been working on this for nearly two years now, and this is the first time we’re going to get to throw some of what we’ve been doing at you guys. Closed Testing is an opportunity for us to get an initial feel for stability, balance, and game “feel” (more or less in that order). MMOs don’t truly get tested until they’ve experienced scale, and this will be rotf2’s first exposure to a concurrent playercount over ten.
What I’m trying to say is, I expect things to blow up. Hard. But I also think that we have a good team, a good community, and a (very eager) group of Closed Testers to help us fix everything. We’re committed to making something that we ourselves want to play, and we expect to be doing a lot more before we reach that goal.
For the initial round of CT, the plan is to run an intense, 2-3 day server stability test, with real players. During this time, we’ll be monitoring everything that works (and everything that doesn’t), and pushing out rapid fixes and improvements as things come up. We’re currently looking to test the easy, early-game content, so we’re setting up the playable realms and dungeons accordingly.
As we’ve mentioned (like, a lot), despite how long we’ve been working on this, rotf is still very early on in its development. MMOs take a long time to build. While the default assumption should be that nothing you see during CT is final, I’d like to specifically point out that these features are incomplete or missing entirely:
- General balance (can’t balance effectively until players join)
- Stat/skill trees (masterwork nodes not done)
- Rune choices (only a few implemented atm)
- Tutorial (completely missing)
- Progression explanation (what is “easy/medium/hard,” what does HST do, etc)
- Enchanting (not ready yet)
- Realms (missing of a LOT of polish)
- Classes (bare minimum for CT is enabled, but the Subclass tree + many class abilities are not ready yet)
- Item storage (a barebones “vault” system is implemented but not available)
I could go on, but at some point, we have to put our pencils down, and see how things look. We’re both nervous and ecstatic to see what people think of this early-stage preview of rotf2.
For those of you that don’t have a CT key, hang in there! We’ll be funneling more players in as long as stability looks promising. For those of you that DO have a CT key, you’ll get an email from us (using your sign-up email) on the 24th, with information on how to download, play, and provide feedback.
We’ll update this post with a key in 15 minutes. If stability is good, we’ll also begin distributing keys to content creators, so if that’s your thing, keep an eye out (spamming our DMs is not a great way to get a key).
Anyhoo. This should be fun. https://rotf.io/register
Closed Testing key: MW[1]Z-T[2]9V-QS[3]2-O[4]YV
[1] The first letter of the name of a once-proud spear-man in legacy rotf.
[2] The first letter of the name of the boss that dropped a primal Soul Bottle.
[3] The first letter of the alternate name for the Market. The “_ _ _ _ _ _ _” House
[4] The first letter of the name of the water-based dragon event in legacy rotf.
aced.gg 