Revenge of the Fallen: Closed Testing First Impressions

Hey, look! It’s another Saturday post. The first phase of Closed Testing has begun, and we’re really happy with how things are going. As we mentioned in the announcement post, this first CT phase was meant to be an experiment for us to see how server stability holds up. Yes, we’d also be using data and feedback from CT to inform content, balance, and gameplay decisions, but we mostly wanted to understand how the server might break under load, and look for fixes early on. I’m going to sprinkle this post with fun CT clips from the community so that I can show their first impressions, and I’ll also share some of my initial thoughts.

RotF is still early on in development. From our roadmaps, I’d put us at around 35% complete—and the reason for this has to do with how development is split up. In our eyes, there are several different sections where we can make progress each day: tech (stability), content, game systems, and balance.

The difficult thing about building a multiplayer game is that the last three sections (content, game systems, balance) all very much rely on the first section (stability!) in order to function. We wanted to build out our tech, and we wanted to do it well. Once we had tech that we thought was pretty good, we started working on some early content and game systems development—dungeons like the Magician’s Hideout, Soul Harvest, and Asgard, along with an early iteration of the skill tree system, are products of that work.

But before we worked on any more content or game systems, we needed to make sure that the foundational stuff (the boring stability stuff) was working properly. Thus, Closed Testing began on the 24th, and we began to collect a lot of data about stability.

Being honest, the results far exceeded our expectations. We found one (1!!!) projectile desync, identified the cause, and fixed it. We’ve found one (1!!!) cause of server lag, and identified some possible solutions, which we’ll deploy soon. The server has otherwise had no problem handling the load. This is really good news for us.

But this doesn’t mean we’re done. This means that the foundation works, and now, we need to work on everything else. The plan is to have six easy dungeons, six medium dungeons, and six hard dungeons, complete the class + subclass system, the realm system, the skill tree + runes…

So hang in there. We’ve been reading all of the feedback, and one thing that I’ve noticed is that a lot of the criticism is around things that simply aren’t done. This is actually a good thing. The criticism isn’t about oversights, it’s about missing features—many of which were already on our backlog. If you thought that CT was a good first showing, great! But if not, that’s okay. We’ve got a lot more to do before we’re satisfied, and I’ll bet that by the time we’re done, we’ll have something that you’ll like, too.

Thanks for everything, guys. Have some keys.

1. 3G3C-HYAJ-K0BU-AZVL
2. AW5B-WBY1-TYYA-1LOM
3. AWXM-MPKM-YOHL-YS8R
4. CSIV-3N0F-HCKH-SBJV
5. DOXG-YSXG-UCOA-P6N7
6. 5OMS-9V8P-V4QT-R8H2

https://rotf.io/register