A moment of silence
Verfasst: 11.07.2016 18:20
As requested, this will be a translation of this post in the german part of this Forum. However I want to mention that I am neither Part of SureAI nor a professional when it comes to translation. I of course do think that my english will do just fine but if I do make any mistakes then those are mine. Not the fault of SureAI. Also be aware that this list was published immediatly after the german launch. That means some of the things listed here may already be present when the english version launches. That being said, here we go.
Still... hope you enjoy.
Edit Caleb: Added English translation for Dünenhaim. Thank you very much for this translation
Greetings!I hope there aren't too many errors. (because I am sure there are some)
After the launch went (relatively) well we would like to take some time to talk about all the things that did not (partly: yet) made it into the game, despite all the hard work and willpower.
Guild questline - The Golden Sickle: The Golden Sickle is a long questline in Ark that deals with the merchants guild "Golden Sickle" and the kilean Sugar Island Union. The quest is very non-linear and has 5 endings in total. Sadly we didn't manage to finish testing all of it by the time of the release. A future patch will however include it.
More bards: Right now there is only one type of voice for the female bards - as of now the male and second female one are silent. Actually those are finished but we will have to add the files uncompressed so the patch will be about 200MB, also a (very, very beautiful) Song is not finished yet. We will add all of this once the traffic on our servers goes down a bit.
Cutscene-system: Those who followed the development of Enderal for some time now will know what this is about. Originally it was planned to stage certain key Story-Events in a cineastic way. The system was indeed functional but the testing of certain camera angles was really hard and would have required us to reach too deep into the engine. In the end the costs and benefits wouldn't justify the effort besides we probably would have created alot of unforseen problems.
Realtime-Flying system: An especially frustrating case for us. one of our coders spend several months on this and even implemented it fully functional into the game. In the end it failed because the Creation Engine simply couldn't process all it had to load which resulted in crashes even on high end systems. No matter what we tried it just wouldn't work - and in the end we had to settle for the classic "Strider" solution.
Guild questline - Rhalâta: The most painful loss. The Rhalâta-questline dealed with the eponymus cult in the Undercity led by the so called "Father". You meet Tharaêl, a tight-lipped Aeterna who infiltrated the Rhalâta and plans to kill the Father. The four quests were absolutly amazing and also featured many ties to the "Butcher of Ark" - a lot of dark stuff similar to the sequences with Daddy with some cool twists and, thanks to the excellently designed Undercity by Julian (Sagantor), a unique atmosphere. The quest was already almost fully voiced and partly implemented but in the end a team member left to work an another (not yet released) mobile project. The loss of this questline greatly upsets us to this day. For anyone who wants to remain in sad reminiscence I recommend the awesome Rhalâta/Tharaêl-theme made by Marvin: klick
Story quest Jespar: An additional quest about a wicked part of Jespars past that starts at the beginning of act 2. (keyword Silvercloud) Same problem as with the other quests.
Story quest Calia: An additional quest after a certain point in Calias backstory, dealing with her family background.
Story quest Yuslan: A two-part quest that deepens the topic of the "Sea of Eventualities" (different realities) which also shines some light on the past of Yuslan Sha'Rim. The key point of the quest is a magical device called the "World converter" which Yuslan tries to reconstruct. It allows its user to travel through different realities. This also had to be scrapped since only two of our five quest-scripters remained at the end of development.
Questline - Chaime: A questline set in Duneville. Starting with a not so unusual seeming murder the player eventually meets the serial killer Chaime. A quest that only lived by the personality of Chaime. This questline also fell under the responsibility of the team member that left.
Sidequest - Light and Shadow: Another quest in the Powder Desert about two unusual children called Light and Shadow and a stone idol. Grim/surreal atmosphere a very cool story and two endings. One of our favorite quests but again. The time.
Druid class: This one was out relativle early but in the beginning we planned to include more than "only" the nine classes the game has now. Among others we wanted to create a druid who can change into different forms. Sadly this was also scrapped due to lack of time.
More synergies: Simple but it would have been cool. More synergy affects amongst the talents. Also scrapped due to lack of time. But it would be easy to mod!
Maybe we find, despite work (and in my case travelling) some time to patch some of the things mentioned here - it also depends on if the community misses them. Maybe we will expand this list in the future since we surely forgot this or that.
Thank you for all the great feedback up until now!
Best wishes and have fun playing the game!
SureAI
Still... hope you enjoy.
Edit Caleb: Added English translation for Dünenhaim. Thank you very much for this translation