PEAK CALIFORNIA

By Jeffrey Kaplan

Our latest Alpha test concluded and the team collectively let out a sigh of relief. While our first Alpha in March was received well by our community, client and server performance fell short of our expectations. As soon as the March test ended, we made the difficult decision to keep the game in Alpha and work toward improving performance and stability. So you can imagine how great it felt to all of us when our most recent Alpha exceeded our technical expectations. Better yet, the game played really well and it was a super fun weekend on the Island of California.

For those of you who joined us for the playtest, thank you for a wonderful weekend (and for the brackets). And for those of you who are still waiting for a chance to play; thank you for your patience and understanding – we’re working on increasing the number of players in future Alpha playtests.

The day the Alpha shut down, we shifted our focus to our next milestone. But before we really get going on that, we have a lot of bugs to fix. Right now bugs are our top priority with even more performance improvements as a close second. We’re also really excited to get back to working on content and features that will level up the game.

The Alpha gave us a lot of great feedback, along with valuable data and statistics we can study. 

One thing that's polarizing among our players is how fast or slow the progression feels. Because The Legend of California is designed to reset on a monthly basis, the progression is intended to be fast. For a one month reset, we don’t expect most players to play a solid month of the game. We know you have other games you want to play and you have “real life” to experience out of the game. That’s one of the beauties of a resetting game: the journey. 

Some were shocked that players reached Tier 4 or even Tier 5 in this playtest (for the record, reaching Tier 5 is actually a bug… but completing 100% of Tier 4 will be a thing). Quickly the sentiment becomes “everyone is hitting Tier 4 and Tier 5” across the community. But the reality is only 5.9% of all players even made it to Tier 3. And 2.8% of players hit Tier 4. Only 6 players total (across 2 Companies) were able to 100% and reach Tier 5. The majority of players spent time in Tier 1 and 2 with the median play time of a Tier 2 player being around 8 hours. So yes, players did “get all the way through the progression” but a) very few did and b) those who did were playing pretty extreme hours. The median playtime in Tier 4 was 28.7 hours and for those few who hit Tier 5, well their median playtime was 39.5 hours. To put it another way, the Monday after the test was a rough one for some of us =P

None of those statistics should mean “everything is great and nothing needs tuning” – far from it. We have a lot more work to do to make the entry experience clear and intuitive for players. While we offer some tutorial tips, we still need to work on helping new players understand the full experience. We know we can do more to make the game more approachable to new players.

On the other end of the spectrum, we know a true end game is something we're missing. Getting to Tier 4 is fun but after a few hours in Tier 4 you run out of content and goals. We have a lot of plans to address this. 

In general, the game needs more rewards and reward systems. We think the idea of Abigail (the PvP Vendor) is really cool. But we need to give players more of a reason to go looking for her. The same goes for Santiago (the fishing vendor). We want a deeper and more unique loot pool for World Events too. And we want World Events to be more enticing, so Tier 4 players are more motivated to travel all over the map. Speaking of unique items, we want more rare spawn animals (and human enemies too!) that have special drops like the Iron Bison or Hartspear. The designers are brainstorming these now and we’ll work to implement more over the course of development into EA and beyond. I’m sure our art team will hit it out of the park like they did with the items for this Alpha. The rare animals need to be more rare. They were bugged in this Alpha and spawned too frequently and sometimes despawned. We need to fix all of that. We’re also brainstorming an “item quality” system that we’d like to start out with for Weapons and then see if we can introduce it to other categories as well. What’s better than a Bolt Action Rifle? Well, a purple Bolt Action Rifle of course…

We know a draw for some (not all) players is PvP as well. We saw more PvP in this Alpha than the previous one but still less than some players expected. There are a number of reasons this is happening. First, most players were in Tier 1 and Tier 2 just trying to get started. PvP isn’t a huge draw for those players at that stage of the game (especially on a PvE server). We did see PvP activity increase as the weekend progressed. Second, the PvP World Events are still new for players to learn and understand and the rewards are decent but could be better. We are also interested in experimenting with introducing PvP events outside of PvP zones (but with plenty of safety and warning for those who don’t want to participate). Lastly, we think the true draw for a lot of PvP players will be dedicated servers with a full PvP ruleset.  This is something we started working on last milestone and are going to keep pushing to get in for either Alpha or Beta testing. 

We think the next playtest is going to be really exciting. We can’t promise all of these things will land in time but I want to share some stuff we’re working on. In addition to making end game and itemization deeper, the team is going to put a lot of effort into making Building and Customization better. And our amazing art team is creating a ton of great customization options for clothing, ranch props and the building system. We think the building and ranch decorating experience is core to our game and speaks to a lot of players who just want to stay “home on the range”. We’ve been exploring tent customization. How cool would it be to express yourself not only through your ranch but also your campsite? The character team wants each player to express who they are uniquely not only through the base character creation system, but through a deep and rich customization system on all of the clothing slots. 

We’ve got a long list of big initiatives for the milestone in addition to the usual tuning, quality of life, bug fixing and performance improvements you should expect from us.

Hopefully this gives you some visibility into how we're feeling about the playtest and what we're working on next. You have been amazing to us and we’re honored to be making this game for you. As game makers, we never get to pick our community – you pick us. But we couldn’t be happier with the community we lucked out with. You all are the best. See you in Cali soon.

(Blog Thumbnail by thundatv)