Blog: Durin's Day Celebration

Greetings friends!

It's been a month since The Golden Update, the team met on Discord to discuss some of the changes from Patch 1.3.3, chat about the one-year anniversary since launch, celebrate the amazing community they've built, and tease exciting things to come!

You can listen via YouTube and the transcript is below.

Transcript for Forge Talk Episode 7:

Please note: Certain parts of the transcript have been edited and may not perfectly align with the audio. Our goal is to accurately reflect the conversation while ensuring clarity for readers who don't have access to the audio. - Oisin.

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Jon-Paul Dumont: Happy Durin's day everybody I'll just jump in Claire on on the Durin's day topic  so for Durin's day is always been an important day for us and partly that is very intentional I'd  to say everything we do is intentional but it just happens that this time of year is a really good one for us making announcements and releasing the game and doing new updates so Durin's day is the start of the dwarvish new year, but you could go deep down the rabbit hole on the internet about the calculation of Durin's day and how you figure it out and because in The Hobbit he talks about: it's  the first full moon of autumn in the sky with the end of the Autumn Sun at the solstice.

It's an interesting one and there's a lot of discourse around whether Professor Tolken actually intended the dwarvish new year to change when the year starts based on this cosmological event and did they relay their calendar out every single year or not? So there's a lot of conversation about that, we go with (if you're curious) we always go with the Encyclopaedia of Arda, which is us and our partners at Middle-Earth Entertainment consider  the closest thing to a canonical Source on the internet. So if you're ever wondering, when we say: "checking our sources" that's one, so they had it as October 3rd this year and who are we to argue. I have seen many other people talk about "well it's easier to just pick the date in the book and then just stick with it every year" which is totally fine I think it really could just be Durin's's month is October we'll just call it that.

Anyway, happy Durin's day happy Dwarven New Year  we did a bunch of announcements two years on this date a year ago, we launched right around Durin's day and then today we happen to get a patch out! So we're really excited about about the patch. Why don't we talk a little bit about some of the cool stuff so I want to get to lighting in a second I want to give Bradley our Art Director a chance to join. Hey perfect I summoned him!

Clare Byrne: Perfect timing! Impressive!

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, that happens anybody else who remote works it always seems  when you mention someone's missing that's the moment they show up. So, yeah Bradley we were just talking about the patch. For those of you who've been in the community for a while  we've got this pattern of we're trying to do a title update basically every three months if we can pull it off. We don't always get there but that's about between 3 and 5 months is kind of our rate, and then we want to do a patch very quickly afterwards and that patch is usually a mix of three things: It's us watching the community immediately and going "oh this thing happened" or "oh we didn't think that this situation would happen let's quickly fix that" it's also just bugs that we wanted to fix but didn't quite get fixed in time because  especially when you've got consoles you have to kind of lock the build down a little earlier than you would  so when you guys play the build that goes out it's usually the build we've had -- sometimes two weeks earlier and in those two weeks we fix more stuff and so we put those into the patch. But the third thing is when the last few little things that we just really wanted to get into the update, not really bugs but just improvements that we wanted and so we always try to hold one or two improvements the big one this time was lighting. So I have really enjoyed -I know Claire you've enjoyed- seeing all of the "my eyes are burning" memes

Clare Byrne: I've really appreciated all those memes that people have been dropping in.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, and it made us realize in the patch notes and probably in Discord and maybe even in the news feed on the game we probably should have said: "be careful your game may be too bright until you delete some lights!"  Bradley why don't we talk a little bit about what was the goal of the lighting change that that we ended up doing and how are we also taking feedback, seeing people's experience and thinking about tweaking in the future.

Bradley Fulton: Yeah so I've been I've been browsing the Discord, just lurking in thehere watching everyone's feedback and paying attention to some of the issues that people might be having but also how many times people say "it looks so much better" which is really great to see because that's ultimately why we're here. The main issue that we were trying to address was just a general sense that we would get from players that the world was too dark and  what does that mean  kind of figuring out exactly under what circumstances and it seemed  the number one case was: I've built a really huge base it might sprawl over a big area of the game, I've placed a ton of lights and yet it just doesn't seem right or the more lights I place in the world -this was another thing- the more lights I place the darker it feels  it is.

We were really just trying to address that generally when you're building a a home in Moria you want it to feel cozy and warm and you don't want to be thinking about light when you're there.

Once you've placed a bunch of lights the braziers and the lamps and things you want it to feel  home and we tried to tackle that in a couple different ways.

The first thing and probably the most important thing was that we take a took another crack at the way that our system prioritizes which lights get displayed on screen and when and from how far away, because ultimately every real-time light you put in the world has a cost, has a render cost and so rather than absolutely crush your frame rate we manage behind the scenes which lights are on and which lights are off we were doing that in a different way before this patch.

I think what we've got now is a is a huge improvement and the screenshots that show  where it's  solid white  which is done partially for humour but that's just showing the fact that we're drawing so many more lights than we were before when you're in your base. And then the other thing that we did was we attached to any hearths that you put down. Now I actually have an area that changes the ambience, and it generally lifts the ambient light of the game up just a little bit and it depends on the size of the Hearth. So the very large ones, the grand hearths will do it quite a bit and then a little campfire will do it hardly at all and that was just to make sure that even if you didn't place a whole lot of lighting in your base that the corners won't go to total blackness was a thing that was prone to happen before. So, the combination of those two means that if you have a really large base and you've put down hundreds of lights it'll all add up to to something that's very bright now. And then you also many players may have adjusted the global brightness of their game to  max on the slider and generally the game is lit when we evaluate it at 2.2 the middle range, which is the default. Knowing that players can adjust that up and down so you might want to first try turning that down to see if that makes a difference because you were compensating for the game being too dark before, another thing I would recommend is because we're generally drawing most of the lights in your base now if you've placed a ton of torches and whatnot just try reducing the number of those, because each one of those will add up so that's generally was our approach and we're not done  we're going to pay attention to everything you folks are seeing and and if there are other issues I'd really love to see them. Ideally, we get a if we get a bug report and you think something is really wrong then give us a bug report, ideally with video would be really excellent. It's much easier for us to narrow down any issues that might be happening.

Jon-Paul Dumont:  Yeah and just a reminder we are a smaller team so almost everything that you guys put into those support tickets that isn't just a "ah go put this into some bucket" we really do go through these  pretty much everybody in this call and some people lurking in the audience are reading every one of those things so we get those reports we look through them so and if you can send video in that, that would really help. It reminds me Bradley when we did that big push to try to fix stability especially Mega-base stability we got a bunch of of big bases from some of our  hardcore builders  people that won the building competition we reached out and Mereak Firmaxe and got their huge build-outs and we opened them up in our game and to make sure that things were stable and we still use those.

It reminds me we probably could have done that for lighting  who are the people that just love having 30 crystal lamps and we probably would be  "ah okay!".

Bradley Fulton: we actually did that with a few, I had a few Mega-bases that that we had gotten from players and and tested just to make sure that  I wouldn't say the most extreme cases but kind of the typical case where you've got a light that you've attached to every column and that kind of thing.

We use those kind of things to validate  the decisions that we're making.

Jon-Paul Dumont: When we were talking a little bit offline about one of the things that we didn't really get a chance to do when we launched the game was: expose a lot of the underlying values. If you go look at a 500 person Team game  a God of War or an Assassin's Creed where you've got just so many controls and each one of those is usually something that someone had to make, but one of the things we're really starting to think about putting on our road map in the next couple of updates is how many more things can we Expose. Some of that could be things  the aim down sight  sensitivity on controller sticks, mouse sensitivity but I think you and I were also talking about what parts of the lighting update could we expose.

Partly for aesthetics and partly for performance so those are things that I think that we're going to go back and see where are places where we've made decisions for the player, and can we start exposing those a little more?

Bradley Fulton: Yeah! I agree with that

Clare Byrne: I was just going to say especially when you think of the difference in the quality of life that improvement and all the players loved it when the difficulty sliders were revealed and people could start fine-tuning things, adding different adjustments to areas and uncovering more. I think would go down really well.

Bradley Fulton: Yeah because I think ultimately an ongoing challenge for us is to give everybody what kind of what they expect but players have so much agency in this world.

We're not limiting how many lights you can place in the world there's not a hard counter that says "well you placed 100 lights so you're done now" we don't want to ever impose that kind of limit so the result is that you have a lot of choice and power in lighting these things up and yet we still want to make sure that it always looks good no matter what is in your imagination and so it's a thing that we're just going to keep paying attention to and making adjustments as needed.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Moving on with the rest of  the changes that we did in this patch there's something -Ryan- I think we figured out last night maybe that didn't make it into the patch notes that probably should have been the one of the first things we mentioned because it's probably one of the most talk about things in the Discord is: you made a whole Suite of changes to make the first Orc Town easier to find. We probably need the patch notes because we realized we left it off when we went through it so maybe just talk about I know you in particular felt like a needle was stabbing you every time someone in Discord was like: "Hey guys can you help me find the orc town" and I think many of our helpers in Discord have also sort of gotten very used to making videos to show people where the Orc Town is. Hopefully those aren't going to be needed but could you talk a little bit about what we did to make Orc Town easier to find?

Ryan Mattson: We've been trying to make it easier to find I think in every single patch since release and I remember on release when people started talking about it -I feel there maybe there was a Reddit post or something- or maybe somebody in the Discord was: "I can't find this thing" and I remember doing the absolute wrong thing which is to say "oh come on it can't be that hard!"

Of course it was! Yeah it's not hard for people who know where it is exactly like me who play through the game so many times.

So every single patch we've been trying to do something to adjust it and I think finally one of the things that I was really resistant to because it can just introduce a lot of instability in the world generation and so I wanted to actually just touch the world generation data in a way that was going to solve it once and for all and it ended up being a much easier solution than I thought it was.

Which is feel that happens, we all have those experiences where like: “this is going to be really tough and it's really dangerous and risky and I'm afraid to do it" and then you actually look at it for a little while longer and you realize that is probably an easier problem to solve I'm just going to touch this little piece of data here and yeah I think and again send please send in tickets if you're having a hard time still we'll try to we'll try to address it for you, but I think it might be solved once and for all and it might be much much easier to find.

So any new worlds that you generate from now on hopefully we won't be getting in any more those questions about where Orc Town is.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah and -spoiler a little bit for one of the few the topics we're going to talk about in a minute- but one of our Muthzak (Guy) made in the gold challenge a version of Orc Town that he said was one gold piece for every time someone asked in Discord where to find Orc town.

It was 30,000 gold pieces so hopefully that will be... yeah go ahead.

Clare Byrne: Sorry I was just going to say we should also call out Axbeard cuz I think Axbeard was the reigning champion of getting to Orc Town the the quickest, he'd jump into people's seeds or into their actual games and just time themselves speed running.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah and I see one alone, you're totally right I mean the original Orc Town issue is the game is so vertical and we thought it would be really fun to figure out.

Hey we'll give you something hard to get to when you get to vertical I mean games like Crackdown that was so fun and that was one thing: "okay we need to make this one thing kind of vertical" so it'll be a little bit, but then you combine that with the limitations on our our 2D version of the map because dwarves don't have holograms and all of that kind of combined to: yeah people aren't always trained to look up, so we fixed that.

The other thing Ryan that that we worked on and and this one is a little bit more of a suite of bugs as opposed to a thing that we sat down and and intentionally iterated on: lighting was motion locomotion especially enemy locomotion so I think for those of you who've been with us for a while know that every update we've tried to do a little bit more for locomotion for combat we did a lot of combat changes in the 1.2 with sandbox and and more with 1.3 .

This time around we really wanted to look through: where does it just look weird and what can we do on that so I don't if you want to talk a little bit about that Ryan

Ryan Mattson: There's a couple of really good examples that will hopefully.. one seems very minor but I think it improves the look and feel of the game pretty drastically and then one is a little bit more a little bit more interesting for combat stuff.

So the the first one that might feel minor but I think is actually a really nice change is (actually we'll talk about three of them), the first one would be the fauna in the game shouldn't walk into Corners as often as you might have seen them do that before. And I feel  often times you would run around especially in Westgate early in the game maybe your first hour or two and you would just walk into a room and there would be a wolf just pathing right into a corner of the world and you're like "that that looks really silly, don't go there wolf" and so Genie worked on some good fixes for that. To give them a little bit of a better understanding of the world so that they won't do that and then also related to wolves is their attack behaviour changed and this one is really fun because previously what wolves were doing to attack is: they would find a spot that they wanted to go to attack you or your friends they would move close to you to do it, they would do they would do their attack and then they would back up when they were done. Which makes a lot of sense from an AI Behaviour standpoint if you're thinking about Orcs but it doesn't make any sense for wolves. Wolves don't back up that often in the world again it looked fine because we were used to it but if you kind of looked at it with fresh eyes you might think it was pretty silly so they don't do that as much now, they have a much more interesting behaviour set for attacking.

Then the other one that's really fun too and is very very visible in your first big fight against the Orcs if people know where that is. Is Goblins, Goblin men, Orcs will actually stand a little bit more at range they'll space themselves apart more and they won't bunch up on you as much mostly because if they were bunching up on you not everyone would be able to attack you so it's kind of weird to have Orcs or goblins right up on you not really doing anything because their buddies are already hitting you they'll stand at range more if they don't have the ability to attack you and they will attack you with their ranged weapons and that really changed the dynamic of some of those big fights because all of a sudden in the fights not only are you having guys up doing melee attacks on you but now there's arrows flying overhead and it feels much more chaotic in a really interesting and fun way. So those are three of the big noticeable things that we did.

Jon-Paul Dumont: I'm wondering if  players notice there's one thing that we debated  what we should do about this but has anyone noticed that when you wake up after sleeping that we don't animate standing up from your bed roll anymore? Because it was just a weird technical Challenge and it made their feet slide around a lot and it always kind of bugged me how it looked and I think it was Genie who was "we got to fix this" and we went back and forth and finally she was "why don't we just get rid of it I doubt anyone will notice" and then she got rid of it and then we did a play test and I didn't even know she had done it and I didn't notice so I'm curious if anyone else noticed that. But don't hide things from your team when you fix them but also sometimes hide them just to see if people do care and one thing just to know is The enemy, The Locomotion, The Dwarf combat those are things that I think we are going to continue to improve iterate change every update don't think we're ever going to say yep that's it we're done .We have a a complex world with a lot of agency.

Bradley mentioned this we when we started off making a survival crafting game, you'd think that there were all of these conventions to stick with but I think the one thing we really discovered about this genre of game is: its agency, it's giving the player the ability to do kind of anything and earn whatever abilities and power they have and so because of that the immense amount of power that that a player has over the world of placing platforms rebuilding destroying it means more traditional methods of enemies and AI locomoting around the world just get a little more complex.

So we're just going to keep tipping away at that as long as we are lucky enough to make updates.

Another thing that that we did is the next big section is the crossplay and the multiplayer I'm not going to go too much through these but  we're always looking at interesting little things that happen when you're playing in multiplayer.

Xbox in particular is an interesting way that they do networking and the memory sizes on the Xbox S in particular means there can be just some weird things that the person who's hosting sees something and the person who's joining doesn't so we've been working away at those and we've actually got another little small patch that's continuing to improve more of that and more network stuff.

So especially if you have trouble connecting on multiplayer and you can get access to logs and fill out a support ticket the more of those, we get the better because it gives us more ways to test out whether we're knocking down all these little network bugs that that can come up and keep you from playing with your friends.

Those are probably those are the big categories and there's a couple of other things that we did I was particularly proud of the Zarok torch getting to mount on the wall. That was because I just happened to be in between meetings and I was reading Discord and someone was complaining about it and just screenshotted the "why do I have to throw the Zarok torch on the ground this isn't fun" I just screenshot, did that and I sent it to Ryan and I think and an hour later you were "yeah I got it fixed" and I was "oh okay let's put that in the patch".

So that's just another example of we absolutely are seeing it when you guys have suggestions and sometimes, we just didn't think of it or we didn't realize .

I think with the Zarok torch I think Ryan you and I didn't realize you couldn't do that we thought we could it must have just been some weird oversight, but you can now.

Ryan Mattson: We made a decision a long time ago and I feel it probably was the right decision at the time for several reasons but then when you think back on it you're "that was a... I don't know why we made that decision" and then what the other one is you can put the Keg up there too.

Clare Byrne: The Keg looks so cute mounted on the wall I have to say. Really I think that's my favourite addition from the patch.

I think it just it looks really nice especially seeing some people sharing displays that they have there of everything lined up and just the little keg sitting there, oh I love it

Ryan Mattson: Yeah put the keg up there and you can use it too you, can get a you can get a mug of Ale from the Keg that's mounted on the wall so.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah, and maybe if we get that, we've got an experiment we're working on now which I I don't want to promise so I'm probably going to regret this but Ryan and our UX designer are experimenting with being able to rename things in the game.

That could maybe give you renaming storage and who knows maybe we can figure out a way to do signs. I'd love to see a little sign over each keg, but we'll see. We'll try to get there.

Another thing that we did was we (inadvertently) when we released the Oaken Shield that Oaken Shield was maybe a bit more powerful than we intended, so we did nerf the Oaken Shield but to make up for it we undid most of the nerf of Shieldwall which I know was the Epic Shield that a lot of people were kind of sad about.

So upped the the durability on that one so that should be nigh indestructible.

I don't know Ryan did you have or Bradley did you have any other particular little bugs that was worth calling out other than maybe you can't eat Mahal's gift anymore?

I didn't realize how many people liked eating Mahal's gift! That was that was that was a surprise, how many people were: "what I can't poison myself with with this thing that's supposed to be a first age artifact?".

Ryan Mattson: That was a funny artifact, speaking of artifacts the way that it was initially implemented to stub it in and it was just yeah we probably should have gone back to well on the initial implementation of it instead of just continually patching functionality out of it or changing it but yeah that that was a pretty funny one.

I didn't realize you could do that

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah in fact I was worried the day before the patch went out that we hadn't fixed it that you could still eat it but I was I was glad to see we fixed that. Cranberries was a big one. I think that was partly from player tickets but also just our own play test we're "where the hell are the Cranberries?"

So it turns out in all of Moria cranberries are the most  the most prized thing above maybe gold.

Ryan Mattson: That was a funny one because and this just goes to show you it's really hard to keep all this information in your head at the same time, but when we would play in campaign mode in our play tests there were cranberries and then when we would play in sandbox mode there weren't and it was so confounding.

Why are the cranberries is not showing up? and the answer was we just didn't put them in that area they were in a different biome so yeah it was a very silly thing.

Jon-Paul Dumont: We did a little bit on the crossbow ranged attacks, yeah I don't want to read the rest of the patch notes but the other thing we have found is that because we do we try to do a lot in each one of these patches sometimes we just kind of lose things in the patch notes.

I hate to say that but we mentioned with the Orc Town so there's probably a few other things we're going to find because a lot of times have things we'll have an actual we'll be very formal about it here is a bug and we written a report about it and  we sent it to somebody to fix and sometimes we're just in a meeting going "yeah this could be better" and then we just fix it and then we forget to write down that we fixed it so there's probably a lot more in here than.

Ryan Mattson: A little one that I remember, it's in the patch notes but it's it's a little vague in there is: we cleaned up the camps the orc camps a little bit so there's not as much clutter and debris on the ground around them and it just makes all of the Orcs and The Goblin men look a lot better when they're running around because they're not accidentally padding popping up on things standing on assets that they shouldn't be standing on and that that that just makes the whole thing feel a little bit better so that was a nice one.

Jon-Paul Dumont: I'm also reminded that we're a month out from the golden update and there was a couple of big things we did to the core loop so I would love in in the chat either now or later in Discord: we made big changes to cooking and we added the different scavenging containers, the Abakhs and the books and scrolls.

So would love some feedback there especially around cooking what do you guys think about the cooking changes now that we're a month out?

Because that was a little bit of a leap of faith that we wanted to make that a little better. So would love to hear what you guys think about that.

Bradley did you have anything else that we had fixed or touched that we want to call out?

Bradley Fulton: Oh there are so many things but I was focused on almost entirely on lighting this whole time so still want to reiterate just want to hear people's feedback on that and if they're seeing any specific issues just please please send us a report

Jon-Paul Dumont: And as for what's next I think we're going to be talking a little bit more about that in a in a future Forge chat.

We are working on and planning the next update I think we've got some things that are pretty fun that that I would love to talk about but will have a little more it to talk about those, but we are actively working on the next one and I think it'll be good amount of time, in an efficient amount of time.

I don't know what that means that sounds that sounds more formal than I meant to.

Clare Byrne: Soon(TM)

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah soon! "when?" "soon". Okay, well Claire why don't we want to maybe talk about the gold challenge.

Clare Byrne: Yeah. Well after the golden update, trying to decide what the next challenge should be and it kind of answered itself with all of these new cool gold additions to to the game I wanted to see how gold people could make things. Kind of going King Midas on their on their builds and seeing what they could change. Yeah I love it's another channel that you have to wear sunglasses going into cuz it's so shiny.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Oh some of those some of those gold challenge builds I feel bad for people going in there post update without adjusting

Clare Byrne: Yeah it probably be very glisteny and glittery but yeah what did you think of the the different entries I know you've been working on the patch so but you were saying you did get a chance to have a look at them.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah and I think we're going to do, we're either going to do a video we did with the Build Awards or or at least a blog post calling out people. I wanted to go through it a little bit more in detail and call people out that were awesome. But there were a couple that I really I would say, there were a couple people that did really used that checkerboard gold floor all over the place and it really does look cool when you fill an entire room with that.

Clare Byrne: Yeah seeing that over really big expenses. The people who filled entire halls and stuff with with that on the floor it looks really nice all laid out.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Then there's one player that did a kind of gold monument around the Muznakan. Those looked really good and then of course just seeing whole rooms filled with gold it made me think, I had the director's instinct of looking it going: "they need to be bigger, taller. We need to make two story gold piles!".

So maybe that's something that we should try to do? I mean I don't know how it would work on performance, but we should be setting out to make Thror's gold chamber at some point. But overall yeah, we've been looking at them. We're going to do either a video a reaction video or a blog calling out the people that are favourites on that one.

Yeah and I guess Clare we got to figure out what the next challenge would be these challenges are ,I think the maybe these might have been your idea, it's been really fun to see the community kind of come together and put stuff together so we should think about what the next challenges: probably not the burn your retina out challenge.

We might have done that already!

Clare Byrne: Yeah  well one of the things I really love is people are kind in competition with each other but also hyping each other up in the these challenges as well encouraging people to try different things. It's such really good vibes going on in those challenge threads and also really inspiring as well so if you're looking for ideas some of those building challenges are really impressive and at the moment between this and whatever the next challenge is going to be we've also set up, we've given a home for Axbeards bare knuckle brawlers challenge oh which is basically taking on various enemies within Moria with nothing but your fists no any armour or anything,

Jon-Paul Dumont: Was that inspired by our team playtest video where we curb stomped that Goblin that came into our base cuz I think nobody had a weapon and a goblin came in I think all five of us just bare knuckled him down to zero. I think that was what that was inspired by. Yeah I want to see that that's going to be fun.

Clare Byrne: There's some there's some really cool videos of people take I think the first one was a bear and then the second one is taking on a troll and they're going to keep escalating I've seen the list of  all the challenges that a be and I think Mojo has been helping design them or prove that they're doable as well and basically being the guinea pig for them and so some of the videos are very fun as well.

Jon-Paul Dumont: One thing designed into the game that I don't know if it would be a good challenge but we did try to design at least The Campaign World layout so if you ever wanted to play the fellowship from one side to the other you could, so that's something I've been wondering about.

You can't really dress up as Gandalf but it'll be fun to try maybe a cosplay the fellowship.

Clare Byrne: Change your beard to White and off you go.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah there you goo. It's what what if the dwarves had a annual, you got all these cultures have these weird holidays I wonder if the dwarves would have this annual Recreation of  the fellowship oh a Fellowship pilgrimage type thing yeah or you get to "this year I get to be Frodo on Fellowship day"

Clare Byrne: Yeah can you imagine all the little young young dwarves being really excited "oh I got pick to be Sam".

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah like a Christmas Pageant but for when Tharkun took down Durin's Bain.

Anyway okay now we're just brainstorming we should probably move onto something more entertaining talk about.

So the other the the other thing that we wanted to bring up is we're, it's October 4th today at least where I am. We're coming up we're about 20 days away from our one year anniversary and well we decided to do the patch on Durin's day rather than the one year because we didn't want to make you guys wait.

It's been a year since we launched which means for for those of us who started on the game at the beginning Bradley and I, you and I have been thinking about Moria for a good amount of years. Multiple many years now so we've been in the mines for a while.

I thought maybe we could just chat about what it's been like to keep working on this game for a year.

Ryan or Bradley if you got any thoughts?

Bradley Fulton:Well this is I mean, I'll just say in general that one experience for any game developer just part of the process of doing it is when you go back and you play old builds of the thing you've been working on you think so intensely about the problems of today and how to how to make it better or the next really cool idea you want to add and you put everything you can into it and then when you have a chance to go back something might come up and you have to go back to an old build or what the way the game played at launch a year ago and you realize just how far everything has come.

You add up all those little changes that everyone made.The whole team working hard for the the last year to try to make the game better and really just hit that vision that we always had and it's always a really good feeling when you see that, but in particular just getting onto the Discord and listening to the community and seeing everyone's reactions to each of those changes but when you add all that up it's really something it's kind of humbling actually.

Ryan Mattson: I would Echo that I don't I don't have much more to add that's the very well put Bradley

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah and I saw a little bit in the in the chat when I when I said "lucky enough to make an update" I think that's it's interesting that that a few people picked up on that one of the things that we pretty much everybody here both speaking and listening loves video games and  it's it's not a surprise that the last couple of years have been a really challenging time for those of us that make video games. Many of our friends have lost their jobs their Studios have closed and so we feel very fortunate that we have been able to not only ship Moria last year but continue to work on it and make it better and I think a big part of that is thanks that we should give to this community. Because you're so active, you were so involved in the game and talking to us and and passionate about it is one of the things that has helped us continue to say "this is a thriving community and we should continue to serve this community and keep making updates" and so the the activity and the passion within this community is a major reason why we've been able to continue to update the game and work on the game so I think we owe everyone here and everyone listening when we do a recording and everyone in Discord a huge thanks because this this community really -and I'm not just saying that- this community really is a big reason we can point to and say we want to keep going. And I think because of that we're going to be able to keep going so thank you to everybody who is a part of this community and everybody that jumps in and helps and we we've been making badges for people that are helping and man, when part of Canada couldn't play last week and people were jumping in and giving us their IP addresses and helping them fix the bugs, oh my God we're so fortunate it's not just throw it over the wall and hope something happens that we can just get into Discord and be "hey guys who can help" and people just jump in and help it is so great. I think in my in my whole career in games there is nothing like having a community that loves the game and is active and this is I think by far the best community I've ever had an opportunity to serve.

So just a big heartfelt thank you because you really are a big reason we're able to continue to make this game better.

Clare Byrne: Hear hear! That's so well put. Yeah this this community is definitely one of the best I've ever had the pleasure of working withe veryone's just so lovely and happy to help everyone else out. It's really great to see!

Jon-Paul Dumont: We can't wait to talk about year two. Not quite ready yet though.

Clare Byrne: More to come! Watch this Space!

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yes I try to send little signals in Discord sometimes but am I'm pushing the boundary a little bit sometimes.

Clare Byrne: Yeah there there's gonna be people reading between the lines of your messages trying to find the clues

Jon-Paul Dumont: Haha yes I need to I need to start putting  little hints in my background on the next video.

Well I think with that that was kind of most of the stuff to to talk about I mean from where we were with 1.0 a year ago. Epic Game Store only in in October we wanted to get it out we got it out on time, but there were so many things we wanted to do. We immediately we didn't we didn't stop and take a breath we were Ryan I remember you and I were we were watching streamers play and we're were going God I wish they could play the version of the Dragon we're we're going to fix up and so oh sorry spoilerthe end fight and so Ryan was were watching streamers on launch day going   popping champagne meanwhile Ryan and Genie were in the lab trying to make the final boss fight better and we got that out with with 1.1 and PS5 launch and knocked out a whole a WHOLE bunch of bugs and quality of life and got the ability to to sort storage and then we turned around and we're: "okay well what's the big thing we can do?" and we're well we "love the story we made but players are hitting the end and they want something more nonlinear let's go let's go make sandbox" Now that was kind of a crazy thing I remember that meeting where we were "well we could just make it where we take all of our generation systems and just hit the random button on everything" and Ryan and I were like: "I guess we could do that" and so and so we did that and got that out with sandbox and then we turned around and we're "well we got to get on Steam we got to get on Xbox and if we're going to do that man people love playing together".

It was some interesting conversations about can a game that's already launched put in crossplay because that's not a simple thing if you didn't plan for it from the beginning. And so worked hard to get that out and make a whole bunch of changes get the core loop a little better and now we're looking at okay well what what do other games have that we don't have that people want and how do we get them that so I think that's going to be a big part ofthe next year.

Clare Byrne: Yeah I think the amount of stuff that's gone into the game over the past year is amazing andyou guys do absolutely stellar work in in getting stuff out.

But also we know that there's there's obviously still a few things, there's feedback that you'd probably want to address in year two as well as your own ideas that you're really looking forward to to adding to the game as well so it's a mix of everything and just to to remind people that if you have anything to report or any feedback you want to share based on your gameplay experience do send it to us. We do go through it. Things will be put into a list for review.

Can't promise that absolutely everything will make it into the game but if a request is popular enough at least we can we can show "hey people want this"

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah and I see in the chat... we are absolutely looking at everything that is all the feedback we're getting right now from the patch things that we didn't fix things that maybe introduced that we want to fix so we're always going to continue to look at all of that and prioritize and try to get those out so.

Okay that's it for today  Ryan or Bradley any any last thoughts.

Bradley Fulton: No just glad to always have this chance to to chat with you guys

Ryan Mattson: Yeah no no final thoughts here just thanks for being here thanks for being a part of the community like Jon-Paul was saying.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Yeah One Year Down! Happy Durin's day!

Clare Byrne: Yeah we'll hopefully do another one of these soon when you have some information to share and unfortunately we didn't get to questions this week but we might add some some questions to the next one as well so watch out for me asking for those.

Jon-Paul Dumont: Oh yeah I ended it quick! Yeah we'll do a question and we could also do another Q&A specific one.

We don't have to necessarily wait till we've got more announcements but yeah when don't we figure that out we we'll figure out how to do that but we're also always reading everything in Discord and I try to answer. I try to answer stuff too. And absolutely another big thanks out to the crew that sort of volunteers the msac that are that are there if you see any one of them online and you've got something that you maybe want to relay to the dev team and haven't maybe gotten our eye or ear yet they're they're listening and they also report things that are coming up too so that's another good way to to let us know things that you want exactly okay all right thanks and thanks Claire for always running these!

I think if anybody hasn't thanked Claire for being  the the greatest Community manager on Discord take a moment and thank Clare too because she is awesome.

Clare Byrne: Ah you're gonna have me getting choked up now. It's a pleasure and a joy.

Jon-Paul Dumont: All right thanks everybody have a good weekend!

Clare Byrne: Same to you bye!

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