Hey Everyone,
The first DBOG roadmap is here! Seeing as we're going to open the test server to everyone this weekend for 2.0 open beta, we thought we'd reveal what we have planned for the first roadmap! As you can see from the roadmap, there are a ton of huge changes coming, some of which haven't been done since the official retail servers, like multiple regions at once. The last 4.5 years have been a gradual progression toward this and much more, and now that 2.0 is almost out, we can finally get started on some of the bigger changes! We're blocking out around a year to complete this roadmap before we get started on the next one. Roadmap 2 is at a decent stage of design right now, as is 3. We haven't yet begun design on 4 but I have some rough ideas of how it will work. Enough about the distant future though, see below for what's coming more immediately. This first year we are calling the tech rework, because much of our focus is on solving technology and QoL issues that are hampering the player experience.
2.0 Open Beta
Winter 2018 has finally arrived! Better late than never. Our philosophy going into this has been that a delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad. Inkeeping with that design philosophy, we've been hard at work on 2.0, and the open beta is finally starting this weekend. For those that don't know, 2.0 is a more malleable client than the client you are currently playing on. With that said, it is also an older build, and therefore requires a lot of work and testing to get stable and optimized. Slowly over the past couple of years, the other devs on the team have been working on 2.0. A few months ago I joined them, and in December we brought on around a dozen new testers to help finish out the alpha and closed beta stages of development. We now feel that the client is promising and stable enough to warrant an open beta. Beginning this weekend, all players will have access to the test server, which will now function as our PTR, or Public Test Realm. We'll drop patches off there in advance for player testing and to gather feedback.
- We'll be testing in 1-2 week flights per level cap or focused area of testing.
- Current testers will be promoted to QA Managers and handle interfacing with and organizing the PTR players to advance bugs through the workflow to the devs.
- The major focus is fixing as many stability and gameplay issues as possible, and tracking everything more minor to be addressed later post-launch.
Regional Servers
As you can see above, the first (and hopefully not the last) regional server in addition to NA will be an EU server. This plan has been in the works for quite a while, and now that we're almost ready with 2.0, the time is quickly approaching for us to branch out to a second server. I have a tentative design that should work for this without splitting the playerbase between the two servers. It will be a non-trivial amount of work, but based on what I've seen in the client and server, it should be doable. This hasn't really been done since the NTL days, so some or all of this plan may change as I get under the hood and attempt to implement this.
- When the design is fully implemented, each region should have 1-2 normal channels, 1 Hardcore, 1 Seasonal, and 1 PvP channel.
- New regions will begin at cap 45 and progress through the level caps slowly.
- Once a region has caught up to the max level cap, characters from other regions will be able to join it, and vice versa.
- Regional characters will not be able to obtain items or meaningfully interact with other regions until their region has caught up to max level.
- GP will not transfer between regions until max level.
- We are currently exploring the idea of re-releasing the founder and anniversary packs in order when a new region is released.
Hardcore Channel
Over the years, we've heard many complaints from older players that the game is just too easy, and things were better in the good old days. This feedback, coupled with how interesting games like Hardcore WoW have become, have prompted us to design our own version of this and give it a shot. Given that this will be a standalone channel with a quarantined environment (should our designs come to fruition, anyway), we won't be pulling any punches here. There will be no more room for complaints that the game is too easy. You'll just be able to join the Hardcore server and enjoy all the difficulty you could ever want! We're even going to bring back some of the older, more frustrating designs. Here are a few potential ideas we'll be trying to implement:
- Characters that die will lose all of their gear and titles, equipment included, and return to level 1. All of their skills, wishes, quests and teleportation points will be reset. The only thing that will remain is their name.
- Upgrade Stones will return, with lower success rates, and item breaking.
- Disassembling will have a chance to break items.
- Attaching Gemstones will have a chance to destroy the Gemstone, and/or break the item.
- The only way to obtain Dragon Balls will be DB Scramble.
- Higher mob difficulty scaling.
- As with regional characters, Hardcore characters won't be able to exchange items with non-Hardcore characters in any way.
- You will have the option to tap out and convert your Hardcore character to a normal one.
- We are discussing full open world PvP, but haven't come to a decision on that yet.
- There will be rewards exclusive to Hardcore characters that are not available for normal or Seasonal characters.
Seasonal Channel
If you are familiar with Diablo or PoE, those games have focused seasons with ladder resets every few months. If you really enjoy a certain level cap, the Seasonal channel will be your way to experience that. Every month or two there will be a new level cap until max level, and once max level has been around a month or two, the seasonal channel will be wiped completely of items and titles. All Seasonal characters will return to level 1 much in the same way they would via the Rebirth/Advanced Adventure mechanic. Here are some of the Seasonal ideas we're working on:
- Leaderboards for highest Power Level the fastest, dungeon clears, and perfect gear.
- Exclusive rewards for Seasonal characters that are not available for normal or Hardcore characters.
- Themed seasons with challenges tailored to that season, such as global mob buffs or increased difficulty in certain areas.
- You will be able to convert Seasonal characters into normal ones.
- Feedback is appreciated for this as we are still hammering out the designs for the Seasonal channel and content.
New Website
While this isn't the juiciest of news, it can't be put off any longer. Our server has made great progress in making the game easier to install and making the launcher smarter, faster, and easier to use, but the antiquated website is a pain point for us and gives new players a bad impression of the level of quality we're prepared to provide. We have to make a new website, forum, and a wiki. We need better discord integration with the game. However, we'll squeeze in as many new features and QoL improvements for players as we can. Here are a few of the ones we'll try to implement in this roadmap:
- Website, forum, wiki, and discord integration with the game to reward engagement outside the game.
- No more dual credential confusion with the forum and website.
- New API endpoints for things like Auction House lookups, item sale history for price checking, GP/Wagu item availability, character equipment lookups, and Ranked Battle/Budokai history.
Full English Localization
While DBOG is further translated than other projects, we've put off a full English localization for far too long now. Much like the push we've made to finish 2.0 over the last few months, we will be turning our focus to a fully translated game this year. It's just not something we can afford to have in the game anymore. New players will no longer join and see broken English translations leftover from teams past. DBOG is better than that, and we're going to finish localizing the game into English to reflect that. Once we are finished with the English translations, we'll move on to localizing for other languages, and bring on translation teams to help. We are discussing opening this to the public as well, much like the PTR, but there would be quality control considerations.
Amnesty
Over the years, we have banned or otherwise driven out via moderation many of the older players who were using DBOG as a soapbox or outlet for their frustration. Over those years we've also created new tools that give us options to moderate or punish players without outright banning them, like the PvP and trade bans. While the game is a better place without those people harassing and driving away the players, we are not blind to what it feels like to lose your main account in a game that you've played for many years, and we're aware that many of those players were permanently banned before we created the new moderation tools. For these reasons, shortly post launch we'll be offering amnesty and forgiveness to those players in exchange for very long or permanent mutes/trade bans, depending on the nature and severity of their previous behavior. We feel this is a good middle ground for giving these players back their accounts, while removing their ability to disrupt other players via chat. Keep in mind this is only for drama related bans. Anyone who abused bugs or botted will not be offered this redemption.
Assorted Post-Launch Goodies/Misc Changes
Here are a few miscellaneous things we're planning on sprinkling in throughout the roadmap, along with as many QoL changes as we have time for.
- Inventory rework
- Crafting rework
- Box rework
- Item pickup filters
- Smaller patches (work has already begun on this)
- Changes to client to prevent thievery by other projects (work has begun on this as well)
- Referral program
- Mod support
- Launcher support for Linux/Steamdeck
- VIP/CBT/OBT removal from the game
- Text wordwrap
Final Words
Normally, we don't call our shots like this and give details about what's coming next, mostly because we don't like to promise things until we know we can do them, and we don't like giving the other servers the chance to rob our designs. With that said, we are confident the only servers with the tools, skills, and time to implement these ideas other than us, are on good or neutral terms with us. We'd like to thank Ivan from Crisis, Grender from OpenDBO, Forest from Galaxy, and Sendoku from UDBO for helping us with 2.0 development in various ways.
Given the comfort level we've built up over almost five years of maintaining and improving the game, we're confident we can pull these things off. We've pared the roadmap down from the original plan, which was about twice the size of this, to what you see here. There will be other changes during this roadmap as well, but many of them are things like staff tools or are too small to lay out here.
This will be a considerable amount of work, and opening new servers with new channels will present new technical, funding, and time constraint issues as well. Hopefully this makes our decaying of Daneos era GP and relaxing of GP shop design constraints in the past few months make sense. We are not silver age Batman villains running away with sacks of cash. We made those changes after long, careful consideration, because we need your help to implement these things. We are not going to charge for channels the way other servers do. We will continue to keep our focus on making the game fun, for free. This is the first of at least four roadmaps, and we will be taking advantage of every bit of knowledge and experience we've gained running the largest DBO server for all these years to fill out those roadmaps with more things like this that you've never seen in DBO. The future of DBOG is bright, and we will get there, together. As always, have fun playing and we'll see you in game!
