Hi all!
First of all, thank you very very much for all the feedback you are giving us. You have no idea how helpful it is. We've been staring at DOS for years so we've grown blind to several problems, but just seeing & reading your reports helps us tremendously when it comes to prioritizing our efforts in the balancing/bugfixing/polishing phase.
We'll be taking a break over X-mas so there won't be any alpha updates then, but expect quite a few beginning of next year. Cooperative play & companions will be introduced in a big update mid-january I think (maybe a week later), but I expect that before that you'll probably be seeing a lot of balancing tryouts and bugfixes.
Most notably, expect some changes to talents, abilities & traits - the ones included are not the final list, and we are aware that our systems still have many problems. But you're helping us solve them
You'll also see a lot of work happening in the feedback department so that you can actually understand what's going on under the hood, and obviously you'll see things like tutorial messages/hints appearing.
We're not sure yet how much of the world we'll open up during the alpha or beta, but even if it won't be everything, I think it'll be more than there is now. Notice that I said - I think - it's not an announcement that "we will"
![smile smile](/images/graemlins/default_dark/smile.gif)
Eventually the editor will also be made available, still during alpha/beta access, but we first want to be sure we have everything covered for the main game.
Those of you looking for the NPC schedules will have to wait a bit - I know that may be disappointing but the game is already quite complex as is so we want to have everything working 100% before we introduce that extra layer of complexity. Schedules can make it very hard for us to read what's going on under the hood because of all the reactivity in the game.
Finally, music & sound will obviously make it into the game too, progressively, as will the final art-assets & animations for everything that is still placeholder. We were hoping to get you some music already before X-mas but that may be hard - we had to remove it at the very last minute because of a technical problem that first needs to be solved.
I hope that despite all these things missing you still are having a lot of fun fooling around with the build and please keep on sending us feedback!
Cheers
Swen