Celtic Heroes

Samhain!

It’s that time of year when the nights draw in earlier, the shadows grow longer and evil forces stir across Dal Riata to bring chaos and misery to the land. After Donn’s sorcerers failed to stop summer bursting across Dal Riata in all its glory, he’s called upon Urchaid to teach the humans a lesson by infecting and enslaving them to do her bidding.
As always our designers, developers and artists have been very busy creating some fiendish new challenges for you along with some pretty amazing items as rewards. Apart from the fantastic spidersilk fashion outfit, we’ve been working on a new mount; the Nightflyer.
This new mount represents the first tentative steps towards our fully-fledged Mounts system that is undergoing design at the moment. Most MMOs use mounts simply as a slightly quicker mode of transport for players. With the Celtic Heroes mounts we want to offer you an alternative strategy for playing the game solo and in raid groups. At the moment we’re working on ways that existing skills can be incorporated or enhanced when mounted either on a horse or a ______ or a ______ (Exec’s note; we can't tell you all our secrets just yet! ) One of our recent recruits; Chihiro, has been hard at work on this for the past few weeks and has come up with some interesting solutions. One of the biggest problems has been how mounts will complement the existing roles in the game without completely replacing them or rendering them obsolete. Of course this approach also has to be scaled across all classes and level ranges. After all, it wouldn’t be very fair of only high level players could use mounts.

Implementing the mounts also presents its own set of technical challenges on how we place a character on what is essentially going to be another character that has its own inventory and armour loadout, and synchronise them for the player…and all the other players in the same group or just even in the same vicinity. Then of course there’s the UI considerations; the mounts will need their very own management screens as well as a place from which you can select which of your mounts you wish to ride into battle…did we mention that you can have multiple mounts? And let’s not forget you’ll want to personalise not only your mount but also the equipment and armour that it has….
We’ve also designed some interesting new mechanics for the Halloween event that also mark developments in quest design that should give us a lot more flexibility in the future. We ought to be able to provide some new unique quest types in the future to challenge you

A lot of these advances are possible thanks to the Destiny engine and the freedom it gives us to create new extensions to the code base and we fully intend to take advantage of these over the coming months. The iOS Unity beta test has been quiet over the past few weeks but we have a new build up on our servers that the testers have descended on en-masse and we should be in the closing stages of development now. Once again we’d like to thank you for your patience and soon we hope to see you all in the shiny, new Destiny-based world of Celtic Heroes.

P.S. We’ll get you some sneaky peeks of the progress of Gelebron’s Tower and some of its inhabitants very soon! We’re laying down the floor plans at the moment and putting some work in looking at the balance of progression across the various levels and it’s really taking shape.