Hello all,
Here's a brief Monday update:
The bulk of today was spent reviewing the outstanding bug reports from the weekend and getting them addressed by their respective teams (engineering, level design, hero design, enemies/bosses, items team, VFX, art, mission design or sound).
We cleared out most of the backlog for the new "bug fix" build which will go to test center tomorrow afternoon. Assuming that build works fine, we'll put it live Wednesday or Thursday. This should provide improvements for Legendary Quests as well as clean up most noticeable bugs.
After these fixes were complete, the team spent time getting ready for the first chapter in our 4-month Asgard rollout.
The first Asgard patch will start out slow and steady, with an investigation of a mysterious situation in Norway. This will involve a game-wide event that supports SHIELD and the Fantastic Four's investigation of the situation (while stopping HYDRA from trying to do the same thing). The game-wide event should take approproximately 2 weeks to complete and will open up access to a new player hub as well as the supplier of Legendary items.
Testing for the patch has been in progress for several weeks internally and will be opened up to the public at the end of the week in test center, with a full week scheduled.
Throughout the Asgard patch, several new crafting recipes will be added and several new item slots, including a Ring slot (which drop in the open world and can be earned through PVP), a Legendary item slot (which is unlocked by level 40 characters), 2 additional artifact slots (for high level heroes) and other item slots to be added eventually.
The Asgard patch will also include a bunch of improvements for new players to coincide with a lot of marketing centering around the US theatrical release of the movie. Marvel will be sending many players our way, so we need to do our best to be welcoming to the new players that we will inevitably encounter. This will coincide with a new character selection screen and brand new waypoint tech which should make the game more accessible to new players.
The Fire and Ice PVP map (located on the eastern side of Asgard on a island controlled by two warring Giant factions) will also be available for live testing this weekend. We'll keep the mode in live beta for approximately one month before we start leaderboards, but all PVP rewards will be awarded at 100% value. We having been testing and iterating this mode for a few months and it's starting to come together pretty nicely. There is no possible way to fully "balance" PVP, but we're at the point where the most strategic and coordinated team is generally winning.
New items will abound in the 4 chapters of Asgard, with 100+ new uniques, 7 new relics (with an unbinding recipe in November), Legendary Items, StarkTech items, rings, new medallions for the half-dozen new supervillians and new artifacts. These will start to roll out in the first patch and continue with each subsequent Asgard patch. This will include the 10 player-designed uniques as they make their way through the pipeline.
In addition to all this, we have several performance optimizations going live with Asgard and well as continued improvements to CPU usage, which is important for zones with a high-number of players.
We'll keep you updated throughout the week.