Well, there hasn’t been much PVKII news... until today. We have still been hard at work trying to bring you a game we have enjoyed developing. I know you’re probably expecting a ton of new media but I have none to offer. Over the course of the past month or two the team has been at work on something different. We’ve decided to go in a new direction with the mod and have been working mainly on working out the concepts. For starters, we’ll be introducing a more advanced system of combat. Currently, the system is quite a bit flawed as many have pointed out on the forums among other places. The fact is it’s just too easy to block whore and slows combat down way too much. For starters there will be a new stamina bar in place which will cover blocking, swinging, running and jumping. The larger the weapon and more armor a player has, the quicker the stamina runs out and longer it takes to charge. The Berserker’s dual wield will be affected by this the most. We feel this will stop players from running around endlessly holding down block. In addition to the stamina bar, players will also need to work on their reaction skills. There will be close to 8 different directions a player will be able to swing, depending on their movement direction and the way they swing the mouse. The blocker will also have 8 directions of block to correspond to these attack directions, which will need to be timed appropriately. It may be a tad difficult to pick up at first, but with time we expect all players will be capable of using it easily as second nature. The last addition to the combat system we plan to implement is a parry/weapon lock mode. When players swing at the same time they will go into a weapon lock for 10 seconds. During this time each player will have a new graphic on their GUI which works kind of like DDR. The graphic will display (random) directional arrows and the players will follow them in succession for the 10 seconds. The player with the greater ability to match these directions will win the battle and knock the opponent down for a quick strike. Aside from just the combat system changes, the game itself will be undergoing a large reworking. We decided that the simple FPS style gameplay is causing players to lose interest quickly, as we’ve seen many complaints about this. We realized the appeal an upgrade system like most RPGs have, and decided to implement something similar. There will be two ways to go about this depending on the server you’re on. Non-Official servers will host the original maps where the player will be awarded money for kills and map objectives. Every player will start out with one weapon and can buy other weapons as they earn money, and upgrades to make their weapons/armor stronger. Players will reset back to 0 at the end of each round.
For players on official servers, there will be a range of new maps. These maps will be very large scale and will take place across several servers running different maps to account for the different parts of the world. For example, a map like Island will actually comprise of up to 5 maps on 5 different servers. Players will progress through each map as they get stronger and more capable of taking on the dangers that await them. There will be no experience, on money to buy weapons and upgrades. As a bonus, players will be able to skip all the hard work if they choose to and can buy the upgrades online using real money, but this is only an option, not a necessity.
The last change we decided to implement is to add even more variety and spice to the game. We’ve seen countless requests for a fourth team and have decided that with our new plans for a larger world and upgrade system, we can accommodate a fourth team. We don’t want to decide what the team will be without input from the community, so we’ll be arranging a list of possibilities and will set up a poll in the forums sometime in the next few days. As you all can imagine, development has gotten quite a bit more serious at this point. More time is going to be needed for us to fill in all these plans. Because the game will be so much different from here on out, we won’t be able to update the current one and most likely won’t be releasing an early version of the new game. Chances are it will only cause anger and upset players when another version comes out and we need to reset players’ data. I hope you all look forward to these new plans for the mod as much as we do, we’re all very excited about this. *Happy 10 Years of PVKII!