Drakensang Online Developer Diary

There's a long-overdue developer diary up on the official Drakensang Online forums this evening, in which producer "toby1kanobi" discusses some of the content they'll be bringing to the browser-powered RPG in the near future. An increased level cap and a new archetype is among them:
Increase of the Level Limits

Yes. We will finally raise the level limit in Spring 2013.

Why so late?

Certain features for Drakensang require the work of a large part of the team for many months. Decisions sometimes have to be made 6-8 months in advance before the feature is visible to players. A new archetype, big country updates or increasing the level limits are such projects.

At the beginning of 2012, when we set the development roadmap, only a small number of players had reached level 40. 99,9% of all players were somewhere between level 1 and 39. That is why we decided to concentrate on making those levels better and more exciting in 2012.

We identified spots that were lacking in usability and improved those bit by bit, we increased the number of items, quests, monsters and locations, optimized the map and travel and added new features to the game to reward your progress above the normal rate and skills (e.g., the championships) . Meanwhile, the number of gamers at level 40 has increased and our last survey showed that you want an increase in level limit more than anything else.

An increase can only be achieved with a new continent, new skills and of course new items.

The Fourth Archetype

In Spring, you may recall that we said there would soon be a fourth archetype. Many of you have asked about it, so here is the answer: Due to other features with a higher priority, we had to keep setting aside the plans for the new archetype. We hadn't foreseen the importance of other tasks, for example the many MultiCharacter accounts, the Daily Quests and the chat function.

The results of the last player survey show that we once again have to postpone the delivery of the fourth archetype so that we can instead work on raising the limit cap, as mentioned above. So unfortunately, the new archetype will have to wait until 2013.

To somewhat appease the masses, we will leak what we are working on: the fourth class (a Dwarf), a fighting machine with totally new weapons, skills and new opportunities. Here are some pics to give you a bit of an idea of the new figure we are so excited about.