The Angel Island Journal 1
Posted October 10, 2004 - 4:19 PM PDT by Adam Ant
The Angel Island team has been busy, busy, busy! These last couple months have seen many enhancements and general improvements.
Some of the more recent changes were to give the Evil Mages and Evil Mage Lords Extreme Makeovers! Basically, we tossed those Todd McFarlane graphics and use the original human graphics from UO and dressed them up like wizards. I really have to wonder about the graphics that were added to UO over the years… It may just be me; (no it's not,) but the original UO graphics exceeded all the follow-on patches in T2A/LBR/etc. Now not all of the newer graphics were bad, like Meers were pretty cool, but some were just kind of crummy.
Like, why did Origin add that funny chiseled looking orc bomber when all the other orcs look different/better? And what's the deal on the orc brute? He's like 3 stories tall! Lol, that one kills me! I have forbid the World folks to spawn that monstrosity anywhere on Angel Island.
Want to see good graphics? Look at the original UO Dragon… then look at the new Wyvern, and Serpentine Dragons … heh, junk :\
Oh, they look ok in a still shot, but look how they move, look how they fight, and look at their corpse..
Oh sorry, I was telling you about new stuff :)
Well, we came up with a solution for Pets with regard to statloss, resurrection, and bonding.
First of all, I believe there must be a way to stop tamers from throwing their pets at monsters without any worry or concern for the pet's safety. This is what we here on the Angel Island team call the 'meat shield' mentality.
OSI Actually understood this and implemented a 10% statloss for pets. However this approach was not very popular with the players, so they changed it under pressure from the taming community.
We've taken what I believe to be a novel approach; we've implement a resurrection timer for your pet. Basically, and from an RP standpoint; your pet's spirit need time to recover from the trauma of death before it can be rejoined with the living body, or else the pet will suffer statloss. This coupled with the ability to stable pet ghosts has made a really workable solution for tamers and their pets.
We've also recently introduced one of my own pet projects, the basilisk. The basilisk combines abilities from the AOS shadow wisp familiars, (even there we are not an AOS shard), and poisoning on a green magical mini dragon.
The basilisk uses new pet AI, as well as the ability to GM all 8 of his skills.
So while the basilisk can be used a bit more tactically than say a dragon, the strength is lower than the dragon and the slots are that of a dragon. This was all done to keep the basilisk balanced against the other high-end tames.
If you know anything about Angel Island, you've probably heard about our Guards. Our guards are mortal and do not insta-kill. They will chase you for long distances and attempt to reveal you should you hide.. Angel Island Guards are probably one of the greater sources of entertainment on the shard.
Player justice is alive and well on Angel Island.
Because our guards do not insta-kill, the wily can exact player just on the WBB macroers.
Lets see.. Our Angel Island Prison is working like a charm.
If you've not heard about it, it's basically where you go if you do not wish to take statloss as a murderer. Murder count decay is accelerated there, but most players do not wait out their sentences, instead try to escape. Oh sure, you can earn gold there and pay off the parole officer to get out early, but the most fun is in escaping. (And if you do escape, you get a bonus reduction to your counts.)
The Angel Island Prison is a fairly sophisticated system that is carefully designed so as to allow only the best to escape. (Escape difficulty is actually scaled based on the number of escapees and their relative abilities—skills.)
Another of the Angel Island hallmarks are the Items Of Brethren or IOB.
These items are patterned after the "orcish mask of kin" on Origin shards, but span a much wider class of races and have a much richer purpose.
Our IOBs currently cover the undead, savages, orcs, pirates, and brigands.
We have setup strongholds for these races and allow the players to become one with their brethren.
For now, the kinship allows free movement within an otherwise hostile society, but very shortly (days), the various strongholds will be able to boast valuable assets; assets worth protecting.
There will be much more building on these NPC alliances in the coming months.
(Factions with a purpose perhaps?)
Our balanced economy is, well… balanced. We've have not taken our eye off the ball as far as our promise of a balanced economy. Over the last couple months we've introduce several nice gold sinks which have become quite popular. A few examples would be our 40 or so rugs, house placement tool, name change deeds, house teleporter deeds, etc..
The gold flows in, the gold flows out; all working quite nicely.
This is just the first installment of Angel Island news, I will try to post something weekly so you will all know what been happening on Angel Island.
Comments?