Development Roadmap

As we work to enhance the content and player experience on Nocturnal Souls, we’re happy to share our roadmap with members and continue to take feedback and ideas from the community. This is not an exhaustive list (we do like to keep some surprises), but here’s the highlights.

High-Level Roadmap - 2021

  • DONE! Now that 110 crafting is complete, nothing is holding us back from rolling out Escha Ru’Aun. The next challenge for Heroics players will be arriving soon.
  • DONE! We’re finalizing a new “New Player Experience” system allowing players a custom storyline from level 1 to 99 with custom missions, gear, and introductions to the Nocturnal Souls custom systems along the way.
  • We’re wanting to dig deep into Beastmaster and figure out what can be done to make it a worthwhile class for solo and party play at 99.
  • We’re excited to start developing the new World Boss and the new Achievement systems.
    • The world boss system will allow players to fight numerous large-scale open world battles to build up unique sachets.
    • The achievement system will be all for show–allowing players to hunt rare NMs all over the world and rack up points and leaderboard status on the Members Portal.
  • We’re diving into crafting itself, including an ‘epic’ storyline for the crafting shields, a cleanup of all recipes, and a revamp to our custom Synergy system.
  • We’re going to put more work into the Master Job system this year with a goal of at least one quest for every job by the end of the year. The average quest is almost 200 lines of dialogue and 10-50 NPCs and mobs–so it’s going to be a lot of work, but we want to get this done.
  • We’re working on the underpinnings of the server to make it more stable and reduce (and remove) our reliance on outside sources for monthly updates.
  • … and we’re constantly taking feedback and ideas from the community on what’s important!

Random Scope Creep - 2021

Sometimes ideas get away from us and we roll them out outside of our roadmap. Here’s a few things we’ve done so far this year that wasn’t planned, but turned out great!

  • Audit and review of over 294 zones to add in missing mob spawns, mob types, and drops to make the world feel a busier. January/February
  • Worked on several packet structures to address lag caused by rapid equipment equips in large-scale fights. February
  • Redesigned the RecastContainer to address edge cases where our 99/99 jobs could cause server crashes. Reviewed and adjusted many main-job only abilities. March
  • Revamped the Summer Heatwaves event to add more zones, challenges, and unique rewards. June
  • Finished adding all of the missing abilities for playable jobs, including customization of several underused abilities. August
  • Wired up Shemo and Shami for all of your seal and crest storage and conversion needs allowing players easier access to orb BCNMs. August
  • A large-scale update to the Members Portal adding offline storage and inventory management, auction house management, and continued improvements on page load performance. August
  • Fall Harvest underwent a significant revamp this year to add a new augmented reward system, bonus shop, and new synergy system. In addition, this introduced the Fatigue system into HELM activities. October
  • The “New Player Experience” grew into the Adventure Quest storyline which revamped gear progression, daily BCNMs, Reisenjima Henge, the training dummies, Voidwatch loot, added ten new quests, 5 BCNMs, a new armor system, and new ways to acquire custom augmented gear. October

On the Horizon

There’s a lot more we have on the horizon. Some things may get done in the current year, others shifted to the future as time and resources are available.

  • We’re looking at the Unity system as a new version of Voidwatch, allowing in players to fight numerous enemies around the world for gear and tokens that can be used to upgrade those items. We hope this will lay the groundwork for our own custom Odyssey zones later this year.
  • We’re looking at the Shadowera (the WOTG zones) as the staging ground for a new storyline system targeting those interested in storyline and lore.