Badia de Cara enters its final pass before Pantheon's public testing
Visionary Realms says the tropical zone Badia de Cara is on its final polish pass before public testing, though no date was given. Still pending: the ferry, pilotable boats, and a server overhaul that will take months.
Visionary Realms says Badia de Cara is on its final polish pass before it opens for public testing. The tropical zone has led the studio's weekly reports for months, and only a week ago the team was still deep in optimization work. No date was given for when testing begins.
What's left is fine-grained work. Design is implementing the spatial dialogue players will overhear around Port of Rulun and fixing NPC pathfinding inside the Sea Dragon Hatchery. The environment team is finalizing collision and navigation in that same port, according to the August 7 report.
Sea travel is also being prepped: an automated ferry running between Port of Rulun and Detihauna, plus the small player boats that can be spawned and piloted. Neither is working yet; this week's work was the groundwork to hook them up.
In parallel, the studio fixed bugs that had Wizards dealing far more critical damage than intended, and reworked most uncommon items to match its updated itemization and combat tuning. The August 5 PTR patch fills in the details: Smoldering Wounds now triggers properly on fire crits, and the Enchanter Mastery keeps filling out, with Charm II castable above level 28.
Underneath all of it, Programming has started a revision of the core server processes for scalability and performance that, in the studio's own words, "will likely take several months to complete." The Market system's data connections are up and running through internal testing.