Hello. I am Allanon, the Director of Vindictus.
Although we've already greeted you for New Year, we're here to say hello again. Happy New Year!
We hope that all players spending their 2024 in Vindictus will have a happy year and stay healthy.
The rest of the development team and I will continue to listen to your feedback to ensure that Vindictus continues to be the game that you love.
When I look back on the last four months, I'm left with a lot of disappointment. I expected to get a lot more done, and there were a lot of things that went slower than I thought they would.
Part of me blames the lack of time, part of me blames the fact that we needed to do a lot of groundwork to change direction.
But in this short time, I've felt and experienced many things, large and small, that have influenced our plans for the future.
We're looking forward to staying busy in 2024 so that we can make Vindictus even more satisfying for players than it already is.
To that end, I'll continue to address pressing issues, improve convenience, and engage with you.
I think the most important and urgent issue is to improve our structure through max level expansion.
Recently, we've seen from several communities that they're concerned about the direction of item growth.
We're looking back at our previous DevTalks to see if our brief explanations caused more confusion than excitement.
To reduce any confusion you may be experiencing, we're preparing a quick update on our progress.
The direction of the restructuring has been agreed upon internally, with only some minor disagreements on the methodology, which are currently being resolved internally.
We'd like to finalize our discussions as soon as possible so that players can continue to play without disruption, and we'll share our development direction for the restructuring in a DevTalk in February.
As for the character balance planned in February or March, we've finalized one more round of damage adjustments.
The variance between the top and bottom characters in Hero+ and the second Space Time Distortion, Eisen Ritter, was much larger than expected. So, we decided that an adjustment was in order.
We apologize for the delay in these much-anticipated utility improvements.
We recognize that character customization is a very important part of the game, not just combat.
Starting with the outfits this February, we'll be gradually incorporating concepts and designs you've suggested in past surveys.
We'll continue to be open to feedback on outfit design through multiple channels.
In addition to outfits, many of you have asked us to release new hairstyles.
With all the focus on characters, monsters, and outfits, new hair has been pushed to the back of our priority list.
We know that hair is a very important part of your character's look, but the structural difficulty of creating hair is one of the reasons it's been pushed to the back burner.
However, I'm one of the many players who also wants new hair, so we're going to make sure that we don't put it off much longer.
We're looking at a number of things to improve convenience, but here's a quick rundown of what's coming in the first half of the year.
We're working on events that will reset character names for dormant users and allow you to trade character names, and we are working on a naming system that will allow you to set a representative name for your account, that you call a House name.
We'll also be improving the Ein Lacher system that we talked about in the last DevTalk, and we're thinking about ways to simplify the leveling process.
Among them, we were looking at several directions to simplify the leveling process, including adding a feature that allows you to completely skip dialog. But, due to the current story structure, that is very difficult to implement so we would have to approach it in a different way.
We're also looking to improve other game aspects, which we're not sure if we'll be able to do this year, but we're going to try to make a system where you can feel more connected to your character.
There's a lot of thought that goes into making this all part of a satisfying gaming experience, but we'll move as quickly as we can once we have a direction.
We're also constantly thinking about ways to diversify our communication channels.
We'll be looking for ways to communicate with you, more than simply bringing you news like this.
We'll make sure we're communicating in the right way, at the right time, so that we don't interrupt your gameplay by popping up too often.
That's all we have prepped for the today.
We sincerely thank you for the consistent love and support you have for Vindictus.
See you again in February!
Thank you!
