Dear Illarionites,

Today, after quite some time, we eventually release the next update of game content. It focuses on the tutorial and the area around the Hemp Necktie Inn, baptised “Troll's Haven”. The tutorial was completely rewritten to integrate it into the actual game and make it an inline part of the experience for new players rather than a separate, artificial island that breaks immersion. From this change, we expect that new players learn from the very beginning what Illarion is all about and that they get integrated into the community of Illarionites from their first minute on. We invite you to create a new character to test the new tutorial and share your impression with us!

We also worked on some other topics. A change that will clearly affect gameplay is that from now on, changing your equipment will cause your character to pause fighting for a couple of seconds. The character remains mobile and can do all other actions other than fighting. This change is necessary to hamper immersion breaking equipment swapping to adjust to technical benefits and will also increase the tactical requirements on fights. Furthermore, we fixed several small bugs and improved texts. For a list of the most relevant changes, see here: https://github.com/Illarion-eV/Illarion-Content/milestone/8.

We also had a server update quite recently that we have not announced in detail yet. The server now supports dynamic changes in character walking/running speed. This will become very useful for magic spells. Also, we can now trigger events based on character speech – “Open sesame!”. Further work went into significantly improving the server performance and stability.

Our next steps, along with implementing your feedback on the tutorial, will focus on magic and housing. For these big features, we have now created two new servers in addition to the game server and the development server, replacing the obsolete test server. This way, everyone can test the development progress without having to bother with Git, Docker and the local server. We will continue to involve you in the development process and make it as transparent as possible. If you are interested in contributing to Illarion’s development, be it as tester, scripter or coder, please get in touch with the team on our Discord server, channels #beginners and #contributions.

Have fun!
Estralis