When I set out to re-launch Alangara a little more than a year ago I quickly realised that having revamped and added lots of areas to the existing world would, more than likely, not be enough to "revitalize" the Inner Realms.
Through feedback, allmost harsh at times, from various players I set out to make the intire module much more storyline and quest oriented. To make it much more single player friendly to address the issues of a substantially smaller player base to this old lady of a game. Playtesting this myself as well I came to realise that more than likely the "best possible future" for Alangara would be to try to create a Persistent World, that would be able to actually compete with downloadable modules in both creational quality and playability for single players. In short to redesign the balance to such an extend that from being a hardcore group-adventure world it would now cater for both hardcore parties and the casual an/or enthiuastic single players.
Having now created a massive amount of extra quests, options, lore, bounties and specialty designs for exploring character types I felt the time had come to start developing a more thorough "red thread" storyline from level 1 to epic+ and as such I started to slowly redesign the Royal Areas to prepare for making the nobility of Castle Balder "come to live" and function as a guideline and develloping story thread.
Yesterday however I had a small chat with Warchief about what was good and what was lacking and unfortunately I realised that the critisism put forth by other players after the re-launch , most noteable/loudly by MagicalMaster, was still an issue. That for all that has been created and all the content there indeed is waiting at epic levels ( and Reborns ) , players still experience a sudden "halt in the entertainment and storylines". On the plus side though back then MagicalMaster claimed ( rightfully I concure ) that this happened at level 15 to 20'ish. I honestly believe that we have now reached level of quests and "things to do" that will keep players fully entertained to around level 25 and content for "grinders" to actually single play themselves to above level 30.
As a consequence of this, and due to the simple fact that I single mindedly wants to make this world nothing short of awesome - regardless of player base or not - I have decided to stop all randomly building, fixing and requests. The Inner Realms are more than capable of catering to level 25 for single play and all currently content is working quite satisfactory. Small tweaks will thus have to wait now.
As the title of this thread indicates the development of this module will now be concentrated 100% on level 25+ content being more areas, storylines, NPC quests and to add up additional bounties. Unlike what I have done so far though I will not be releasing content on allmost daily basis. This will be a massive packet update, taken the time and dedication to create a fully functional "Epic package" much like expansions in professional games. This particular expansion will be directed at level 25 to 30.
So... If and when you dont see me much online over the next weeks or more this is not me being absent. It is me deciding that it is time to "go all inn" on the transformation from hardcore Group-World, in ages past, to fully operational single player world as well - Mind you world bosses and tons of waiting EPIC GRUOP challenges still exists !
/Tara