Hello! This is Lead Developer PurpleFooz, and I’d like to talk a little more about our plans to “epi-fy” Three-Barrel Cove! Many details are still being worked on, but we wanted to give you some idea of what to expect when Update 22 arrives.

The Story:
Rumors have surfaced of a giant treasure cache, hidden somewhere in Three Barrel Cove by the pirate lord Ahraatz-Ri before he was slain. For those who might not remember Ahraatz-Ri, he was the ogre-mage boss and leader of the Blood Tide pirates in the Sentinels of Stormreach adventure pack.

The remnants of the Blood Tide pirates believe that if they can find Ahraatz-Ri’s treasure, they can use it to restore themselves to their former power. Rumors of treasure have also attracted other pirate crews, and Epic Three Barrel Cove is now crawling with competing pirate crews looking for treasure, and who are willing to fight for clues!

Cydonie will be the questgiver; it’ll be a new instance of her in Three Barrel Cove. There are some complex Argonessen politics going on – while Cynodie is still the ambassador, she’s out of favor for siding with the lesser races when Argonessen wanted to raze Stormreach. Cydonie has numerous motives, and is choosing to have adventurers do work on her behalf, at least for now.

Monsters:
We’re also completely replacing the old heroic monsters with a new list of epic monsters. There is some overlap between the old list and the new list, because some monsters make ideal pirates at any Challenge Rating. For example, warforged are on both lists. However, they’ll feel more like airship pirates rather than the original Three Barrel Cove warforged, and will be used both in different combat roles and different locations.

A number of new “native” monsters are planned to be added to 3BC’s landscape: harpies and yuan-ti. We discussed a number of possible monster additions with the Player Council. The dev team had a short list of monsters to meet particular gameplay goals, and we narrowed it down to those two through PC votes.

Pirate crews will use slightly different line-ups of monsters from each other. For example, we’re planning on a crew that uses a lot of artillery, using rune-arms and explosives. Another crew might only have a small number of monsters which use rune-arms. A completely different crew might specialize in undead pirates.

Most of the pirate types are individually weak, and are meant to work in conjunction with each other in order to threaten high-level players. They support the airships, which are the real epic monsters.

Airship monsters:
Each of the pirate crews are based on a pirate airship, flying about the 3BC landscape. This is a new thing for us, but we’ve been able to prove out the concepts in our prototypes – each airship will be a single attackable monster, with several attacks, including:

• Magefire cannon broadsides: Different airships will barrage you with different types of magefire cannons, i.e. deal different types of damage.
• Grapping hooks: Airships can shoot grappling hooks down to the ground, allowing their crew to zip down. Airships will typically try to drop their crew near to players they plan to fight. For some types of pirate ships, the monsters will just be the generic crew. Other pirate ships might specialize in this, and drop off much nastier pirate marines.

And because a picture is worth a thousand words, and a video is worth a thousand pictures, here's some early footage from Eberron of airships in Three Barrel Cove:



Players with powerful ranged attacks can directly attack these airship monsters. Melee players will be great against crew and marines, and in particular against the grappling hooks that allow those monsters to continuously spawn. There will also be large Ballista Turrets in the landscape that can be used against airships, giving all characters the chance to hit a ship in the sky. The turrets are expected to be similar to the kobold crossbow turrets in Haunted Halls that you may have already encountered. Clever players can find ways aboard some airships, fight through the crew to the lower decks, and destroy the airship from the inside.

Quests and Adventuring in Three Barrel Cove:
The landscape will have different slayer and rare objectives on epic and heroic. It also won’t have the exact same list of explorer points. All the monsters on the landscape will be replaced on epic. It’s likely that at least some encounters will be on the Random Encounter system. But one of the realities is that 3BC has a ton of tight cliffs & walkways, without enough space for random encounters to spawn. Those areas will get new statically-placed monsters.

Yes, we’re planning on adding free teleport points across the landscape!

The small town and ship dock that’s currently part of the adventure area will be converted into a public area. We want to do this because it makes it easier for us to set up and place the new epic quest arc.

The epified dungeons have their monsters completely replaced, and as well may have some different objectives. Their layouts and main critical paths are probably going to be similar to the old ones, but the nature of the new pirate monsters should make them feel different. We’ve tentatively chosen 4 dungeons to be epified as part of a new 5-part epic arc: Prove Your Worth, Ghost of a Chance, The Legend of Two-Toed Tobias, and Garl’s Tomb. These are partly based on the responses to the “favorite 3BC dungeon” thread, and partly based on our internal evaluation on how much effort it would take to epify each of the 3BC dungeons. We also considered how well the new story and pirate monsters would work in these dungeons.

In each dungeon, you’ll be vying against Blood Tide pirates and other pirate crews to locate clues to the location of the treasure. The clues might be as simple as a piece of a map, or something a bit more complex. Once you’ve completed the 4 dungeons, you’ll be able to find the location of the treasure on the 3BC landscape.

We’re also planning a 5th dungeon – a brand new epic-only dungeon. It’s something of a spiritual replacement for Guard Duty, where you are fending off pirate airships which are attacking the airship carrying the treasure back to Stormreach. Rather than the static nature of the original Guard Duty, we’re planning on something much more dynamic and interesting by building on top of the technologies we developed for the “bed ship” in Acute Delirium.
Thank you for reading!
PurpleFooz

I think it's awful they're building more new systems. They obviously can't manage to not fuck em up, why are they introducing more???????????????????????

Harpies and yuan-ti are bullshit, but like you said, at least they aren't 6k hp rats..

They are all stupid bards...

Unfortunately, new content is better at attracting new players and earning them money from current ones. Ideally, they would be able to fix old systems while coming out with new ones, but they obviously don't have the manpower to do that.

The result seems to be content comes out --> content has bugs --> worst bugs are fixed, less game breaking bugs are ignored nearly indefinitely --> repeat.

Same as the ones in Gianthold, and Eveningstar?

A number of new “native” monsters are planned to be added to 3BC’s landscape: harpies and yuan-ti. We discussed a number of possible monster additions with the Player Council. The dev team had a short list of monsters to meet particular gameplay goals, and we narrowed it down to those two through PC votes.

Most of the pirate types are individually weak, and are meant to work in conjunction with each other in order to threaten high-level players. They support the airships, which are the real epic monsters.

New content doesn't have to mean new systems.

They can make HUGE amounts of new content without adding new programming features.  Just hire a half dozen new dungeon designers and tell the programming developers that they're not allowed to design any new programming features for the game or we'll cut their fucking fingers off.

*WHAT* they designed bothers me more than the fact that they designed a new feature, but the fact that they designed a new feature is also stupid.

The free teleporters is good, though.

we should try to forget about any broader policy changes we'd like to see and attempt to focus on the slightly more realistic "I hope whatever they do isn't too badly broken when they release it".