Latest Neocron News and Information

Dirk "John Doe" Wilhelmy has posted up some very welcomed news about the Balancing project. Here is a copy of what was posted on the official forums, so why not go and give your feedback on the progress?

Project Progress

The balancing’s concept and rulesets have been worked out besides a few finer points. Over the past weeks, we have created a first general test version, which allows us to run comprehensive tests. This internal test phase begins today. The main focus of these tests is weapon handling, resistances and NPC balancing. The goal is to get a general impression of all changes – the GameMaster team will be helping with this.

There are a few topics still up for discussion. During this first test phase, the discussions will continue – we want you to keep evaluating our concepts:
- Melee Combat
- Drone Combat
- Vehicle Combat
- Hacknet Combat and Hacknet NPCs
- APU Combat and PPU Support
- Effect of combat skills on weapon behavior

As you can see, we didn’t forget any section of Neocron. In case some of our Monk players feel a little left out: The discussion about the Monk’s orientation and the changes that have already been implemented will only make sense once they are in context – as the implementation of the PPU does not meet our expectations yet, the APUs will unfortunately also have to wait.

Begin of the public test server phase

We have set the launch of the public test server to mid-October. Until then, all components of the rebalancing should have been integrated and tested internally. At that point, we will also start new discussion topics to receive your feedback on the changes in an organized manner.

We will use the PvP-Server Neptun as test server. First we will create backups of all of Neptun’s data sets, to be able to restore it to its current state once the tests are over. We hope for the Neptun players’ understanding.

We are also planning a character transfer for the test server phase. It will allow you to copy your existing Runners to Neptune. Furthermore, we have planned comfortable solutions to allow you to easily reset your skill points and to give you access to items (weapons, armor, implants, etc.).

Current state of the discussions

Especially the combat discussions aren’t exactly exciting reading material – but that’s not their purpose. They contain the most important (and, in our opinion, the most representative) properties of the respective weapon family. They should allow you to figure out if there’s any missing weapons or weapon variations. Unfortunately, another form of discussion is not really possible over the forums. We also do not want to make this process even more complicated by presenting all weapon families at once. This would result in a pretty big mess, where everyone refers to something else – there would hardly be any useful information to be gained!

The choice and time of each topic depends on our workflow. After all, creating, translating, processing and moderating these discussions cuts into development time, which we part with – when it is possible.

In the end, we are very happy with the results we get from the discussions. Many details have found their way into the balancing thanks to your influence. Some of the additional weapon choices that have been requested were implemented before they were mentioned in the forums. This leads us to believe that we are on the right path, and that Neocron will be a "much more loving, beautiful and balanced" place in the future.