Ravendawn Online Fixes ‘99%’ Of Lag Issues And Unveils Feature Roadmap With No Dates
Tibia-inspired free-to-play MMORPG Ravendawn Online is doing pretty well for itself following its official launch earlier this month. Developer Tavernlight Games is trumpeting a significant increase in player numbers and Twitch viewership since launch day, despite the persistent lag issues.
The studio is happy to report that the game has logged more than 1.2 million unique viewers and over 1.5 million hours watched on Twitch in just six days. Player numbers have also grown significantly with the Serafine server’s population nearing its capacity close behind Angerhorn. Nearly all lag issues have also been fixed except for the server lag that occurs every 30 minutes during world saves, a fix for which is currently in the works.
Meanwhile, Tavernlight has shared a vague development roadmap for the 2D pixel MMORPG. It doesn’t show release dates but it does list some of the new features and content that players can look forward to in the next few months. That includes the opening of the Northern Steppes region, additional customization options, legacy skills, guild wars, guild forts and strongholds, herbalism, alchemy, a leaderboard, and a PvP arena. The team is also planning to throw a major content update in sometime between the release of guild strongholds and herbalism.
“We understand many players love having dates on Roadmaps,” says Tavernlight. “However, we have seen that this is frequently used in the MMORPG industry to over promise and miss deadlines with the attempt to drive hype, only to continue to lose the trust of the Community as deadlines are missed.”
“Our team prefers to Under Promise and Over Deliver,” the studio adds. “With this, we do not give specific dates until the new feature, system or content has gone through the full QA process so that we do not promise dates (to try hype) only to possibly miss them. When we provide a date, it is a date we will do everything we can to commit to.”
Tavernlight isn’t the only development studio that’s adopted a “we’ll deliver when ready” attitude and it looks like its quickly becoming a thing in the MMO development community. Personally, I’d prefer that they take their sweet time rather than compromise quality for the sake of meeting a deadline… as long as it doesn’t take years. Unless it’s a new game, don’t announce it until it’s at least a few months or weeks away from release, but that’s just me.
In any case, there’s a lot of things to look forward to in Ravendawn Online this year, the details of which can be found in this dev blog.
