Drakensang Online Developer Diary #4

Bigpoint Berlin’s Bernd Beyreuther takes us into a fourth developer diary for Drakensang Online, this time discussing the progress they’ve made during the closed beta and how it has helped them determine which features need to go live sooner rather than later.

Releasing quickly was very important to us. It doesn’t make much sense for us to tinker in our workshop when we could be developing the game with real players in a real environment. We decided to postpone a large number of the features we came up with during the development process to ensure a swifter release even if it meant starting with less features.

The mini map had seemed less important to us and was put on the list of backlogged features. The closed beta helped us to see that the mini map is the most important feature demanded by our features. One Facebook response stated: (loved this game but I won’t play again till the mini map is implemented.) We’re working as fast as we can to implement the new system.

Further features currently being worked on include the new shop and the complete retooling of the essence and magic systems. Both systems were far too complicated and full of bugs and we’re working hard to correct them.