For this week's Friday Feature, I had the chance to speak with Jaskell about some of his work on Game Update 16. Many of you wanted to know more about what we were going to do with Nym since our first announcement of this update. Well, Nym is back and better than ever! Here are some behind the scenes looks into the "face lift" of Nym and his Theme Park that Jaskell was able to share with us this week.
Nym's Theme Park will receive a long deserved revamp to make the content more challenging. This theme park will also pick up where the content path last left off, in an effort to deliver a more complete experience for new players. Quests will be added to the player's journal and you will get a chance to earn new rewards. We're also planning to include additional side quest, collections, solo and/or group content. New and veteran players alike will enjoy the new theme park and get a chance to play one of our most exciting quest series.
Originally the plan was to scrap all of the old Nym theme park content and start over. After running through the old content again, we had forgotten how much energy had gone into the writing of this 6 year old quest. As a result, we decided to repurpose the old content and add to it where necessary. This turned out to be a challenge in itself due to the way quests were created when the game launched. All the old content had to be manually transitioned to the existing quest system.
The dungeons involved in the old Nym content were also repurposed, repopulated and designed to be a little more interesting through collection content. The dungeon upgrades aren't just for looks. There are four NPCs in Nym's Stronghold that will give out extra side quests and you can complete this content at the same time, or after the main theme park quest lines have been completed. Dome side content includes named elites to challenge the individual and boss fights for small or large groups.
Nym's old quest of sending the player to retrieve items from the Imperial Lab felt anticlimactic so the old content was shuffled around a bit and Nym now has his own challenging quest line. To tackle the new Nym quests I had assistance from design apprentices who had to quickly learn how to create quests, conversations and collections using our design tools. Their work was completed fast enough to fit a little bit more content into Nym's quest line than previously planned. Kudos to them!
As previously mentioned in the Producer's Note, we currently have plans to deliver approximately 25 new collections and 9 badges to the new Nym's Theme Park. Since the collections are through the theme park content, players will need to participate in the theme park quests to unlock most of them.
While the theme park was designed to be an addition to the content path, we all hope new as well as veteran players enjoy the all of the work put into this latest edition of Nym's Theme Park.
Sneak peek!
Collections
Note: None of the following collections can be completed unless the player first participates in the content by speaking to a NPC.
