As you may have noticed, the title has absolutely NOTHING to do with the content of this post. Now moving on to the actual content.

Hawkfriend and I had a very serious meeting over pizza and iced tea in which (the meeting, not the iced tea) we came to some decisions for AO. As you may have realized at some point, it is very taxing on both computers and bandwidth alike to have a completely open world such as in Runescape or World of Warcraft (Down with Blizzard Entertainment!) which prevent many people from playing.

We are now planning on having AO broken up into separate maps. For example, city A has its own map, city B has its own map, and the countryside in between that connects the cities has its own map. This would allow for more dynamic and destructible environments, as when you entered a map, by yourself or with your party, it would be instanced and not saved after you left. Resources and enemies could be randomly put on the maps when you entered. Dungeons would be more similar to the normal areas. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Also, we are planning on having a 3-tier make-your-own-class system. We only have a few rough ideas at this point, but here's a rough description: 1st tier is for the 'knowledge,' and would determine the skills you would have and the weapon/item specialties you would have. 2nd tier is for the statistics of the class, and would determine stuff such as how much defense, speed, etc. your class had. 3rd tier is for the attributes like elemental associations, etc.

There will be a specific backstory (all we are telling you right now is that all the the current races are descended from Earthling humans) and magic will be highly toned down, instead using a bunch of pseudoscience and steampunk elements. (Don't worry, we still have a LOT of magic!) The Seikilos and Archfiends are the same kind of creature, but the Fiends themselves are not. All races have a lot more in common than they think, and we are making the Outsiders much less, well, completely evil.

The storyline will give good rewards but will not be the #1 source of loot, will give better rewards the more people do it in a party, and will have scalable difficulty. We want the storyline to be a major attraction but not THE main attraction.

We want to have a lot more random battles (not the lets-see-if-we-can-get-across-the-yard-without-encountering-a-random-battle-cloud sort of random battle but the lets-get-the-guys-together-and-go-see-how-many-rounds-we-can-survive kind of random battle) that will be exciting and intense every time, so that any grinding won't actually seem like it.

We want to have a guild and friend system that rewards people frequently battling together by awarding "brotherhood points," with guilds getting more benefits the higher the average brotherhood level between its members.

This isn't everything, but let us know what you think!