Making of zao 4

The main questline The New Frontier included something new concerning the character's progress: the base camp develops further as your character advances in the main questline so you really see the fruits of your success and your actions actually do change something. In a multiplayer game it is somewhat difficult to change the world since it would affect all players but in such a limited area with the given space and time frame it was a new interesting approach. Some ideas, however, had to be dropped in the planning phase. Originally, the content team wanted to open the area and story behind the Great Gate as well for this update. However, they can only create a certain number of quests and story bits. Had they extended the area even further, it would have been impossible to back it up with a tight story and good quests. Thus, they saved it for later together with some monster races that actually should have made their appearance according to the original concept. Lionet reveals that one of his ideas was to give players the impression of Zalamon recruiting individuals for his resistance: "I wanted to add various NPCs to his underground hideout in the steppe. The player would have been able to talk to them and they would have said a few lines. However, to make this plausible I would have had to create quite a few separate and unique versions of his hideout. However, due to the large amount of content we implemented in this update, there was simply no time to include it."

Certain things are also rather tricky to make and really pose a challenge. Chayenne explains that the Zzaion raid, for example, was quite complicated since she needed to find a way to open those gates during a raid, make sure that they stay open until next server save and then close again without locking characters in: "I eventually did it with ten hidden switches under Zzaion that are triggered by, uhm, rats that also spawn during the raid. Some of them appear just one time for a few seconds and do things like opening the gate or setting the walls on fire, others stay until the raid has ended and trigger a few special effects like fire raining from the sky. I'm still a bit disappointed though that the effects don't look half as spectacular as I hoped them to be and are over within a second each time."

The riddle in the mountain temple was another tricky thing to do since it had to be easy enough to quickly understand it and at the same time just as complex to provide the right amount of challenge. "The concept I had was modelled with a rather complicated set of rules and scripts and at first turned out quite nicely," Lionet points out. "After some testing offside the regular solution, however, several colleagues made it by just randomly switching levers for some time - and that is what many players probably do to complete the quest, oh well."