Uhm… How About Less Information in Patch Notes?

Saga of Lucimia is slowly becoming a bigger part of our site! For the second week in a row, the devs of said MMO shared an interesting opinion in their “Mondays in MMORPGs” blog format. After advertising a more prominent role of GMs last week, their Creative Director shared how they plan to deal with patch notes, or more precisely, what will be included in them.

Saga of Lucimia apparently will publish little to no updates in their notes. They might relocate an NPC, or destroy a dungeon entrance, all without informing the community.

[su_quote][No such changes] will be mentioned in the patch notes. It will be up to the players to discover those changes and events just as they would in a real adventure setting: by actually going there, exploring, following the lore and the storylines, and immersing themselves in the world.[/su_quote]

Saga of Lucimia Is Unlike Most MMOs

Now it’s good to remembers that Saga of Lucimia is a hardcore old-school indie MMO that focuses on immersion and role-playing. It doesn’t even feature a mini-map. So what makes sense for such a game probably doesn’t necessarily make sense for other titles. You would think Neverwinter for example simply doesn’t have the type of gamer that would appreciate such an approach. On the contrary, you could foresee a bunch of complaining forum posts coming the devs way. Around here we usually plead for more information, not less.

It’s still intriguing to think about it. Say the devs patch a full balancing pass. Would you rather test and figure out everything yourself? Or changes to quest lines, dungeon mechanics, profession recipes? Or does this really only make sense in a hardcore role-playing environment? What would definitely happen is that players would instantly become less open with handing out information as well. The more something is difficult to figure out, the more it makes sense to keep and use information in an inner circle. Also going to the preview server and looking up changes there would become even more important to gain an advantage on live. That said, a PTS might not actually make sense any longer, because you don’t know what to test anyway.


You can probably think of even more implications, don’t you? What’s your take on the topic? Share your thoughts on our social channels, in the comments below, or visit the corresponding thread on our message board!

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3 thoughts on “Uhm… How About Less Information in Patch Notes?

  • March 21, 2018 at 6:28 pm
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    I think it’s a way to deviate the players’ attention to the game and the game’s world, and less on devs fault of doing this or that that players don’t like. Keep them busy on the game and stop busting devs balls is what comes to my mind.

  • March 22, 2018 at 7:04 am
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    There’s already more than enough in the daily grind. Trying to figure out what changed would only make it worse. In certain situations, it would advantage those who identified the change and punish those who did not. That doesn’t appear to be the model that Neverwinter is after, though I do miss the days of experimenting with synergies among classes to figure out what worked best instead of being spoon-fed whatever the current meta is.

  • March 22, 2018 at 1:12 pm
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    Given how lazy the devs are I dont think anyone should be giving them ideas on how to do less work.

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