Which upcoming feature you most excited for?

Movement tracking system overhaul so things won't be just sliding all over the place as much.

 

It's hard to be excited for anything when you've already seen four years of progress and know how AE releases things. Putting high hopes on new features just set a bad precedent, because it puts you in a place of expectations and you already know that a small indie company cannot fulfill your vision of a feature (maybe you expect a specific thing for a trade system, but AE omitted it in favor of other ideas).

At this point, I just glance at whatever they release and decide to either play it or just do daily quests and focus on other things after that. Even if a highly requested feature like a trade system or a guild system comes out, I wouldn't be too excited just because years have already flown by and many older players have moved on, so it just wouldn't be as fun anymore without some of the social aspect of the past.

 

It's more than just about hiring programmers. They're understaffed in various departments, especially with many of their employees now working for other games or projects outside of AE. When you see the company as it actually is, many of their games don't really receive regular updates anymore (AQ, DF, MQ, ED, OS, HS). They only have one modeler for AQ3D (Xero) who's already busy working on other side projects (e.g. Akumi Wars). They rely heavily on community artists for AQWorlds while their hired artist is working on AQ3D. Their storyboarding is being rushed and they're really just facing problems with management. And to compensate for that lost (especially with the close end of Adobe Flash, which was their entire source for their old games), they've invested heavily in mobile projects (Bladehaven 3D, Battle Gems, BioBeasts, Undead Assault, etc.). And aside from all of that, there's even more competition in the gaming market than there was in 2001, and AE relies too much on preserving their legacy.

 

I wouldn't say there weren't players interested in those games. Some of their games still have a cult following (like OverSoul), while other games made players lose interest because the project was abandoned or because it was poorly managed. For instance, HeroSmash is still in Beta, but that game didn't have proper management (the keys on the table were left to Randor and some volunteer developers). Also a finished storyline doesn't necessarily mean that it's the end of development; AQWorlds finished its chaos saga years ago and it still gets frequent updates (despite that Adobe Flash has been discontinued and it's extremely rare to see job posts for Flash animators and ActionScript 3 programmers nowadays).

I would say that AQ3D's development, while probably not as successful as AE's early 2000s web games or even AQWorlds, got a decent support due to the late 2015 Kickstarter, and a few events, and that's about it. It's hard to expect anything else until we see the game leave Beta testing and actually grow. Most of its support right now are from cult fanbases that play other AE games, and there really hasn't been any advertising for the game, so the game's pretty much in limbo.

 

Well let's just hope we get trade, pvp and guilds. If we get that a few more classes (specifically healers) and some content that requires and rewards traditional mmo gameplay I think we will be in a better place. Maybe even a full release at that point.

 

I wouldn't have too much expectations at this point. It's been 5 years and there were certain points that I think would have been pivotal for those features or even a switch to a Live release. I think the likely outcome would be guilds, but I don't think it'll be anything special, just a way for people to brag about belonging to some popular group.

 

Oh I'm sure when they add in guilds they will add guild quests. Some sort of absurdly difficult and extremely time consuming stuff to keep people preoccupied until the next minor release of new content.

 

I am most looking forward to a trade system. But my question is, "How will the trade system work?" I haven't seen any talk on the details of a new trade system on here so I will ask that question. Sorry I can't start a new thread on it.
There are a lot of things in my inventory that I am keeping in hopes that a new trade system will be put into place and I can get those items to others who would deem them more valueable than I do.