That’s an interesting question. I’d guess the following: Everything we do in the story belongs to “our” timeline. In our timeline we cannot prevent the emperor to do what he does. Because everything that happened (that we did) in the Ruined Era already happened and caused the things we do in the earlier eras. If we would kill the emperor before some key event than from this point on the Ruined era would not have existed and we would not have taken the shard pieces and so on.
So everything we do is determined. The things we do to “prevent” bad things to happen trigger events that lead to the exact events we play through in the story future.
At the end of time we have access to parallel worlds. In these worlds we did not exist before and we are.
Then there is another theory where when you change something in the past, timelines fork and you now exist in a different timeline than before. In this case you could prevent key event to happen without erasing your own existence. But you would not save the original “home” timeline. This one is existing parallel now and will exactly go the determined way of doom you try to prevent.
I think for storytelling the first approach is more exciting. Because it leads to the point where you realise that everything you do to prevent something# already happened and cause the exact situation you try to prevent.
We have cause the emperor to rise and do what he does. And the moment we kill the emperor will trigger events that lead to the existance of the Ruined era.
The german TV Series “Dark” covers this topic very nicely. It’s the most impressive TV series up to date for me. I just want to recommend it to everybody that likes the time travel theme, as soon as it comes to your vod provider in your language (or whatch it with subs).
It’s interesting to see that when we deal with time travel, we always end with the same theories and possibilities. It looks like these two you proposed are really the more logical possible.
I think I’ve heard of Dark, but never seen it. I almost never watch TV, but the best time travel show I’ve watched so far is Doctor Who, which seems to be in a very different tone.
Implement the ability to buy things using a controller, this is a necessary feature which right now due to not existing, makes playing the game 100% with a controller, impossible.
This feedback would be better served in the controller support feedback thread, but that functionality is planned to eventually come to controller – as mentioned by the game director in that thread.
A bit overdue, but during the May 7th dev Q&A we were teased some concept art for the Bone Golem. There’s certainly no shortage of options to choose from.
Another developer Q&A has come and gone today (May 14th), and we received a couple more teasers for 0.8.2. These include a final (or near final) look at the new Inventory panel, additional Loot Filter improvements which will allow players more advanced affix filtering options, and further confirmation of the Primalist updates coming in 0.8.3. You can find these images and/or videos in the OP.
We also got a teaser of the completed lightning & void Smite VFX refresh:
As Shtrak said, it’s going to be stressing your cpu more than your gfx card due to the cpu running all the AI, procs, etc. I’ve also head people say that it’s better on AMD hardware than Nvidia though I’ve got a 2070 super & don’t have any issues with everything on ultra. The only time it dips down from ~70 fps is when there are lots of mobs on-screen & I hit everything with lots of procs which I would expect to drop the fps due to the cpu load.
We got this blurb at the end of the Patch Preview:
This may or may not just be referencing the loot label optimization that we know of or there could be further optimizations coming in this patch that we don’t yet know about.
The big optimization will likely be the spell effects auto-pooling system (mentioned in the “Possible Inclusions” section of the OP), but we’re unsure if it’ll be included in this patch or if it’ll be coming in a future patch.
Mike talks about this optimization in the February 26th Q&A, the March 19th Q&A, the March 26th Q&A, and it’s actually brought up a lot during the April 28th Q&A/VFX stream. The February 26th Q&A probably has the most detailed response about it (see the “When are you doing some big performance pass?” question).
Another look at the new Forge & Inventory panels as well as some of the new Action Bar. You’ll also spot 5 of the new Storm Crows, a few new items, and comma’s – oh, the beautiful comma’s:
Just to add some context to that world map image in the OP – this is what Mike said during the Q&A stream when displaying it on screen to everyone:
If there was a new chapter coming in this patch I feel it would have been included in the Patch Preview for 0.8.2, similar to previous patch previews that had chapter content – like the Patch Preview for 0.7.8.
