A few days ago we launched the latest season of Imperia Borealis and in this post i want to talk a bit about how it went for us.

Before the launch

Our overall run book for launching a new season was first created back in S1, but we've since taken lessons from that launch and improved upon it.

The rough plan for D-day currently looks like this:

• Content patch
• Season 1 wind‑down
• Season 1 → base‑game feature promotion
• Season 2 spin‑up

Each of these steps then have detailed steps of their own. Things like configuring the new season feature map (what new features should be season exclusive and not present on standard), performing backups and clean ups on both standard and seasonal DBs, setting registration gates (i'll talk more about this one later), reseting battle-pass, sending out emails to existing accounts and much more.

Launching a major update involves a lot of moving parts and is usually also time critical. Having a run book with pre-defined steps to lean on helps a lot. Especially when things go wrong.

The run book also contains most of the important scripts needed already tested and prepared on the PTR, ready to be used or re-used if needed.

A few days before D-day we run the entire run book on our PTR-server that is a close replica of what we have running on the production server.

What didn't work?

The deployment, update and overall rollout worked well, but one major issue that we had that really hurt. Before we start the season rollout, we close down login / registrations for everyone except for a whitelisted few (ourselves and a few trusted testers). The whitelist works in a way that for anyone on the list, visiting the site or playing the game feels just like normal.

Because of this it took us quite a long time before we realized that the login / registration gate was still up and thus any new players wanting to try out the game was met with a closed shop sign.

We have since changed how this system work to clearly indicate that the public gate is still in effect. It has also been promoted to a major milestone from a minor one in the run book. This should obviously always have been a major milestone but was not.

The second error, and one that compounded the first issue was that our discord link on our promotional page was stale and users couldn't join the discord to get information about the registration issue.

Both are fixed and updated in the run book now.

What's next?

This week we are currently working on further graphical improvements and on mobile performance on the world map.

One major graphical improvement that we are working on is an update to creeks and "bäckar". You can see an early version of it in the short animation up above.

The keened eye will also notice that the terrain renderer for estates have been updated with new detailed terrain and terrain blending.

Keep your eyes sharp for the next update later this week.

We also intend to release guidelines for how we will work with updates in the future. The short of it is that we want to avoid game balance patches mid-season as much as possible but will release UI/UX and graphical updates as soon as possible.

The end

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Imperia Borealis