We finally released the new male model on April 1st! OK, during this year's prank, I was just as surprised as you... O_O Story time?
This year, the joke was on Artix...
Every year on April 1st, we celebrate "April Fools". We do lighthearted silly pranks (or insane bonkers game-changing madness) across our games. In the past we turned every player into a mod for a day, replaced 100% of our art with stick figures claiming that we needed to "save bandwidth", swapped he genders of every character, turned our world upside down, gave every hero random... um... "gas", or even stage a hacker baby take-over where most of our game contents were drawn over with crayon. This year may have been one of our best... not just because the 3D stick figures were hilarious, but becauseone told Artix (Me) or the rest of the team about it O_O. Seriously.
Every hero in the game was turned into a stick figure.
It was 3am on April the 1st and I had logged on to make our webpage prank of "Nickolas Cage 3D" live when I saw a Tweet of a stick figure in our game, AdventureQuest 3D. Assuming it was photoshopped by the person who posted it I thought it was funny. Then I saw another. And another. And... then I thought, "Wow! These guys are really going all in on this stick figure gag." Then my eyes went O_O as I realized... this might not be photoshop. I logged into the game bracing myself for it to be normal and then having to tell the people on Twitter that they "had gotten me." BUT THE GAME WAS FULL OF STICK FIGURE PEOPLE! I walked up to the NPC and the message was as follows...
I honestly had no idea this was happening. Neither did Dage, nor Cysero, nor Yergen.... we were all shocked. (Also shocked at the prices of the stick figure travel forms we knew nothing about either.) And the message that character in the shot above was actually NOT a joke. After doing this they were really scared I was going to come into the office angry and lay down some righteous Paladin fury at our team meeting. But instead... we have them a round of applause with praise. Realizing that this level of creativity and talent was being underutilized, I empowered the 4 devs responsible responsible (Xero, Korin, Llusion, & Perseus) to bring this level of creativity and fun to all of the releases.
We hope you were surprised and had a good laugh-- I certainly did :D The prank in AQWorlds was pretty funny too. I love these stranger memories we create together. In fact, I think I live for them.
April Fools on!
Official Twitter of AQ3D
Pun-slinging Paladin
Undead Legion Ruler
Scribble Scribe
Dawnforger