AQ3D Shadow Wolf Travel Form Feature

After talking to a lot of you, it seems like the exclusive Shadow Wolf Transformation travel form is a large part of what made the $120 Kickstarter Package the MOST popular package. 1,678 backers went for this package which is more than all of the $50 and $60 packages COMBINED.

We've finally laid enough of the groundwork in the game's engine to start development of this highly anticipated feature. The Travel Form is AQ3D's solution to getting around the game faster, like Mounts in many other games and they function very similarly. We might eventually have mounts too but at this stage Travel Forms were a much better fit for AQ3D (I'll discuss that below). Some people seemed confused about what the Shadow Wolf Transformation travel form is and what it will be able to do so here's what you need to know.

AQ3D Shadow Wolf Pack

The Shadow Wolf Travel Form is an Kickstarter EXCLUSIVE and will NEVER be available in-game. If you Didn't get it then, you're out of luck.
It is a TRAVEL FORM. This means that cannot attack or fly or do anything crazy but it DOES allow you to move at increased speed as described in the Kickstarter description.
Currently the Travel Form increases your speed to 120% of normal, but we may raise it.
Your normal class attacks are available while in your Travel Form but as soon as you use a skill, you change back into your human form.
This is only the first Travel Form in AQ3D. We plan on adding MANY more, some of which may be hard to get or hard to craft and increase your speed even further.
Once you "learn" a travel form, you will be able to access it quickly while not in combat from the new USE menu coming soon to the interface.
Currently, the transformation is instant but will eventually have a short cast time to help avoid mob harassment and resetting, cowardly fleeing and other dishonorable acts.
The transformation will probably be accompanied by a particle effect and possibly a short player animation, but you won't actually shapeshift like a lycan during his time of the month. The transformation animation needs to work for any and all travel forms. Animating shifting bones and spouting fur or scales or feathers for every single transformation is unreasonable.
There will be certain areas where you can't transform. EXAMPLE ONLY: We don't want huge mammoths standing on top of an NPC or completely filling Yulgar's Inn.
As Travel Forms are a time saving convenience and provide no stats or power to your character, most or all travel forms will Dragon Crystals (micro-currency like AdventureCoins) but there may be some that can be earned or crafted through diligent gameplay.
Finally, travel forms are still in EARLY development and are not anywhere NEAR ready to be released into the wild. We want to make sure that the functionality is bug free and that it's amazingly fun and looks impossibly cool dashing through the forest at noticeably faster speeds. The animations are still a work in progress and we will show you more when we have more to show you.

WHY NOT MOUNTS?

Good question. I LOVE mounts. Personally, I had collected over 100 on my WoW account. So why did we go with Travel Forms instead of Mounts?

One part is technical. If we had gone with a fixed 3/4 camera or had created a single player game, we would have much tighter control over what you saw on your screen at any given time. But that's not the game we wanted to see on our phones and that's not the game that we decided to build. We feel that giving YOU control of the camera makes the entire world much more immersive and that having friends and strangers to play beside help make the world feel alive and dynamic. This means that certain sacrifices must be made.

Once again, we are developing this game for (among other platforms) mobile. Smartphones and tablets are getting better all the time but some devices have lower end graphics chips and/or processors. To that end, we only have a certain amount of THINGS that we can display on the game at a time. Every character on your screen is going to have different armors, helms, weapons, belts, gloves and boots all with different textures and your device needs to be able to keep all of those different 3D models and textures in memory and display them at the same time.

Going with travel forms means that instead of displaying all of those item models and textures AND a huge wolf for you to ride on, we can entirely replace all of that gear on screen with a single wolf mesh. Actually, if everyone just decided to hang out in their travel forms, it would much nicer on your hardware than hanging in human form.

AQ3D Cysero Shadow Wolf

The other reason is about storytelling. Although some factions occasionally rise up to stand against magic, Lore has always been a very magic heavy world. Magic flows through every part of Lore. The people of Lore have almost all the same modern conveniences that we do but they're all provided by magic instead of electrically driven technology. Getting your Travel Form in AQ3D will be a rite of passage, like a young person getting their driver's licence in our world, or learning to apparate in the Harry Potter universe. It's simply accepted that when you reach a certain age (or level), you are considered responsible enough to be allowed to change into an animal or monster form and travel that way.

This doesn't mean that Lore doesn't have horses or wagons (or Gaz's Frogzard driven cart) but not every person on Earth chooses to drive or buy a car either.

This also means that we might EVENTUALLY have mounts, but no promises.

AQ3D Guardian Stables