Tibia new map beautiful landscape

While Jan is mainly responsible for creating ingame graphics and textures, the content team plans and assembles everything and builds all the beautiful landscapes in Tibia. In the case of Zao, it was already set since the Yalahar update that the new map expansion would take place east of Vengoth.

At first, the general shape of the new continent was created. Just on the floor level, without any mountains and dungeons. Then, everyone in the team got a printed shape of the new area and drew his or her version of the map: where the mountains are located, the cities and how the area should look like in general. Different designs were talked through and after having come to a conclusion, the areas were assigned to different team members. As soon as they had received the graphics they had requested from the graphics department, they started to build the new areas. "First of all, the general floor tiles and shapes were set, followed by houses, ruins, quest areas and unique landmarks. In the end, decoration such as plants, stones or even rubbish were added," Denson Larika explains. "For the Dragonblaze Peaks, for example, I worked from ground level to the top. Level after level. Then I hollowed the peaks and built the caves for the dragons." The monsters were placed after the whole map work was done. What followed was a time of adjustments and fine-tuning, hopping on and off the internal test server to test hunting grounds. With the start of the external test server, the whole content team was then busy with bug fixing and tweaking things further.

The ideas for the quests and missions in Zao came along with the development of the new continent. Certain quest types were necessary to introduce players to the new area, its inhabitants and its lore, and to guide them around. Other quest ideas evolved around the given themes. The Tomes of Knowledge quest, for example, is a nice way to unlock things like nifty furniture and creepy dungeons. At the same time, the content team could use them to make some selected excerpts of the massive background story accessible in smaller bits for those who are interested in it.

Beneath the Clouds

This summer...


...you better turn your lights off!

Tibia classic story

Killed cobras turned into genuine corpses and can be looted like any other lootable corpse
The corpse of a lancer beetle now looks like... a dead lancer beetle - we have added the correct corpse sprite to it

On the automap, shallow water is displayed in a bright blue colour to make clear that it is passable

NPC Zalamon has made a crash course in communicating, so from now on he should be able to avoid any wordings that are misleading for some fellow Tibians
The experience counter of NPC Grizzly Adams was standardised to make sure that experience points are always rewarded the same way when a character kills a boss at the end of a hunting task

Elite hunters will not be able to do Grizzly Adams' demon task twice anymore
NPC Black Bert now has technomancer beards in stock for you Having completed the Demon Oak quest will be properly displayed in your quest log To do the Annihilator quest, you have to be a group of 4 people again - no more, no less Snowmen that can be built by players now reveal the names of their creators when you look at them Some typos were fixed