After heavy changes of the game engine, neither the existing characters nor the existing maps are made for this world.

CF2 is a hard break, incompatible to CF1.x. All players have to create new characters.

And the maps needs to be checked against the new game engine, if they still work.
Doing this, each map should be verified to follow the Map Making Guide and needs to be modified if not.

Because all maps needs to be touched or at least reviewed, this is the perfect time to reorganize the entire world to create different areas for different levels.

It's hard to find suitable maps for a character, especially for newbies. Either the maps are far to hard and it's frustrating always dying. Or the maps are to easy. It's seldom to find a map best suited for the character level to have a challenging experience without frustration of impossible to beat monsters.

Solution

Creation of areas for different levels. All maps of the same difficult level are placed together. No more searching for suitable maps, if the maps become to easy, the player moves over to the next region.

Problem

Needs a restructure of the entire world.

CF is played most of the time without a party (for a lot of players). And for such a gameplay a storyline leading through the world is ideal for the orientation. Pupland has something like that, but there is a mix of the difficult levels of the maps.

Solution

Writing of storyline quests for each region. They may be linked together, that after one region is finished, the next region sends an invitation or whatever.

The quest system should give out quests best suited for the character level. There needs to be key quests for the storyline and some side quests to fill up level gaps between the storyline key quests. Also some random maps without any quests are helpful to offer the chance for increasing the characters level.

Don't block the way to the next region with a message like: “this is for levels 50+ only” or “you're not powerful enough to enter”. Use guards asking for a “gate pass” or something like that.

Or the characters become invited by a king of an island because he heard about the heroic deeds and has a job for the character. Now a ship in a harbour lets you reach the island.

Introduce new quests for example with: “It is said the entrance to the castle is guarded by powerful cyclops, but no one ever came back to confirm this rumour”. If the character is able to kill cyclops, then the player can give it a try.

Things like that.

Problem

The storyline shouldn't look like a “guided tour”.

Having a nice apartment at a low level region like in scorn, won't animate the players to move to navar, because the apartment there is smaller and has no portals.

Solution

The higher level the region is, the better the apartment should be. Portals leading back to lower level regions should be available in every apartment. But no portals to higher level regions.

It may be a pain to carry all the collected items from one apartment to another. An ingame support moving items by changing the apartment is helpful.

There aren't much ingame stories about the crossfire world.

Solution

While reorganizing the world, new quests needs to be created and there should be added a lot of background stories into the old maps as well as into the quests.

The lores should be tied by region, so scorn area would contain information about other scorn maps, etc.

Informations about the region is gathered by random treasure, included into various maps, talking with NPCs, …

Finding some informations about the world is nice, but collecting them at a central place is better. Reading a scroll where to find a new quest a good thing. But if the character isn't strong enough for this quest, the player may forget about this quest once the character is strong enough.

Solution

An ingame diary collecting all the background informations and the lores will help. Anything the character ever read in dungeons will be written and sorted into the personal diary. Notes belonging to each other should be stored on the same page of the diary. This will allow us to make smaller notes (like a puzzle) which only makes sense if the charater have them all.