The Dragon Update for Arcane Odyssey has been released! This post outlines info for the coming updates, and goes over the major additions, changes, and fixes in this update.
If you want to view all of the smaller changes and bug fixes, they can be found under the Patch Notes section of the game’s Trello board:
Patch notes p1
Patch notes p2
Patch notes p3
Patch notes p4
Additions/Changes
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Added Dragon Cliffs that spawn in the Insanity 1 and up ranges of the Dark Sea. These are a new type of structure that has a dragon at the top. The tier of the dragon depends on the Dark Sea range, and they can also sometimes be “corrupted” which changes their behavior further. High level dragons can use magic, sometimes multiple types, and the strongest dragons can use devastating attacks. Dragons drop meat, scales which sell for a high amount of drachma, and also drop new weapon and item sets depending on the dragon’s color or corruption type.
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Young dragons can now sometimes appear on any Dark Sea island.
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Improved Dark Sea island generation.
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Various small optimizations.*
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Added the first types of Arcanium Weapons, found in treasure chests, which have 2 spell random base spell slots and 3 weapon skill slots. The weapon skills on these weapons require magic and weapons stat to be used, and are larger when used by pure magic/weapon builds.
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Strong sea monsters and dragons can now build up damage on your equipped armor pieces. If a piece breaks, it gives reduced stats until it is repaired by either a Blacksmith NPC, or by using Repair Kits in your inventory, which can be purchased in bulk from Armorer NPCs.
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Added Arena, a 1v1 casual or ELO-based mode that can be accessed by talking to Sir Gavin at Munera Garden after completing his quest and completing the Bronze Sea’s story, or accessed by using an Elysium Potion.
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Added Port Mistral and Rosehenge refugee camps that appear at Sameria as you progress in Nimbus Sea’s story.
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Added new models for the Leather, Frost Brigand, Dark Leather, Bright Leather, and Reinforced armor sets. (Designed by SelloutJTN and Algepra)
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Added Iron/Steel/Titanium Kettle Helmets and Sallet Helmets. (Designed by SelloutJTN)
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Too many balance changes to list, see above patch note links
*Optimization
(To be clear, this section is talking about FPS issues when casually playing the game, not in large fights)
This is a major issue a lot of players have with AO and many people get frustrated about it, so I want to explain the situation here to make it more clear. AO’s current optimizations to reduce rendering lag and lighting/shadow updates are as follows: island details unload at a close distance, islands completely unload at far distances, all ships unload based on distance, all NPCs/enemies/animals unload based on distance, citizen NPCs only appear when near towns, all attacks/abilities are not rendered client-side if the user is far away, (new) the day/night cycle is not perfectly smooth unless the sun or moon is actually on your screen to reduce lighting/shadow updates, (new) weather clouds no longer move or rotate to reduce lighting/shadow updates.
A lot of devs try to contact us making assumptions about why the game lags the way it does, some even claiming the entire map is loaded at all times, so I hope the information above clears that up. To the best of our knowledge (using Roblox’s in-game tools to find performance issues), AO’s FPS issues come from “Rendering” lag, not script performance. Roblox’s in-game tools for finding performance issues have been of little to no help in optimizing in this situation, and the other developers that have team create access have all tried to find the issue too to no avail.
Another issue a lot of players are confused about is memory usage. High memory usage is not an indication of a performance issue unless it is continuously going up over time. AO has thousands of items, which all have different textures and mesh assets that are stored in the background, which takes up memory.
This isn’t a case of us developers not caring about optimizing the game. Generally when I myself make optimizations, I don’t even put them in the patch notes at all because I don’t want people to get their hopes up that all lag will suddenly be gone. Before AO released in Early Access, I was really confident that its performance was going to be good knowing all the unloading systems it had, so I was just as confused and frustrated as you when suddenly I was getting 30 FPS when sailing in open sea. It has frustrated me for the past 3 years, especially when people hate on me or the other devs and act like we don’t care, we don’t try, or aren’t competent.
Genuinely at this point I’m convinced the only way the game’s main performance issue can be found is if a Roblox engineer looked into it personally, because as I said above, the in-game tools for finding rendering performance issues are of no help. We have double checked systems so many times such as terrain fragmentation, attack effect cleanup, and so on to make sure no invisible effects are left behind, I’ve joined tons of servers over the past 3 years looking at the microprofiler and script performance tabs to try to find any kind of hint, and it always ends up being for nothing. I would love for a Roblox engineer to personally look into this issue and help us, but I don’t know anyone at Roblox and usually posting on the devforum is no help either.
I hope this kind of clears the air about where me and the other AO devs stand on optimization. I am just as frustrated as you all and really hope something can eventually be done about it
Next update
Now that the dragons are finally out of the way, the next updates for the forseeable future are mainly going to be new story chapters. The next chapter alone will have 2 very tough bosses and some really cool action moments that I can’t wait for you guys to see 
I also want to apologize for how long the dragon update took, I really wanted to add lots of variation and make the high level dragon fights feel really grand, since dragons are the peak of fantasy and I really wanted to do them justice. It took a lot longer than I expected since some parts of developing them got monotonous, and I was also going through some things IRL which slowed things down a lot too. I don’t expect the next update to take nearly as long as this one, since we have the next story chapter written out fully and such.
Hopefully you guys enjoy this update for a bit and keep looking forward to higher levels/new bosses/new story