Dofus Beta12b— patch notes (2004)

The official v12b text (2004-05-12) lived on dofus.com's "beta12" page (?page=informations&rubrique=betatests&ssrubrique=beta12), linked from the beta-test index but never captured by Wayback, and no idnews item announces it (nothing between 2004-05-10 and 2004-05-25). The message below is the only known Ankama text published during v12b. It does not describe v12b itself: it is a roadmap by Tot, Ankama co-founder, posted on 2004-05-23 in the graphics section of the Carnet de Bord. It confirms in passing that only "players validated to test the monsters" had access, on 300 to 400 maps. This matches the v11b announcement, which described v12b as the version "in which the monsters will appear".

Text of the message, as captured on 2004-06-07 (translated):

Regarding what comes next, here is what we plan for the game's release:

Custom items: Custom items can be found on very high-level monsters or crafted by players who chose the tailor profession. The tailor will make hats that highlight other players' professions. A baker's hat for the baker, a hunter's cape for the hunter. This will let players with seller professions, or others, be spotted more easily by those looking for them. We have already started working on it. I think we still need a few full-time days to finish this part)

The trade interface: The graphic interfaces are ready and waiting quietly in their corner for the devs to have 3 days to spend on them. We took our time, and we still are on this part of the game, because this system is far from simple. If it were only the player-to-player trade interface, no problem, but many other features will stem from this interface, Crafting, trades with NPCs

Resources: We have already made a good part of the resource graphics. Even if for now you must be wondering what the mosquito wing, the Mulou testicles or others are for, they are not there by chance. They are an integral part of the crafting system we are currently designing.

The world: For now, players validated to test the monsters have roughly 300-400 maps to explore. This set is the unfinished version of the kingdom of Amakna. We are currently finishing this land's monsters, its history, who rules it. This part represents only a third of the world at its final release. On top of the two other regions, we are also working on "Moon Island", "Wabbit Island" and "the Heroes' Cemetery". In short, we plan a game of about 2,000 maps for its final version. Keep in mind that every month we will increase the size of the world and the features in it. For the team of 4 artists, this is the biggest part of the work we have left.

Treasure maps: Some of you were lucky enough to find puzzle pieces. Treasure hunts will work in a rather original way. You will have to complete puzzles (among some 20 available puzzles) and, once one of them is complete, a key will materialize in your inventory. This key will let you open the precious treasure chests. The graphics are ready; we have a good week of work left to get it all working.

More later, once I've recovered from my sprained wrist.

This version was released on May 12, 2004, based on this page. I don't have the changelog for this version; however, this version removes the dark brown chat background to match the same beige as the rest of the interface. It's possible to gather some information about this version using the forum.

The first piece of information is the addition of monsters, announced for beta v12b; it seems a selection of players got early access to certain zones of the game to try out fighting monsters, and these players received the characters [M] at the end of their character name. In terms of functionality, this test period may have served to test the setup of the subscription system (only validated accounts could access the zones). This screenshot comes from v12b; you can see players with the [M] suffix and a new map with monsters (crabs), and weapons are still visible. The chat background color is lighter than in v11b.

A forum thread discusses cheating and the big gap between players who go farm monsters and the others; XP seems slow, and there seem to be issues with access to equipment (message from 05/29 at 11:48 PM). We learn a lot of things through this thread:

• To gain XP, you need to farm a lot of monsters
• There's an imbalance depending on players' activities: XP gain via PvP is low and leads to cheating, while players who can go gain XP against monsters can level up quickly.
• Some equipment can be bought directly from NPCs, but it requires gold coins that aren't easily tradeable.
• Wabbits are mentioned in the thread, yet Wabbits were released with Wabbit Island during update 1.1 (with a monster reskin) — Wabbits were used, like other monsters, for PvM testing.

Still on the forum, the Misc category lets you see the threads discussed in May 2004; you can see several interesting threads:

• a thread about M players
• another thread discussing XP on v12b,
• a thread about monsters

The v12b bestiary can be accessed through these links: natural forces, insects, vegetation, forces of the night, boss, orcs, goblins. A large portion of these monsters were removed between this point and 1.0; the names of some monsters were heavily changed, as were their skins.
The bestiary also has a familiars section visible here; even though the site save was made during v17b, it's interesting to see that the Bouftou and the Tofu were designed to be familiars — there are also other familiars we won't see again, and I think the familiar named Hertuy actually corresponds to the Moumoule (the description matches). Familiars will be added to the game but will be removed and then re-added later (they have item type 18, and it's not present in versions v17b and 1.0). The Tabi is also present, and its description matches what will later become the Dragoturkeys; this page shows that mounts were meant to be Tabis — I think the Tabi was dropped because its skin was too small and probably poorly adaptable to character sprites, which would push toward a character skin overhaul with version 1.2.

Something I find interesting to note is that this version, which adds monsters, may come along with an overhaul of monster sprite names and numbers, along with the removal of certain monsters like the White Moon; the exact version of this update is currently unknown to me.

The paragraph above is no longer up to date; in reality there were several changes throughout the beta.

A screenshot from this version can be seen here; this screenshot shows fights happening on the fountain map. Otherwise, the changes in this version are mostly focused on server-side changes (restricting zones to [M] characters) and on adding monsters, so there may be nothing else new. Interesting information about monster placement can be found here; it mentions Wabbits and jellies added in the early versions, and apparently the jellies were on the map below the Sram temple.

To wrap up this version, I want to come back to this screenshot; Liche mentions v12b in a video because you can see the character's weapon, however while doing research I had read that Dark Vlad was introduced with v15b along with the Evil Forest (I no longer have the source). I have doubts about the game version: the map matches the Evil Forest, but the Dark Vlad file from v17.1b indicates the sprite comes from v13b. I also don't have information on whether the character is an [M], but maybe it's just a test map with Dark Vlad without the Evil Forest having been added to the game, which would explain the v12b of the screenshot.

Telling a v12b screenshot apart from a v13b one

Since it's tricky to tell apart the different beta versions from this period, and versions 12 and 13 are very close in terms of interface, to easily tell v12b from v13b apart you have to look at the placement of the bug-report button at the top of the screen: on v12b it's in the top left, on v13b it's in the top right.