Greetings, medieval adventurers!
This is a short news blog conveying our thoughts and plans for the near term updates to the game. We’ve continued to sift through the feedback and reports we’ve received since launch (there’s been quite a bit!). With a focus on improving the game, aside from general jank, we've received few enough complaints expressing various degrees of frustration with some of the content in the game, starting with the ambusher groups roaming the mountains.
Mountain Ambushes
Though we think the concept remains good, we admittedly missed the mark with its implementation and the idea wasn't properly conveyed to the player. The ambushers roam a very specific section of the mountains, leaving some areas more chill whereas in others the player's expected to be more on guard. The intention was that the player might try to pick their fights, and rather avoid and try to escape groups of enemies that posed too much of a threat.
Nothing particularly prepares the player for these encounters though; their functionality isn't explained anywhere, nor does anything else in the game work the same way. When players are attacked, they tend to instinctively try to fight their way out of it.
If the player succeeded in defeating them early on, the problem was only compounded, as that triggered higher level ambushers to attack next time with better drops. The increasing ambusher levels were more intended as an optional end game challenge, but they were also overtuned, with their levels increasing too quickly compared to how many kills were needed for the end game craftables. While some of you experts handled them fine regardless, they did also leave a fair few players at their wit's end.
So, with that said, we're exploring ways to rework the encounters entirely. At the moment we're leaning towards building a minigame around the ambushers, including a potential introductory quest, which would leave the ambushes much less frequent/intrusive while not active, i.e. while you're not trying to hunt for them.
During the challenge, you would gain increasingly better rewards based on how many groups you're able to take out in row, and it would contain conditions for failing the challenge (dying or fleeing from a fight), which would reset your current tally and roll back the ambusher levels.
Early Bandit Fortress
It seems to us that some players get themselves caught up in the bandit quests, unintentionally bee-lining to the bandit fort encounter before even progressing the main quest to the Mistywood. Since the fort was designed as slightly higher level content, players would often end up running into it under-leveled and under-equipped, leading to a frustrating experience. In a few instances it seems the player thought they were on the main quest and believed their progression to be blocked.
To address the issue, we're planning to add a potential extra step to be performed in Thornhill, unlocked further along the main quest line, which should naturally guide players to continue along that path and hopefully progress a bit in power and consumables, before attempting to fight through the bandit fortress.
Thornhill Trainers Unlock
For few enough players the requirement to access Thornhill Academy has been a pain point. For us, we perhaps somehow assumed that of course everyone would ultimately seek to improve all skills, but in reality there are lots of different ways people have shown up to enjoy the game, at different levels, ready to put it down at different points in the journey.
As such, the Thornhill Academy pre-requisite quest presents a frustrating roadblock to certain types of play. But the way the quest works, requiring the use of all the various skills, it can't easily be adjusted either. So we're leaning towards uncoupling the quest as a requirement to access the trainers, and instead you would automatically unlock each trainer as you progress in that particular skill.
The quest itself would stay as optional to complete for the other rewards it offers, for which we may come up with an additional few to make up for the removal of the trainer unlock.
Re-selecting trainer traits
It's been requested for a while, quite a while... Well, we've finally worked a solution to be able to switch between the trainer traits where a choice can be made. You will be able to simply select another trait in the trainer UI to switch between them for the cost of coins, to be rolled out into the game within the next patch.
Modding Enthusiasts
We've noticed some of you like to mod. While we're not in a position to offer proper modding support and tools, we'll try to make it easier to those of you that are technically minded. First and foremost we'll remove the code obfuscation and expose some data files to be more easily modifiable, such as items, shops, npcs, dialogue, quests and npc interactions.
With that, it should even be technically possible to make simple quests of your own.
New content?
At least one new content update is currently planned to be added into the game further along in spring. We see more room for new quests in the late game, 50-100 level ranges. At the moment we have no details to share on that though, but what medieval adventure doesn't have a good old dragon slayer quest...?
Well anyhow, these and other smaller issues are on our agenda as we move into the new year. With that, it's time to wish you the best of year 2025, and most importantly, happy gaming!
Regards,
Pura
