Summer greetings, medieval adventurers!
First things first, as per the title, we're excited to announce October 27th as the date for full release update for The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker!
Upcoming Features in the Full Release Update
To sum up our plans on transitioning away from early access, we aim to clean up some of the existing content, provide more full skill progression and expand the late game experience for those who enjoy spending more time with the game.
To that end, the full release will be accompanied by a major content update including (though not limited to...)
- Skill level caps increased to 100
- Plenty of new craftables included
- Unlockable high level ogre mountain area with new quests, mobs, new dungeons and lots of new gear
- Achievements (on Steam and in-game)
- Visual improvements
- Bugfixes and performance improvements
- Balancing enemy stats and drops
We already detailed some of these plans in our previous dev blog, in case you're curious to have a look there. However, we'll also share more details and screenshots by the time we're ready to release.
Your feedback is still most welcome!
Over the course of our Early Access period we've received tons of feedback and bug reports from all of you, which has helped us greatly in identifying and fixing many bugs and problems within the game. However, while we've been busy with development and prioritizing different things, it's possible we sometimes miss things from your feedback.
So if you as a player feel like there's something fundamental bugging you about the game, even if it may have been raised by someone else already, don't be shy to bring it up and discuss it on our Discord or Steam forums, or send us a report in-game.
Upcoming changes to inventory management.
Having to deal with a restricted inventory was a foundational design decision from the early onset of this game - you were never meant to be able to loot absolutely everything all the time, or were expected to make choices around what you valued to loot most - but it's fair to say that widely players have just found the inventory experience frustrating.
While we soon made adjustments to it after the EA release (Horsy the Packmule, refining ores into stacks, changed stack sizes for some items found in abundance...), we've now worked on some additional tools to give players more options on how to manage the inventory (some of which may come into play before getting access to personal storage or before encountering Horsy).
Straight up more inventory space - 35 inventory slots up from 24, in a 7 x 5 rows presentation as opposed to current 6 x 4.
Scroll of True Alchemy - a new magical, consumable item that immediately converts an item into its worth in gold.
Salvaging - workbenches and salvage kits that turn items into stackable scrap, which may be exchanged for crafting materials.
Universal Bags - a few special bag items that may hold a number of any items within.
Horsy Upgrades - you'll be able to acquire items that speed up Horsy's return from the bank, or call him back without visiting a stables after having sent him away.
Salvaging workbenches can be found in various locations
Quick Q&A
Q: Will the price of the game increase upon full release?
A: No, for now we've decided to keep the price unchanged.
Q: Will the Main Story Quests be expanded in the upcoming release?
A: No, although what is already in place may receive some polish. We're not yet ruling out delivering a major update post release to expand on the quest chain involving Gabrius and Eloria, but more than likely we'll prefer to continue that adventure in another title entirely.
Q: Will the release update bring the option to play as female?
A: No, for now we're prioritizing other aspects of the game. However, we may add this feature later down the line, we're not ideologically opposed to it due to story/lore reasons. But it does require more work than simply adding a button in the character creation; the dialogues will need to be edited to distinguish between Lord/Lady and the vast majority of armor models do not as of now support other than the male body model.
Q: Are necromancer/raise dead abilities coming to the game?
A: This was a feature we were entertaining around the time of the EA launch and has periodically been asked about since. Unfortunately, after experimenting with it this past spring, we decided to put it in the freezer for now. We may return to it post launch but it will not be a part of the upcoming release update.
Q: Can we skip the prologue?
A: One of the most frequent complaints we see relates to the prologue. Aside from some awkward pacing related to the amount and length of the cutscenes, we've identified that the most glaring issue with the prologue is that in its current form it acts as something of a story obstacle, where the "real game" doesn't quite begin until you've cleared it.
In initial versions of the game it was actually quite packed with cute little sidequests, such as searching the castle grounds for your children, training sword fighting with your son, hunting deer with the groundskeeper etc. Alas, these were deemed deadly boring by our earliest testers and we had some difficulty cobbling the whole thing together... I'd like to think we've come a long way since developing that bit of content.
In any case, though we're reluctant to deal away with the prologue entirely, we've been looking at ways to rework it so that it would feel like the game begins from the actual beginning, instead of needing to sit through a somewhat separate story sequence first. To that end, you should be able to encage with most of the skills and find some form of side content through exploration of the manor grounds. But we'll keep you updated on where we land with this.
Q: Will there be multiplayer?
A: The short answer is no. The social online function may sometimes give the impression that the game might not be that far off from true multiplayer functionality, but that's just not the case. The game relays chat messages between players, but to have it relay literally everything else is a challenge a team our size is not fit to deal with. Light co-op multiplayer features may be in the realm of possibility in the future, such as a minigame that could be played together with another player, but it's definitely not anything we're committed to at this time.
That's our news for now.
As always, if you have any burning questions, we'll do our best to answer them on our discord server. which is where you're most likely to get a hold of us - the link's included down below. With that said, it's time to wish you all happy gaming and enjoyable rest of your summer!
Regards,
Pura
