Greetings mercenaries! Welcome to the third Update Preview, giving you a sneak peek of some of the upcoming changes & additions to Combat & Battles. Today's preview is the last one before Community Update #2, we hope that you have enjoyed this short but sweet series of articles!
Battlemap objects
When you can’t use your wits, you've got to be ready to use anything else.
You can already find a few fun things on battlemaps: rusty spears, poisonous gas, fire traps, bear traps, you name it. But we were feeling generous. And more importantly, we felt that every biome should feel different. Fighting in varied environments is nice, but that feeling gets much stronger if you know you’re going to fight a bit differently in every one of them.
- In fields, you’ll throw pumpkins at your opponents, which might (understandably) get them confused.
- In forests, you’ll throw poisoned axes at them.
- In marshlands, you’ll find abandoned bombs and potholes filled with flammable liquids. This additional explosive potential will give you the opportunity to dissipate poisonous gas (only to replace it with flames).
- In plains and mountains, you’ll find familiar flowers, and those will allow you to heal during battle.
- In towns, you’ll find obstacles that can be destroyed when hit.
- In ruins, you’ll find abandoned torches that can be thrown and spread fire where they land.
Extreme difficulty
Experience Wartales in the most painful way possible.
This has been in our plans for a long time. There are already many ways to increase difficulty in Wartales, but we do know that some of you can never get enough suffering. This is our gift to the most dedicated, most hardcore, most masochistic players out there. We’ve made everything straight up ruthless, unforgiving and unattainable. Enjoy <3
In extreme mode:
- There is no “dying” status. Your companions are alive until they’re not.
- Every cowardly companion that runs away from a fight can be considered dead. Dead to us, anyway.
- Of course, it is no longer possible to retreat.
- All prison sentences are life sentences.
- Failed your job mini-game? Too bad. You leave empty-handed.
- Oh, wait! Thieves do get something when they mess up: injured.
- Don’t rely on merchants for resources: they barely have any supplies.
- You earn less gold, less happiness and less of pretty much everything good.
- You get more suspicion, more enemies, and more tired.
- Hostile groups run faster.
- Skills cost more AP.
Quality of life
Games should be hard, not tedious.
Yes, we have crafted nightmarish challenges and deadly traps for you. But we’d like you to experience them in the most comfortable way possible. That’s why we’ve introduced several quality of life improvements, two of which have to do with fighting. The first will give you more freedom in how you organize for combat and manage your units during fights. The second will give you more information, helping you avoid frustrating situations.
- It is now possible to customize the order of your units’ skills in the skillbar.
- Environmental hazards such as fire, poison or mud now have clear delimitations displayed on hover.
Other changes
Fight more. Fight better.
Even though we’ve been busy designing major features and preparing the future of Wartales, we must never forget to improve previous features and pay attention to the little details that can make the game better. Overall, we are trying to make Wartales’ fights feel natural, fair and interesting.
- Escaping fights in forsaken villages should now be easier when you have a small team. You will also escape more easily if a large proportion of your companions tries to find an escape (but they might get hurt as they neglect defending themselves against foes).
- Merchant caravans can now be attacked randomly by bandits. If you defend them and manage to save the merchants’ lives, you will be rewarded.
- The quality of the gear you find on enemies can now vary (until now, it was always low). Your blacksmith can also increase the quality of these items in the forge, in exchange for resources.
That’s all for today! As always, let us know what you think of the upcoming features & changes here and on the roadmap. Don’t forget to join our awesome (and passionate) Wartales community on our Discord server, Reddit page as well as Twitter & Facebook. - Shiro Games