Gunslingers!
You've been fighting relentlessly to take back the frontier from the bloody claws of otherworldly abominations for two full months. And there's thousands of you! We've been blown away by your enthusiastic reception of Blood West and humbled by the overwhelmingly positive reviews. You've been recommending our game to your friends and other Steam players, and it means the world to us. We know we love old-school, immersive gameplay full of stealth, tactics, and exploration - it's nice to know you do, too!
The Skin Collector - enemy concept in the upcoming scenario
Some of you say our western stealth shooter arrived in Early Access in better form than some high-profile games left it. That's a bar set really high, for sure, and we're doing and will continue to do our best to meet your expectations. We don't yet have a set release date for the upcoming content update that will bring about the second playable scenario. Seeing how much you appreciate the fine details of our creation we want to put as much - or more - effort into crafting the next rich and varied part of the world of Blood West.
The Wraith - enemy concept in the upcoming scenario
While we work on the new content we also improve on some aspects of the existing game, because there's always room for improvement, and we're no strangers to early access. Today marks the release of our first regular Early Access update (full changelog below!). It'll be accompanied by a week-long promo matching the release discount of 20%, so all of you who were on the fence with Blood West in the release week and held out until there's more reviews - here's your chance!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1587130/Blood_West/
Full 1.1 changelog:
Following your generous feedback and going through the many gameplay videos and streams, we've decided our priorities for the first post-release patch. Here's how we're improving on the game's mechanics and introducing some quality-of-life improvements:
New features:
- A new, alternate bossfight path
- Leaning from behind cover (make sure to bind the keys!)
- New vendor items - sacks that improve inventory management
- By popular demand items in the inventory can now be rotated to improve stackability (have fun!)
- You can now bind the key to unload ammo
- FOV slider added
- V-Sync toggle added
- Brightness / gamma setting (does not affect the UI)
- ESC key closes inventory/map screen
- Trying to bind a key that's already in use will prompt an option to swap them
- Keybind menu cannot be closed if not all keys have been set, missing bindings will be highlighted
Changes:
- Improved enemy A.I. - they will react to gunshots in their hearing range, notice if another mob in their line of sight is killed, become alarmed in vicinity of other aggravated mobs
- Jim's lucky coin quest is now failable if the player chooses to keep the coin for themselves
- Reworked the acid-spitting Humanpede behavior - it should now be more challenging to fight, although it still prefers to avoid up-close combat
- Nerfed the Collector perk - it generates less loot
- Nerfed the Gotcha! perk - it now provides just longer, not infinite effective headshot distance
- Totem blessings no longer stack - you can only have one active at a time
- Putting a bow on the ground while it was drawn will return the arrow to the inventory
- Removed the Shadow Heart item
- Reduced healing items and ammo amount player can find in the game world
- Some spelling and grammar corrections (not final)
Bugfixes:
- Loading your game no longer causes FPS to drop
- Quitting the game by Alt+F4 combo no longer risks corrupting your save file
- The UI prompts display the correct bindings right away, not after game restart as it used to
- Ctrl and Shift keys are now bindable
- Reloading the boss fight no longer causes wendigo not to spawn properly
- Fixed the rare bug that allowed losing or multiplying bandages (and other stackable items)
- Fixed the breaking platform in the boss fight which was breaking to quick on subsequent tries
- Sliding or running downwards on slopes no longer generates damage to the player
- Multiple fixes to the save game functionality
- More clear option selection ("Accept" closes the form and saves the changes, "Back" was renamed to "Cancel", acts accordingly)
- Molotov burning sound no longer loops on mob impact
- Mobs no longer vocalize post-death (which occurred when killed with shotgun or other multi-projectile weapon)
- Ghosts no longer leave blood splatter on walls
Sacks - a useful new addition to the player's inventory
Please note that after the patch loading an existing save game will result in the player being re-located to a safe zone, and all the monsters will be re-spawned.
This concludes today's summary. If you have any more suggestions or happen to run into some issues, please make sure to let us know either here, in the game's Steam hub, or in the Blood West channel of Hyperstrange Discord.
Good hunting, Gunslingers!
Next from HYPERSTRANGE
If you enjoy Blood West not just for it's stealth but also its action and visuals, you might be interested in our teams upcoming FPS - POSTAL: Brain Damaged. That's right - The notorious POSTAL series returns in a twisted spin-off that it into a whole new direction. Developed by Hyperstrange under the watchful eye of Running with Scissors, POSTAL: Brain Damaged gives you retro-FPS looks and fast-paced modern gameplay. Please consider adding it to your wishlist:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1359980/POSTAL_Brain_Damaged
Yours truly,
