Greetings, dear friends!
Thank you for the positive reception of the Early Access launch of Swordhaven. We greatly appreciate your trust in our team, and we are committed to bringing you more content to enjoy. Additionally, we are focused on addressing the issues you've uncovered and reported while playing.
The most glaring issues were addressed on day one thanks to your swift response, and many more substantial fixes are on the way. These include a wide range of problems, from mouse click delays and pointer offset on 4K resolution screens to rowdy chickens provoking aggressive fauna to assault villagers, as well as players being unable to reach a chest due to a pathing error, unfair crafting tool self-destruction rates, ammo shortages, etc.
As an example of this, here's an explanation of what your feedback influence crafting-wise:
The tool component used in crafting will have a definite use count. When you buy a brand new tool, it will come with a limited number of uses. Each crafting attempt with this tool will deplete one use point and will either produce the item you were crafting (if your skill check is successful) or not (if it fails). This system makes crafting more controllable, reduces reliance on randomness, and increases overall openness.
Of course, your feedback will be the defining factor in this.
Balance will take a bit longer to completely level out, but we're getting there.
First of all, we will enhance the default Normal difficulty, as we plan to add Easy and Hard modes with their own unique features soon. To achieve this, the Normal mode should be as close to ideal as possible. We understand that this is an ongoing process, so please feel free to share your thoughts.
More content is planned for Balance—and ultimately, fun—including ability-teaching masters, secret ability scrolls, and peaceful abilities that some of you asked us to incorporate. Hit, miss, and dodge rates, weapon technique values, and much more will evolve sooner, thanks to your feedback!
NOTE: Viltyb is not a bug. Trust us on this one :-)
A lot of work is being done to optimize the game for various hardware configurations. As a small team, we don't have access to many machines for playtesting our games, but the data that you provided has greatly compensated for that.
The low FPS bug present on certain machines, crashes on Linux, and other issues have mostly been resolved by now. As is the case with all our projects, the game will become more efficient on hardware with every update. That FPS count won't stay in single digits for long—trust us!
Another beautiful thing about Early Access is all the feedback we received from you in these few days. Quality of Life ideas like:
- the option to switch units of measurement from imperial to metric;
- broader camera rotation speed slider;
- hotkeys for speeding up or slowing down battle animations;
- more HUD sizing and font sizing options;
- weapon switching;
- the not always intuitive location of the weapon technique menu;
- more sorting options.
Honestly, there are more good ideas than we can list here, or this thread will grow to abhorrent size =) We are thankful to each and every one of you for all the great ideas.
We will keep working non-stop until most issues are dealt with, and parallel to that we will be continuing the development.
A major update will come in 1.5-2 months, and there you will get a large new chunk of content, including resolutions to quests you may have started in this version, new quests, new characters, dungeons, weapons, armours and items.
A much more thorough summation of what to expect from the first big update will come out later.
Patch notes:
- Optimized pathfinding;
- Cursor visibility fixes;
- Main menu save-load UI bug fix. Turning off gamepad during loading no longer wrecks control scheme;
- Optimized FPS in dialogue screen and story screen;
- Improved localizations;
- Lockpicking bug fixed—lockpicks no longer disappear on success;
- Added new painted minimaps;
- Updated forest, water mill, Aldar's house musical tracks;
- Ability points now granted per level (temporary);
- Fixed unending attacking animation in real time;
- Scrolling in text encounters fixed on gamepad;
- Nulki questline fixed;
- Experience farm via Nulki fixed;
- Grainhold fence fixed. Now he buys stolen and illegal goods;
- Manual targeting in RT combat during pause fixed;
- Fixed wolf dodge sound effects;
- Improved real time combat flow and speeds;
- Mendog questline flags fixed;
- Localized pins for minimaps;
- Fixed pathing to certain containers that was inaccessible before;
- Fixed freezing during panic;
- Optimized texture sizes;
- Highlight object improved for higher resolutions;
- Fixed visual settings for Grainhold village (black water, wrong tree textures, etc);
- New item icons;
- ESC closes move item menu;
- Added tooltips for gamepad during sorting;
- Fixed combat freezing in Grainhold;
- World Map colours adjustment;
- Fixed Skink stun animation;
- Proofread English texts;
- Fixed the attack behavior of all goats;
- Vibration bug fixed (controller no longer jumpscares players).
Thank you for a great start to Swordhaven's story! Stay tuned for more.
Yours,
Atom Team