Hello fellow adventurers!
Our first major content update is now available. We worked hard to bring the people of Vaelun to life for your enjoyment! Please see note below about previous game worlds and save files.
New
- Relationship Perks - Building relationships with NPCs offers new relationship perks as you increase your friendship level with them, giving you perks such as discounts on goods and services, etc. This is a significant system we can expand on going forward.
- NPC Job Skills - Now several of the vendors have a new job skill stat that indicates how good they are at their craft. As their job skill increases, the quality of their goods and services will increase as well. This is a big system and lays a foundation we can build further from. For now it is implemented for Innkeeper, Outfitter, Weaponsmith, and Armorer. This is why we call this "Part 1".
- Job Skill Quests - New job skill quests are now available that will significantly boost an NPC's job skill, allowing them to level up.
- Ask NPCs Questions - NPCs know a lot more about their world. You can ask questions about specific subjects such as people, places, resources, services, etc. They give more in depth responses such as what they know about the subject, how they feel about people, where to find things, how long to reach certain destinations, how safe it is, etc.
- Known vs Unknown NPCs - When encountering NPCs in buildings, known NPCs will have fully visible portraits, while unknown NPCs will show up as silhouettes.
- Gifts - NPCs who have become your friends may now possibly send you gifts via letter
- New NPC Portraits, with Emotions - We updated all of our NPC portraits with high quality art, adding the range of emotions for reaction to what you say and do
- NPC Schedules - NPCs are now no longer static in their workplaces. They can move around throughout the day off hours, grabbing something to eat or hang out at the inn, study at the conclave, run errands around town, etc.
- New NPC Trait System - NPCs have traits and opinions of those traits in others. This creates consistent reactions between NPCs. This is just the tip of the iceberg, we can do much more with this.
- Improved quest system - we had a technical constraint where a quest chain could only track killing something OR collecting something. Now we can do both, allowing for more interesting quests.
- 15+ New Quests - enhanced with emotional responses and additional trackers
- Revised Relationship Screen - Hey, it actually works! It is cleaner and shows more valuable data: people's jobs, hometown. It also provides filtering options - current town, friends, enemies - and sorting alphabetical or by relationship score high/low
- New World Creation Screen - updated to the new UI look and feel. You will see several new tabs and settings (disabled for now) allowing us to add more options later
- Revised Relationship Tiers - It is easier than ever to make friends in Vaelun. The new values are: Casual Friend 75 Good Friend 225 Close Friend 450 Best Friend 900
- Time Stands Still In Conversation - Time no longer passes during conversation. You're welcome. ːhappystar2022ː
- Town Economic Themes - Towns and their economies are now categorized into themes based on their geographic locations and the available surrounding resources, which also affects trade with nearby towns.
- New Items - like enchanted pickaxes, armor padding, weapon wraps, and fluffy towels.
- Custom NPC portraits - customize a person's portrait by right clicking the portrait and selecting a local image from the "%appdata%\LocalLow\Defiance Game Studio\ArchmageRises\CustomPortraits" folder.
World and Save Game Incompatibility
To make all the new stuff above, we had to significantly change the file format for NPCs. Sorry, there was no way to migrate data across. We try very hard to maintain file compatibility within minor versions but will likely change it significantly across major versions.
A prompt will appear when you start the game asking to delete your incompatible files for you.
Known issues
- Some of the pricing is wacky. Will hotfix it tomorrow, didn't want to hold up the whole release for that.
- We're investigating a performance / lag issue sometimes when talking to certain people. It seems to be based on quest pool selection behind the scenes. We're working on it right now will patch soon as we can.
- This is a big update, we probably introduced bugs we didn't catch. Thanks for your time and reporting in advance. We appreciate it!
Thanks so much for being on this adventure with us! We really hope you enjoy this update!
PS. It's still Jun 28 EST when I published this. 4 minutes more and we would have been late. ːlaughing_yetiː