Our new patch is LIVE and ready for your next great adventure. Full patch notes are at the bottom of this announcement, but here’s a quick overview of the new improvements and a peek at what’s on tap for your next patch.
Tavern Improvements!
The tavern layout has changed, with a new floorplan that makes better use of the space. Dishes will also now pile up on tables as you serve patrons, and can optionally be cleared away with a click for a bit of bonus tavern reputation. As you get deeper into the game, you’ll notice bigger crowds in your tavern and we’ve also squashed a bug that was causing unlocked heroes to go AWOL if you didn’t recruit them the first time they stop in.
Facility Improvements!
We’ve retooled the recovery rates for the infirmary and bath house and made it so any Mood or Psychosis effect makes you eligible for the bathhouse. We’ve also eliminated a bug that could cause fully healed adventurers to milk their recovery by hanging out in the infirmary until you manually removed them. Now they’ll properly get the boot when they’re ready for action.
Adventuring Bugs Squashed!
We’ve revised your quest list and added tooltips to make it easier than ever to track your past and current adventures, as well as made a host of stability improvements to questing.
A Peek at What’s Next: Relationships and Required Heroes!
One of the most exciting changes we’re busy working on for the next patch is a complete overhaul to the way a hero’s relationships evolve, both with their fellow heroes and the tavern itself. We have a bunch of new tools that will allow us to make every success bring heroes closer together and every failure drive them apart. Encounters where heroes squabble on the road will no longer just be flavor text. Every interaction will affect their relationships, for better or worse.
We’ll also now have the ability to require a particular character on a quest. If it’s Murgul’s personal quest, you can’t launch it unless she’s in the party. With that comes a change in approach to how you unlock characters. In early builds of the game, heroes you encountered in your travels were pretty much always open to joining your roster. If you met them, you got to recruit them. No longer.
Heroes will have to be won over and convinced to join your roster through successful completion of their quests. Fail, and they’ll sign on with a rival. The central idea being that the heroes of one playthrough can be the villains of the next.
If in recent builds, you’ve encountered Odessa Dauntless or Bengar Skullsplitter in the prologue and failed to save them, you know that they’ll turn up later as monstrous versions of their former selves that will have to be dealt with. Example below...
Success: ____________________ Failure:
Emilia Mortalis and Grusilla Marrowsucker will be joining the infamous assassin, Carver, as the next two heroes who can become villains if you fail to recruit them. Without the guidance of the tavern, Emilia falls further into her obsession with reanimating animals, which was cute when she was making zombie rats. Around the time she starts creating vampire bears, you’ll have a real problem on your hands.
And an unrecruited Grusilla will now return to the Badlands and attempt to seize control of the Marrowsucker Clan from her murderous mother, Mafalda. Will Gru become a tyrant even more dangerous than her mother and what will that mean for the tavern? Can her sister, Gurda, help bring Grusilla back from the brink of madness? Stay tuned...
We Want to Hear from You!
The Epic Tavern team is streaming every Monday, Wednesday and Friday on Twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/epictavern), and we have open voice chats with players every Tuesday and Thursday on Discord (http://discord.gg/epictavern).
Stop on by and let us know what features you want in your epic tavern.
Mondays, 7-8 p.m. EST: Story talk with Tomo and Shawn on Twitch
Tuesdays, 1:30-2:30 p.m. EST: Dev chat with Tomo and Shawn on Discord
Wednesdays, 1:30-2:30 p.m. EST: Dev stream with Memige on Twitch
Thursdays, 1:30-2:30 p.m. EST: Dev chat with Tomo and Shawn on Discord
Fridays, 7-8 p.m. EST: Design stream with Tomo on Twitch
In these trying times, we hope a return trip to the land of Beor for a fun bit of escapism will be just what the doctor ordered. Stay safe and happy adventures, friends.