Greetings, brave adventurers!
Our latest patch (1105) brings with it a horde of fixes, improvements and new content/features. You can find an itemized list at the bottom of this update, but here’s a quick overview of some of the new things we’re excited about…
Loot Chests!
No, not the crappy kind that ruin games so companies can squeeze more money out of you. These are the awesome kind that you find in-game for free and then open when you get back to your tavern for bonus gold and loot. Chests come in four ranks (Dull, Common, Rare, Epic), each of which have four possible levels. More dangerous quests provide higher caliber loot chests.
Name Your Own Heroes!
While some character names are hard-coded, the majority of patrons in your tavern can now be renamed at the moment of hire! In this first incarnation of the feature, it’s still easy to miss. A pop-up screen appears when you hire a hero. There’s a button on it that lets you rename any character whose name isn’t hard-coded. We’ll make this easier to spot in future builds, but it is up and working, so we wanted to make the feature available to you folks ASAP. Much like our random tavern name generator, we have a random character name generator you can access by clicking the little yellow dice above the name fields.
Equipment Refactor!
Every item in the game has been refactored. Hundreds of items have had descriptions added and every item has had its effects tuned. There is also now a consistent item naming system. If an item has Rugged in the description, it will always improve Mountaineering, etc.
Required Characters/Shared Personal Quests
I’m all kinds of psyched about this one. We now have the ability to require certain characters on a quest. This opens the doors to one of my favorite new things, shared personal quests. You may have noticed that many of the tavern regulars have overlapping backstories. Now, once you get to know two heroes who have a history and unlock all their bio strings, a shared personal quest may pop up, where both heroes are required on a quest to resolve some issue in their past.
Murgul Flametongue and Gurg Stoutbelly once belonged to the ill-fated adventuring group The Companions. Fully uncover the backstory of these two heroes to unlock Those We Left Behind, where they return to the maze of Xyris the Minotaur Queen and attempt to recover the remains of their former traveling companions.
Custom Character Refactor!
Every custom character has been retooled, punched up, and now starts with at least one piece of unique gear that reinforces their backstory.
New Level-Up Screen
Leveling up heroes is a cause for celebration and our old way of treating level-ups like just another summons wasn’t doing the moment justice. Now, at the start of each turn, you’ll get a special screen where you train every hero who has earned an advancement.
Widespread Rewrites over the first six weeks of gameplay
Much of our early-game content was written before we had the ridiculous assortment of narrative tools now available to us, and it felt a bit sparse and outdated compared to our newer stories. So many of those early quests have been revamped, and their rewards spruced up a bit. The same is true of Personal Quests. Expect to see more of this in the next couple patches.
New Prologue encounter and follow-up quests!
We’ve started swapping out some of the prologue encounters we don’t love with ones we do. One of the new random encounters available has the Ravinger Four encounter a sanitarium in flames. Save them and the insane illusionist Zeddicus Gnash will become a major crime lord in the ensuing decade that you’ll need to deal with. Fail to save them and you’ll be sent to investigate the nuthouse ruins, haunted by a collection of dangerously insane ghosts.
Netherling on a String
Your Netherling on a String toy (acquired through the quest chain The Tinker’s Damned) has gone rogue and it somehow knows every hero’s darkest secret. If a hero has it equipped when leaving the tavern, it will occasionally target another hero in the party and taunt them about the most painful moment of their life. With more than 30 personalized taunts depending on which other heroes are present, this toy promises to be an entertaining, if sometimes demoralizing, addition to any adventuring party.
We’re currently cranking away on a special event that’ll be launching before month’s end. We’ll have new scary quests to play and special limited-time rewards for completing classic Epic Tavern horror quests during the event. More info on that front coming next week!
Full(ish) list of improvements in our current build 1105...
New:
- Loot Chests! You will now find treasure chests (Dull, Common, Rare, and Epic) in your travels and open them upon returning to the tavern
- Adventurers now have a personal gold stash and associated wealth rank. Quests can now branch based on the wealth rank of heroes in your party.
- New Level Up Flow allows all Adventurers who are ready to be leveled up to do so at the start of the turn.
- Required Characters! If a quest revolves around a particular character, you are now required to have that hero in your party to launch the quest
- Shared Personal Quests! Getting to know heroes with overlapping backstories may unlock quests where both characters are required
- New Quest Chain: Those We Left Behind
- New Prologue Encounter: The Burning Sanitarium
- New Quest Chain: Still Crazy After All These Years
- New Quest Chain: The Haunted Nuthouse
- Hunger now causes increased Spirit drain (10% extra drain per hunger rank 1 - 4, which creates a max drain rate of 80% per day)
- Deaths and Incapacitations in your Hero party are now called out in a unified event pop up to ensure you don't miss these key events.
- Decorated death types have been introduced. Deaths can now come in a variety of flavors, all controllable via the Narrative engine, and all FULLY MODDABLE. In Streaming Assets you can find the new DeathTypes JSON file which lets you designate your own custom death events.
- Expanded tooltip functionality to support "live" updates while visible
- Added live tooltip for hunger/starvation UI
- Added live tooltip for health and spirit bars
- Added tooltip for spirit drain indicator
- Added support for changing the MOTD on ET's News Server
- Hooked trophies up to trophy placement system
- Enabled Decor button to launch trophy placement system
- Enabled mount point click to launch trophy placement system
- Tavern trophies: Setup for trophy scroll list
- Rewrites/punch-up/reward tuning done on most early-game quests
Improved:
- Equipment Overhaul…
- -Equipment now has a rarity rating and can be awarded randomly by category
- -Every item in the game has had its effects refactored and a consistent naming system has been implemented. Items with Rugged in the name will always improve Mountaineering, etc.
- -Descriptions added to several hundred items
- Rewards adjusted for several hundred quests/encounters to better match the text description
- All personal quests have been punched up
- Refactored all custom characters, tuning their abilities and giving each at least one custom piece of gear to start
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: Potion Pollution
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: Reproduction Malfunction
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: BYOR
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: Rats!
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: Is There A Doctor in the House?
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: A Sore for Sight Eyes
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: Rub A Dub Pub
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: Murder Most Fowl
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: The One Who Got Away
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: Nuts!
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: In Plain Sight
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: The Tinker’s Damned
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: The Good, the Bad, and [TAVERNNAME]
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: Six Feet Under
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: Ant Misbehavin’
- Quest chain rewrites/tuning: Sometimes Dead Is Better
- Loot Divvy screen refactored
- Rebalanced Starting Gold funds to ensure new patrons can afford their first round of drinks
- Summons Icons and the Drink Chain Widget can now be clicked on directly to activate rather than requiring the player to click directly on the character
- Maximum items in a chest is now linked to the Grade of the chest
- Hunger UI has been redesigned
- Starvation UI has been redesigned
- VFX added for hunger gain event
- Wound and fatigue effects are now dynamically calculated and appended to the effect list at the time it is referenced, eliminating the need to track them in the main effect list
- Legacy wound and fatigue effects (non-dynamically generated) are now removed from the characters' effects lists upon startup
Fixes
- Passed Out is functional again
- Achievement Fixes: Passed Out, Quests!, Greedy Boss, Trickle Down Theory, Charitable Owner, Team Appreciation, and Perfectionist are now obtainable
- Corrected hang that could occur if you were logged into Steam but without a connection
- A new Drink Chain Combo failure state "Sold Out!" has been added for if you run out of stock during a chain
- Corrected race condition during party assignment that would lead to a soft lock
- Tavern Facilities can now be purchased after the turn they become available
- A parsing error in Narrative Token EQUIPID has been resolved, allowing stages that use it to display and function correctly
- Menu has been updated to properly support 16x10 resolutions
- Sold Out Messaging no longer remains after the Drink chain in which it occurred.
- Corrected an error in Loot Chest Grade table the resulted in far too many Epic Chests
- Hunger and starvation tracking is restored, and now integrated with passage of time of day
- Spirit drains while traveling as per design (40% per day by default)
- Refactored wound and fatigue states, consolidating them with the effects system so they are driven by presence of relevant effects
- Hunger UI now disappears during event action phase
- Hunger UI now initializes properly in all contexts
- Parties that have already attempted their quest objective and are returning home can no longer "abandon" their quest.
- Increased nutrition value of rations to reduce required supplies quantity and mitigate excessive quest costs
- Negative Gold Totals will no longer cause the Loot Divvy screen to freeze the game
- Added missing line return in Quest Complete rewards Details list
- Corrected logic error which allowed Incapacitated heroes to be assigned to a quest if they were in a facility
- Corrected calculation error that increased Epic Loot Chest occurrence
- Corrected Error that resulted in a one turn delay after a character leveled up before the player was allowed to allocate skill points
- Hunger is now initialized to 0 for all party members when departing the tavern
- Text edits to Level Up panel
- Corrected scene errors in Tavern and Pulled New narrative Data
- Removed problematic namespace reference (NUnit.Framework.Constraints)
- Corrected pronoun form in one of the incapacitation strings
- Demoralized added to Bathhouse Treatable ailments
- Required Character exploit has been fixed, preventing heroes who are not on your roster, or incapacitated from being added to a Quest
- Hotfix for 1090 - LogOut Button fails
- Broken Levelup Prefab has been Restored
- Levelup properly saves skill point assignments
- Drinkchain Tutorial flow now functions following Grunson and Murgul's Level Up on Turn 3
- Increased starting stock of Mead from 20 to 40 to prevent running out before it's possible to order more.
- Party displaying as wiped out when there are still surviving members has been fixed
- Spirit decay during travel has been reactivated
- Base Natural heal rate has been reduced for all adventurers
- Fixed trophy placement system bugs
- Trophy system: Trophy now reverts to default when it is unmounted
- Corrected several situations which were allowing Adventurers to change into invalid states
- Fixed several Narrative and procedural-based rewards that were either not displaying or not being given to the party
- Token parsing errors preventing gold rewards in some cases has been fixed
- Token parsing error preventing narrative deaths has been fixed
- Bug which prevented narrative rewards granted in the resolution text from correctly displaying has been fixed
- Corrected error in Tag assignment for Characters
- Corrected serialization error in Loot Chests
- Hang with Loot Chest serialization corrected
- HP, SP, Skill, and effect changes display in Stage results again
Do you have suggestions on how we can make Epic Tavern even more, well, epic? 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, 7-8 p.m. EST: Let’s Play Epic Tavern on Twitch
Thursdays, 1:30-2:30 p.m. EST: Dev chat with Tomo and Shawn on Discord
Fridays, 4-5 p.m. EST: Dev stream with Memige on Twitch