A new opening

The intro is no longer a map with a moving dot. It is six painted scenes of
the journey, every frame of them drawn for this game: the camp at Ötüken
striking its tents, the open steppe, a snowed-in pass, the dunes at noon, a
caravanserai gate lit from inside at night, and the walls of Samarkand at the
end of it.

Hold the camel in the corner to skip it, as before.

The day's march has a picture now

Press on down the road and you see the country you are actually in - and the
season you are actually in it.

• Spring steppe is green with meltwater running through it. By autumn the same grass stands tall and ochre; by winter it is thin snow over dead ground.
• The desert is cool scrub in spring and a white hammer at noon in summer.
• River banks flood in spring, run clear and green in summer, stand as bare willow in winter with ice along the edge.
• Farmland is ploughed in spring, heavy in summer, stubble and stacked sheaves in autumn, frozen bare in winter.

Nineteen of these, because the twentieth would be a mountain pass in winter -
and the passes are shut in winter, so no caravan is ever on one.

The knucklebones can be lost again

Aşık oyunu could not be lost. Throwing again reset the circle without
taking a new wager, and your winnings carried over, so you could pay once and
throw until you were ahead. It now costs a stake each time, as it always
should have.

For the record, with no Accuracy at all the game takes about six throws in
ten. That is what it was supposed to be doing the whole time.

Every word, in every language

The encounters added with the beliefs and the rival Houses - the yer-sub
rites, the kam's drum, the omens, the five rival meetings - had never been
translated. They showed their raw key on screen, or fell back to English in
the middle of a Turkish sentence.

That is fixed. 160 lines in all twelve languages, written in each
language's own register rather than run through a machine: the yurts, the
banners, the ford, the rag tree, the drum at dusk.

Fixed

• An overloaded column could be wiped out in a single day. Losing one animal while loaded near the limit killed every remaining animal the next morning, with no warning and no way to shed cargo. Overloading now bites hard but leaves you days to reach the next stop.
• Seven Turkmen lines contained Cyrillic letters that look identical to their Latin ones - including the name roller you use at the start of every run.

PlayStation controller symbols

A DualShock or DualSense always worked, but the game drew Xbox symbols no
matter what was plugged in. Worst of all was X: on screen it meant
Square, while on a PlayStation pad X is the name of a different button
entirely.

Cross, Circle, Square and Triangle now appear in place of A, B, X and Y, and
L1, R1, L2, R2 in place of the Xbox bumpers. A new
setting under Controls - Automatic, Xbox or PlayStation - lets you set it by
hand, which matters if you play through Steam with PlayStation configuration
support switched on: Steam then passes your pad to the game as an Xbox
controller and the game cannot tell.