Hello mates, The Baron here carrying the good word from KospY and the Warpfrog team.
How can this possibly be... the day has arrived. Blade & Sorcery 1.0 is now available! ːamadeus_happyː
What a journey, guys... From a one man project started by KospY to a studio of +20 fulltime developers. From a little indie arena sandbox to the beginnings of a fantasy IP.
All of us at Warpfrog are blown away by the events of the past 5 years, and we want to truly thank all of you guys who supported the game in Early Access. We carry some cynicism for common practices in the modern game industry, so when Warpfrog was founded we pledged to reject what we always hated as gamers ourselves and do things on our own terms.
Through your support, you guys let us remain independent from shareholders and publishers, and enabled the studio to become the truest and most authentic version of itself.
Now lets set the celebrations aside as you have waited long enough; let's get into the 1.0!
Before you begin
If you are moving from Early Access to the 1.0 Update, do yourself a favour and solve your troubleshooting issues before you they begin -
Remove all of your U12 mods!
U12 mods will not work on 1.0, so as usual, mods will need an update.
MAIN FEATURES
As a caution I should warn that anything past this point may be considered a spoiler for those who wanted to play the update as a blind experience! Be warned!
Crystal Hunt Game Mode
The all new Progression Mode is now in the game - start as a lowly warrior or mage and increase your character's power by unlocking new skills.
Find loot in the dungeons to buy and sell weapons and armor in a physical store.
Delve deep into the lore which gives context to the events of Crystal Hunt and world of Byeth. Uncover the secrets of the ancient Dalgarians!
We are delighted to add this gamemode for folks who always wanted a little more out of Blade & Sorcery than the default sandbox experience.
Staying true to the Warpfrog way and our beliefs on game design, this is not a hand-holding experience. However, Crystal Hunt will give motivation for the player to progress and develop through the game, as well as now having a definitive game ending to strive for.
Your Crystal Hunt character will be separate from your Sandbox one. We added some option goodies on character creation so you can customize your game and difficulty level; for example you can tweak the damage received or dealt modifiers, determine if Dalgarian language is automatically translated into your language, or enable death consequences if you please, such as losing gold or even permadeath.
Crystal Hunt was truly nuts for us to work on, because it was like dropping a new game on top of the established Blade & Sorcery game that you already know. The Warpfrog team really worked hard on this as we wanted to do justice with our final major content update.
We hope you like it!
Dalgarian Dungeon
The Dalgarian Dungeon is an entirely new dungeon biome to explore, revolving around the ancient race of Dalgarians; a highly advanced and magical people, now extinct.
The most notable difference about the Dalgarian dungeons compared to Outpost is the sheer scale; you will notice the "rooms" are not just physically bigger in terms of structure sizes, but also much larger in terms of space, with more open layouts.
This should give a different vibe to exploring the Dalgarian Dungeon as compared to Outpost, which has a more linear sense of progression through it.
Skill Tree
Your Crystal Hunt character will start off as a no-skilled warrior or petty mage. Prepare to have the rug pulled from beneath you when you realize how complacent you have likely become to being OP in sandbox mode!
Over the course of Crystal Hunt, you will earn the ability to unlock skills, steadily increasing your power. These skills correlate to the 5 branches on the Skill Tree - Fire, Gravity, Lightning, Body and Mind.
A player could choose to go all-in on one skill branch and become the penultimate master of that element, for example being a Fire mage than incinerates all foes. Alternatively, a player might choose to dabble across a few different branches and diversify; perhaps you want to have some fire powers, but still enjoy the utilitarian versatility of being able to gravity glide.
Worth noting - although there is an absolute ton of skills, the idea is not that a player would have all 78 skills unlocked at the same time. If you did this you would be so unbelievably OP and your game absolutely chaotic with so many compounding skill effects, lol.
Our estimate is that a player will likely have two fully unlocked skill trees the time they reach the end of the game, or one tree plus a couple of other random skills. In theory, a player could continue to play Crystal Hunt and unlock everything (and some players surely will) but our intent was playing Crystal Hunt with a specific build, and then giving yourself the replay value to go back and play gain with a whole new build playstyle.
New Skills
The madness.. the sheer madness... Crystal Hunt has a grand total number of 78 skills to be unlocked.
Each of our skills are playable game features; we avoided anything that would have been "gamey" like +5 damage, or +10 health, etc. The skills are actually things you can do or have an impact the gameplay somehow.
To get even crazier, a lot of the skills have synergies that stack with each other to create interesting effects.
For example, a player might unlock 3 separate skills; Gravity Bubble to create a bubble where enemies are weightless, Hyperfocus where time moves in slow motion but you do not, and Dilation Bubble which slows time on objects passing through a gravity bubble (like arrows).
These are three separate skills, but when you combine all these skills together, you will find a synergy that is unique! The combined effects create a timestop type of effect, as you can see here --
Remember, this is not even one of our 78 actual skills in the game! This is just an example of how a player can leverage the simulation factor of Blade & Sorcery to synergize skills and create totally new things and make really interesting character builds.
Creative players will have a blast mix and matching skills to find all new off-skill tree effects, and I guarantee that you guys will find lots of combinations we never even dreamed of.
This is in beauty part of B&S being a simulation game!
New Golem enemy
One of the many secret things we kept close to our chest before the trailer drop was this beauty, affectionately named "Hector" by the community.
We really want you to experience everything related to the golem in VR, so I will avoid saying too much here!
However I will say that the golem is huge and fully physical, so if you were wondering - yes it is climbable!
Lore
A huge ask from players over the years has been for the introduction of lore to give a grounding and context to the gameplay of Blade & Sorcery.
We are beyond delighted to have finally delved into this and add depth to the world of Byeth!
A large asterisk I will place here is to warn you that while we have deep lore, the game does not hold you hand. It is not a "sit back and enjoy the story" type game with a narrator guiding or breaking things down for you, nor is the world and story events revolving around you.
A player can find lore scattered throughout Crystal Hunt, which they can collect to piece together the bigger picture of the world and its events. There is a lot to find... At one point there was some genuine concern that our lead designer Shrubokrant may have legitimately been writing a novel, lol.
But on top of this, a player may also use inference to observe the world around them and come to conclusions about things, of which the game will not validate for you.
Our Art Director Glitch skirted with a descent into madness on this, adding micro details to the world to make sure it was as cohesive as possible with the lore. For example, the coins in the game have the face of an ancient king that you may read about in some lore.
But who will get this??? Haha, even if some players will never notice such small details, we feel it will be absolutely awesome for those who are into this type of attention to detail and do! That is very much our vibe.
The team also went all-in with the portrayal of the Dalgarians. When it came to Dalgarian environment design, cdmpants and his Environment Team really sat down and laid out a society that made sense. If this was a real society, the Dalgarian dungeons would not just be a collection of random rooms; everything should have served a purpose for them.
Last but not least, depending on how hardcore you want your lore experience to be, we also have ancient texts to discover in the game that are in the Dalgarian language.
To crack this language would require a player to literally decipher it themselves in a throwback to the hardcore era of 90s-esque dungeon crawlers that involved paper maps. It is not some Zodiac killer level cryptography lol, but should be exciting for folks who are into this type of thing.
However, we realize how hardcore this is and also that there is a great inconvenience due to the VR headset factor, so we have a difficulty option to automatically translate for players who just wanna enjoy an action game without a pen and paper, lol. Automatic translation of Dalgarian language is the default for the game and the manual translation option is just an added layer for the hardcore madlads out there who want to be fully immersed in the experience.
Final thought: we also realize that some players may not give a hoot about lore and simply want to play an action game - no problem!
Our lore is there, but a player can choose to take Crystal Hunt at face value and just blast through it, enjoying the action, unlocking skills, finding loot, etc. No worries, you can do this and you will still be able to finish the game.
Meanwhile players who dive deep into the lore:
Loot
Had you ever found a treasure chest in U12 Outpost only to be crushed to find it was non-interactable? No longer!
Throughout the Crystal Hunt dungeons, players will find loot in the form of coins or valuables, sometimes hidden in side-room chests, sometimes on shelves, or sometimes hidden cunningly in the environment.
Players can also potentially find rare crystal shards in dungeon runs, which can be used to unlock new skills on currently unlocked skill branches.
Finding these bonus crystal shards in the wild is truly satisfying.... there is something very rewarding about it on a primitive level, as you will see. Lyneca refers to this as inducing some kind of dormant "loot goblin" part the brain, and you know what... he is 100% right! ːgoblinː
Shop
What would all that loot be without somewhere to spend it!
Crystal Hunt introduces a new shop location for the player to visit, where the player can sell loot, and buy new weapons and armours.
As always, we wanted to avoid as much gamey abstraction as possible, so the shop is an actual physical experience where you can take things from a shelf to look at or try them out before purchasing, then take them to a counter when you are ready to buy.
We also have something completely new and unusual for Blade & Sorcery that we kept under wraps - a voiced NPC as the shopkeeper! (voiced by yours truly ːlunar2019piginablanketː)
The shopkeeper is facially animated, with reactive voice lines to try give him a bit of life and make the shopping experience a little varied each time.
New Weapons
1.0 comes with a grand total of 76 weapons, not including things like arrows, quivers, throwing pouches or props. ːamadeus_spookedː
Tiered weaponry is also finally implemented into the game, so Crystal Hunt will have a progression of gear to purchase.
We tried our best to avoid gamey mechanics like having upper tier weapons "deal more damage", since after all, a player should be allowed complete the game with a rusty dagger if they are so inclined. Instead, upper tier weapons will have other benefits, such as being able to hold an imbue charge for longer, increased reach, additional offensive spikes, or slicing through certain armours easier.
Meanwhile, blunt weaponry will be more effective against armoured enemy, whilst blade will be better for slicing skin.
New Armors
There are now a total of 90 individual armour pieces that comprise of 10 full sets. These armours provide various levels of physical protection and will also be utilized by the enemy.
There is also a whole new mechanic to go along with 1.0 armour - Heavy armour will provide you with better physical protection, but lighter mage armour will allow you to cast spells faster. If you go all-in on mage gear, you will be slinging spells like crazy but you will have a "glass canon" type character.
The nice thing is you can mix-match armour pieces to find the best balance of physical defense and magical offense for your desired character build.
Ruins Replacement Map
Everyone's least favourite map finally got a total makeover.
The Ruins was one of the earliest maps in the game, introduced back when the we were still using some store assets. This meant the textures always clashed with the rest of the game and looked ugly by comparison.
We have been dying to remedy this for the longest time, so when we finally were able to redesign Ruins we decided to go whole hog and completely remake the map from scratch, making it lore friendly in the process.
I'm sure there will be some nostalgia for the old Ruins map, but the new map keeps the essence of the original - the verticality, the chandelier, the moody lighting, etc.
Arena Map Revamps
Ruins was not the only map to get some TLC. To compliment the addition of world lore, all arena maps from sandbox have gotten cosmetic touch-ups.
Not only were were beautifying and optimizing the old maps, but we wanted to create a sense of cohesion between them, to make these locations feel like they are all part of Byeth and not just random places in isolation.
It also gave us the opportunity to shake some of the old maps up!
Enemy Factions
In the past, enemy difficulty was directly tied to armour levels, so easy enemies were the "gladiators" and hard enemies were the "soldiers" in armour.
To coincide with Crystal Hunt and the new lore, enemies are now separated out into factions, and difficulty is now faction based. That means it is possible to find enemies of any faction difficulty with mix-matched configurations of armour.
Although any faction could potentially have any configuration of armour types, the different factions will tend to lean towards different strengths and weaknesses to provide a varied challenge.
For example, you are likely to find more armoured knights in the Eraden army faction whereas you will likely face a lot of powerful mages in The Eye.
New inventory system
Before Crystal Hunt and loot there was no great need for an inventory other than a place to hold your potions and torches. However, many players did not even realize there was an inventory at all!
Admittedly, it was not very intuitive. This has been rectified in 1.0 with a very clean and intuitive inventory system that still keeps within the spirit of VR and is lore friendly.
A little bonus to this new inventory system is that you can now see how your armour protection is stacking up, as well as how your armour impacts your spell casting speeds as mentioned earlier in the armour section.
Journal
A cool and immersive way for players to keep track of the lore they find in game is the introduction of the journal. Any lore you find will be added to the journal and sorted by faction, so tracking down all the lore has a little bit of a "gotta catch em all" vibe for lore enthusiasts and completionists.
If you are not playing the hardcore manual Dalgarian translation option, you will be able to see Dalgarian text that is translated to your own language here too.
Status effects
You might be wondering exactly what this could be since in the past you could already make enemies weightless with gravity or zap them with electricity to stun them. When we say status effects here, what we are talking about is a whole new under-the-hood system we added for how enemies become effected by status effects. The long story short is you will not see it in any gamey type of way, but it should come across intuitively.
For example, enemies exposed to fire now generate "heat" (under the hood) until a point that they actually catch fire, and eventually being on fire will char them!
As I say, you wont completely see the mechanics of this under the hood stuff but you will experience it in a nice and immersive simulation way. We also made this as moddable as possible for modders to add in their own status effects.
The creation of this new system also allows us to add status effects to the player, so you may be interested to know the player can also experience these effects if hit with them from other mages!
That just about wraps up all the major features! Goodbye, and good luck.
Did you know Steam has a character limit on the news? Lmao, they are probably thinking no sane person would hit that cap...
There are many more parts of the update that are not flagship features but absolutely worth mentioning!
More varied enemy mages
Enemy mages have a wider variety of spellcasting at their disposal. This includes access to new spells, but also the ability to imbue weapons and arrows, and utilize some of the same combat skills player has.
This makes certain factions like The Eye particularly nasty!
New enemy voices and dying sounds
More than 3 AAARRGHH sounds? Not in my Blade & Sorcery! ːsteammockingː
Finally addressing a long running community gag, we have added a ton of new sounds to enemies to give them more variety in voices and deaths.
The inspiration for this was based on the popularity of the mod Painful Death SFX by Sushin, who in fact works for Warpfrog!
Cross-elemental merges
As well as each skill tree branch having their own progression, there are sections of the skill tree where unlocking two prerequisite skills on different branches may unlock a brand new cross-elemental skill.
These tend to be the biggest and baddest of skills, so are typically requiring a player to have unlocked the upper tiers of multiple skill trees, meaning they are usually late game skills.
New Tutorial
Not just a reworked tutorial, but the tutorial now serves as an introduction to Crystal Hunt and gives context to the events around which the game takes place.
If you are playing Crystal Hunt for the first time, don't skip it!
Home persistence
Something we had to remove some time ago has returned, with improvements! Objects you place in Home will be saved in that position when you return.
This means, although not technically an intended feature, you could put gear around your home to add visible clutter, like place a sword on a shelf. We felt this was a nice little immersion element, but if you smash up your Home furniture then that will be on you! haha
Stash system
The book spawner in Home has some new utility in Crystal Hunt. The book spawner now serves as a kind of inventory storage for all the items, weapons and armour you purchase in Crystal Hunt, so if you buy things in the shop, they will appear here for access at any time later. You may even enjoy the element of collecting all the game weapons and armour to display in your book.
Another handy QOL function is that if you drop a weapon or item anywhere in Home, you can now quick retrieve it. You can maybe see how this would be useful in conjunction with the Home persistence. ːtankː
Sandbox enhancements
All new weapons, armours, factions, and skills can be found in Sandbox. You can even pick and choose which skills you want to use in sandbox mid-game, as well as pick the default sandbox skill loadout when making a new character. For example, maybe you want to have the classic B&S U12 spell experience, or maybe you want no spells at all.
Following the philosophy of "we wont tell you how to have fun", we added no barriers in Sandbox, and everything is unlocked. But for this reason we recommend you play Crystal Hunt first so as not to spoil the new content. However, it is your call!
Graphics enhancements
It is always our desire to push, push, push PCVR to the very limits!
We added some new graphical improvements to make the game even more beautiful, such as clouds casting shadows and eye adaptation to lighting changes such as going from inside a cave to outside, and vice versa.
Continued optimization
This is a forever job for us, so nothing new there, but we continue to add optimization and improvements to dungeons, props, etc.
A pretty big boost we added was through a new custom ocean that should be a lot more performance friendly!
Cheats
The cheat menu has a couple of new goodies to check out. We also reserved the option for the player to play Crystal Hunt with cheats if they like.
Conversely, when making a new character there is the option to disable the possibility of accessing the cheat menu mid-game in order to prevent yourself being tempted to cheat.
Mod manager QOL
A much needed QOL feature - the ability to uninstall all mods at once.
It's funny how such a seemingly obvious thing is not obvious at the time. The necessity of this became quickly apparent when we were DM'd by some dude asking the best way to uninstall his 150 mods, lol.
Credits
See the lovely folks behind Warpfrog!
You might also enjoy the credits video as a little chronology of the game development. Nostalgia time!
Localization
The game supports 11 languages in total; English, French, German, Spanish (EU), Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Thai, Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional.
About the SDK
An update SDK is coming! Modders will still be able to make mods as they did in U12 in the meantime, but 1.0 SDK will have some nice additions such as be the ability to make mods for Crystal Hunt itself; creating new skill tree branches for example.
If a modder has a whole modded skill tree, it should slot nicely in with ours and pro-modders could even go so far as adding description text and tutorial clips to match the vanilla skills style. ːsteamdanceː
What's Next?
Is this really "the end"?
Only of Early Access! Blade & Sorcery's major content development and roadmap are now complete but we will continue to support the game with bugfix patches, optimizations or QOL stuff, even when working on our next game, which will be made using our new and much improved ThunderRoad 2 framework.
In the coming weeks we are likely to be cranking on patches for 1.0 bugs that the community will inevitably unearth. The emphasis will be getting the game into the best and most stable condition it can be.
This will be the best case scenario for modders too, as without any major updates disrupting the modding scene it means your mods will no longer need updating and we will hopefully have a lovely modding renaissance period.
You have now reached the bottom of this very long news; the year is 2034 and The Elder Scrolls VI is about to be released any year now. ːwftogrinː Thanks for reading!
On behalf of KospY and the Warpfrog team, our sincerest thank you to our players for giving us your time, your support, and sending us your good vibes over all the years of Early Access.
Now, go play some Blade & Sorcery! We are just gonna rest our eyes...