Let me preface this by saying that I drafted this ~5 days before the previous update went out due to the delay in dropping the Horseman Hunter Pass. Let's get into it.
Looking at my calendar between now and the end of the year, I definitely don't have time to do anything more than I've done so far content wise. I finished the main thing - the end of this chapter's story, the ending sequences of Cross of Auria.
I may still poke at Yeul's Castle going into 2026, but I think development time would be better served creating a complete experience for the next game - one that doesn't need content updates or DLCs. I already prepared a project file for CoA2 and scrapped every enemy, troop, most items, many skills, many repetitive or unused states, and overall reduced the engine maximums back to their defaults. Unfortunately, I'm still experiencing crashes so there's a fair chance that if I do end up making big pushes with CoA 2, it may not be on the RMMV engine. I had hoped to reuse core locations such as the main cities and already fleshed out dungeons while focusing on adding all new content and new interactions/quests/etc. If I end up swapping engines, I'll have to redraw the world map. With that being the case, I might reconsider it being a direct successor to CoA. Who knows - we'll have to see.
Headless Hunter Pass is now available on the Steam store. This offers one of the most difficult challenges created for CoA with the Horseman himself, who then becomes a repeatable fight in the Veil. This was prepared ~3 weeks ago as part of version 7.2.
I kept doing the art wrong and getting the store page denied for the DLC, so it's still not approved yet. In that time, I made some postgame superbosses with no attached achievement, just the satisfaction of beating them if you can. They are the first enemies to have shields potentially in the millions, but they each drop valuable gear for defeating the rest of them. In total, there are 14 discoverable post-orcWar bosses throughout the game, with a final 15th spawning after the previous 14 are defeated. These enemies are completely untested and will probably make you pull your hair out. Good luck! If you beat some of them - let me know! With the release of these enemies, the version rolls up to 8.0 and includes data from the 7.2 release, including lowering required levels for various prestige classes.
So, this is it. We're entering limited service mode moving forward. I will still keep a copy of the most recent version of the game saved so I can squash out any bugs you all find, so long as they either break canon or the game. If it's just some random artifact that's curious but not damaging, I probably won't come back to fix it. You can absolutely let me know here on the Steam forums and I'll take a look regardless of what it is.
The amount of time I put into making this game cannot be accurately calculated. I spent days working on spreadsheets that you all have never seen, weeks storyboarding before I started, and of course the fixed 3806.3 hours I have in the RMMV engine plus 171.9 hours in just this branch of the game itself since I started working on it in 2017.
Thank you all for playing Cross of Auria.
I hope to see you in the next one.
//Hardytier
Update Info
With the upgrade from previous PC to new PC, I no longer have the ability to read or create RTF files, so the PatchNotes file usually included in the game files will not be included moving forward and the way I write patch notes, if I include them at all as a post, will be more like this than they have been in the past.
Game version -> 7.2 (Horseman Hunter Pass) -> 8.0 (Postgame Bosses)
Class Trial now displays the requirements for Knight, similar to Pyromancer.
Reduced Pyromancer's Black Mage required level from 50 to 25.
Reduced Knight's Swordsman required level from 25 to 20.
Added 14 post-game discoverable bosses at level 75.
Added 1 post-game discoverable boss at level 100.
Includes functionality for Headless Hunter Pass, available immediately via View game page