Adventurers,

The new 1.0.1.3 patch has now been pushed live. This provides many new fixes along with the contract negotiation system and character driven interactions amongst the party.

For the full patch notes you can find them here.

In continuing with bringing more life to the adventurers themselves below is the next work in progress features being added. All of the UI is still work in progress, but I wanted to give insight while working on the feature now. This feature will go live on the beta branch next week as I want to ensure there is enough content to ensure it doesn't feel stale.

For 1.0.2 another pass on the adventurers themselves is coming into the game.
In order to really solidify building stronger bonds, rivalries, and personal connections within the party the group will now react to shared victories, difficult choices, camp conversations, contracts, and the hardships of the road. Their personalities, morale, and opinions of one another shape unique events and consequences throughout your journey.

The morale losses and gains are still being tuned to ensure it is meaningful.
Every member can pursue their own ambitions. Choose character driven goals tied to combat, contract/town work, crafting, travel, healing, and relationship building. Then you have to ensure they achieve what matters to them to earn morale, strengthen bonds, and unlock unique traits. If this doesn't work well you can always abandon a goal at a cost and choose a new direction later.
Morale will expand its focus now shaping how the party performs and gets along. High morale improves energy recovery, combat accuracy, camp productivity, relationship gains, and negotiation rewards, while low morale makes those areas less effective and intensifies relationship setbacks. Morale can rise or fall through many means now, but the intention is for it to never remove player control or force companions to abandon the party.

There have been a lot of fixes and updates since launch. Thank you all for your enthusiasm, support and even criticism at times. The game has a lot of moving pieces and many layers so I appreciate the patience of everyone as there were a massive influx of new systems, new drivers, and overall hardware specs with the launch. I'm not a big company or even an indie with 20+ people so I appreciate all the patience truly.

Now having said that, those were the original promised features in 1.0 so now it's time to keep adding to the world and enhance things to the next level. Starting with some additional features tying in backgrounds and personalities more.



A new contract negotiation system has been added to town job boards. Before accepting a contract, you can now choose a party member to negotiate the terms and potentially change the reward, renown, town reputation, deposit cost, and even the danger level of certain jobs.
Negotiation is meant to be a gamble, not a guaranteed upgrade. The right character can improve a deal, but a bad negotiation can lower rewards, reduce renown, hurt town reputation, add extra enemies to kill quests, or affect party morale. Backgrounds now matter more when deciding who should speak for the party, and party members may react differently depending on how the negotiation is handled. Always choosing the bounty hunter for your negotiations can cause more enemies to appear as an example.

The adventurers now want things when they enter a town.
A request only appears when the game can actually justify it. Damaged gear triggers a repair ask. An empty armor slot prompts a trip to the blacksmith. Low morale brings up a round at the tavern. Exhaustion suggests the inn. Hungry horses, injuries you can afford to treat, an open roster slot with the coin to fill it they all have their own trigger along with some flavor text based on the personality of each member.

You can always refuse an ask as well, it just will cause some morale penalty. There is also a cooldown with these requests too so if you keep spamming town entry, you'll notice it start to spread out more and more over time. But if you have a lot of demands in the beginning you will see more requests early on.


For those who want an easier combat experience Easy mode has gotten even easier.
In the combat settings there is now "Less Enemies" making combat encounters have 33% less enemies along with "Less Health" 33% less enemy health. This should help those who just want to have a fun experience but feel too overwhelmed with all the powers and crowd control mechanics.

For those already started you can also just enable these options in the settings menu or disable them when you feel comfortable with the overall gameplay.

Level cap has been pushed to 18. This is in anticipation for another feature coming soon...

I don't expect this to be on the beta branch for more than a week to ensure it works properly but if you are interested you can jump in and test it out.