These are the Patch Notes for The Exiled version 1.4 that will be released with the start of our Season #6 game servers (August 10th until September 6th 2017). Please check out our list of known issues before playing and reporting bugs.

This month sees the initial launch of our Survival Mode rule set. You can learn more about survival mode here and about our reasoning for the update here.

Note: To properly test Survival Mode we are deactivating the 7-day-trial restrictions for Season #6.That means that everybody will be able to play the full season, even if you did not buy a Supporter Pack.

New Features

• Limited Availability: All game worlds are available for exactly 3 hours per day.
  
• Limited Lives: All characters have a limited amount of lives. You lose one every time you die in the game. Lifes refill every 24 hours. New players will have increased lifes and decreased refill timers.
  
• Thirst: In order to survive you need to find water. Find a Well on the world map in order to quench your thirst.

Game World Availability

European Game World

• from 17:00 UTC // 19:00 Germany // 20:00 Moscow
  
• to 20:00 UTC // 22:00 Germany // 23:00 Moscow
  
• and then every day at the same times for 30 days

American Game World

• from 00:00 UTC (Friday) // 5 PM PDT // 21:00 Brazil // 8 PM ET
  
• to 03:00 UTC (Friday) // 8 PM PDT // 00:00 Brazil (Friday) // 11 PM ET
  
• and then every day at the same times for 30 days

Thank you for supporting The Exiled, do not hesitate to share your feedback with us!

Sincerely,
Your The Exiled team

Hello everybody,

as announced in June we are nearly ready to start testing Survival Mode. On Thursday, August 10th we will launch two new game worlds for you, both running the new Survival Mode rule set.

Here are the start times:

European Game World

• from 17:00 UTC // 19:00 Germany // 20:00 Moscow
  
• to 20:00 UTC // 22:00 Germany // 23:00 Moscow
  
• and then every day at the same times for 30 days

American Game World

• from 00:00 UTC (Friday) // 5 PM PDT // 21:00 Brazil // 8 PM ET
  
• to 03:00 UTC (Friday) // 8 PM PDT // 00:00 Brazil (Friday) // 11 PM ET
  
• and then every day at the same times for 30 days

• Limited Availability: All game worlds are available for exactly 3 hours per day.
  
• Limited Lives: All characters have a limited amount of lives. You lose one every time you die in the game. Lifes refill every 24 hours. New players will have increased lifes and decreased refill timers.
  
• Thirst: In order to survive you need to find water. Find a Well on the world map in order to quench your thirst.

• Will there be other game worlds that are not running Survival Mode? No. This season we will exclusively test Survival Mode.
  
• Will the game be F2P during the season? Yes. We will disable the trial phase restriction and everybody will be able to play for the full 30 days, even without having bought a Supporter Pack.
  
• Will Survival Mode stay forever or become the new normal? We don't know yet. This depends on your feedback during the season.

Enjoy testing Survival Mode! We hope you like it and we are looking forward to hearing your feedback on the forums.

See you in the game!

Fairytale Distillery
(Alex & Sebi)

Hello everybody,

for a while now you have only really heard from us in forum posts and via support tickets. Sorry for the lack of info. We owe you a long blog post to explain what is currently going on in the distillery. Here it is:


In the weeks and months after launching The Exiled into Steam Early access we updated the game with larger updates for each new Season and smaller hotfixes in between. We added some new content, we tweaked the game balance and we fixed bugs. We also experimented a bit with our Trial period, giving out extra trial days and even making the trial last for a full month-long season.

But as anyone who can read a line chart[steamcharts.com] can see, The Exiled does not currently have a large enough player base to sustain the game, let alone our development team. So in order to make up for the missing game revenue we had to do what all game developers do in such situations - we take on contract work to pay for our bills while working on the game in the time we have left.

And that worked really well. Sebi and I went from being 100% completely broke to being able to pay our rent on time again. We're now in a good groove that allows us to combine consulting gigs with working on The Exiled indefinitely. And so we can finally get back to work on making the game as good as we always wanted it to be. After all, we are in Early Access and we still have a lot to do.


Since launching in Early Access we got a lot of feedback from our players. First of all: Thank you for that feedback! Even though sometimes emotions get a little heated and some Steam reviews are a bit hard to parse - you can still be sure that we read what you wrote and made sure to give your feedback thorough thought - especially those awesome, long forum posts where some of you spent a lot of time on analyzing the game. Thank you!

Most recently we invited you to take part in a Community Brainstorming. And while that was happening we did our own brainstorm sessions and jotted down a lot of ideas about where we should push the game in the future and how we can make sure to deliver the experience we want to create.

Before I get into the details of what we decided I want to address some very valid points of feedback and explain why we are NOT going to develop the game in that direction. Not because we do not think that these ideas are bad per se - they just do not fit our possibilities as a team and our vision for the game.

1.) "Make it more like a real MMORPG"'
We often get the request that we should do away with limited server lifetimes, add more PvE content to the game, more interesting mobs, quests, dungeons and a proper storyline, increase the size of the game worlds and add more concurrent players to each world. We are not going to do that. Why? One reason is purely practical and financial. We are a tiny, independent team with a very limited budget. We just cannot pay for the hundred of thousands of hours that go into the creation of large game worlds full of PvE content. We also think that we do not have to do that. There are already hundreds or large MMOs out there that deliver exactly that kind of "adventure in a huge world" experience. And we neither can nor want to compete with them on this experience. Both our team and our technology setup has not been designed for this approach and it never will be.

2.) "The game needs to be more responsive/lag-free/polished"'
This is a hard one for me because it is a very reasonable request. We are all used to an amazing amount of polish from the games we play these days. And while I would love to at some point have a game where each action feels as juicy as in a Diablo III and where the game controls are so amazingly tweaked as in Battlerite - this is again a tall order for a tiny team like ours. We will not be able to make sure that our game with its 100 to 200 concurrent players of pings between 30 and 300 feels as great as singleplayer game or one that has up to 4 players with perfect ping in its arenas. So while we will improve our experience here, we will also never hit the high bar that other games with different development focus can deliver.

Of course there were hundreds more suggestions that I have not discussed in detail here. Some of them are very doable and will make it into the game eventually. Others will never happen for similar reasons as stated above.

So now that we know what is not going to happen, let's talk about how The Exiled is going to change in the near future and why that is going to be awesome!


While The Exiled currently has many flaws, it also has some strengths. The one that we find the most important is that when the game works as intended, when you are in the game world for a few hours and you're engaged in PvP combat with and against other players, then it is a ton of fun. The times where PvE and gathering becomes a side-task and back-drop for your very immediate PvP experience is awesome.

The problem right now is that this experience is pretty rare. Many times we log into the game, run around, find only a few or no other players and then turn to farm some mob camp or collect resources. And that is just plain boring. So here is what we will do: In time for Season #7 (August) we will launch a new type of game worlds that we call "Survival Mode". Here is how they differ from the current game:

Focussed Action: Three Hours per Day

Survival Mode game worlds will only be accessible for players for a short time per day (currently we think 3 hours). How does that make the game better? Simple, it makes sure that we are all in the game at the same time and that finding opponents for PvP is way more likely. And this ensures that we do not have to fall back to the rather boring "farm some stuff" mode of being.

Yes, we have to get a lot of details right here. For example we need to get your feedback on during which times our game worlds should be online for each continent and time zone. A survey about this will go out to you soon. And yes, we know that some players will not like this idea at first. But please: Give it a try and then decide if you like the new experience or not. And yes: We will have an offer for those of you who just cannot play during the final time slots.

Limited Lives

Survival mode also comes with a gameplay tweak that you already know from our "world end" event: On Survival Mode worlds you will have a limited amount of lives. Every time your character dies, you lose a life. And if you run out of lives, you have to take a break from playing. You're out of the game. But of course we will make sure that lives are not suuuper scarce and that they refill over time (current plans: 6 lives max and you get 3 new lives per day). And we will make sure to give new players a lot of extra lives so they can find into the game (which requires some extra dying) before they run out of lives. This small change will make PvP a lot more adrenaline-filled as it currently is and that is exactly how we want the game to be.

Thirst: Get some water!

This feature was often requested by players but it only makes sense now in conjunction with the 3-hour time windows and Limited Lives: On Survival Mode worlds you will need to find an oasis at regular intervals and stock up on water. If you do not get to an oasis in time to quench your thirst you will slowly loose health and eventually die. And yes, oases will be relatively rare and you might actually have to negotiate or fight to access once. Which is great in our book since we want to have even more interaction between players in the game.


So this is it, now you know our plans going forward. Of course we're also working on some smaller and bigger bug-fixes, performance improvements and balance tweaks. But Survival Mode will be our focus for the coming months. We will release more detailed info about it over the coming weeks and we will make sure to discuss it with you in detail and take in your feedback. After all, this is Early Access. We know that big changes like this are sometimes painful but we're also committed to being here and to discuss it in detail with you.

So please make sure to head over to the forums and talk to us about Survival Mode.

See you in the game!

Fairytale Distillery
(Alex & Sebi)

These are the Patch Notes for The Exiled version 1.3 that will be released with the start of our Season #4 game servers (May 18th until June 14th 2017). Please check out our list of known issues before playing and reporting bugs.

This month a lot of our dev time was spent on upgrading the project to the latest version 5.6 of the Unity game engine powering the game client. This is going to improve performance for many players and fix a lot of smaller bugs with rendering. It will also make future development easier for us.

Note: With Season #4 we are activating the trial period restriction again. So if you have played The Exiled for more than seven days you'll be required to purchase one of our three supporter packs to continue playing.

Technology Changes

• Updated the game to Unity 5.6 which should increase performance and fix a number of bugs.

Balancing Changes

• Doubled all settlements' caravan storage capacity.
  
• Increased the world map visibility range for high-level meteors and carcasses.
  
• EU primetime is now an hour earlier.
  
• The siege time window has been slightly reduced.

Usability Changes

• The "join a clan" popup now shows the current server of each clan.
  
• The whisper tab will now always show the "*" sign when you have an unread whisper.
  
• Updated the descriptions for Meditate and Deflective Shield.

Map Changes

• Fixed a settlement layout where a siege flag could be captured from outside a wall.

Bug Fixes & Miscellaneous

• Fixed a bug that allowed settlement gates to be displaced.
  
• The clan details window now correctly states if a clan is recruiting or not.
  
• The character window now properly shows 3 armor skill slots at level 9.
  
• Link buffs now end when you remove the link skill from your skillbar.
  
• Players can no longer format chat text.

Thank you for supporting The Exiled, do not hesitate to share your feedback with us!

Sincerely,
Your The Exiled team

These are the Patch Notes for The Exiled version 1.2 that will be released with the start of our Season #3 game servers (April 20th until May 17th 2017). Please check out our list of known issues before playing and reporting bugs.

Unlimited Free Trial during Season #3: In order to make it easier for new players to get into The Exiled we have decided to get rid of the 7-day trial period during Season #3. Yes, that means that you and all of your friends can play The Exiled for free for the coming four weeks. Just start the game and you're in. You can (and should) still buy a Supporter Pack to unlock more character slots and get unique visuals for your character but it is not required anymore to play the game.

Open Clans: We have changed the clan system to allow for three new recruiting states. "Accepting Applications" is the default and it works as before: Applicants can message clan leaders and recruiters in order to be sent a clan invite. "Not recruiting" means just that - there will be no way to get in touch with the clan. And "Open" means that everybody will be able to join your clan at the click of a button without needing an invite. We also added a window notifying new players of the most active clans they could join.

Balancing Changes

• Fewer meteors, carcasses and caravans will now be spawned but they will carry much more loot. This should lead to more competition between players.

Usability Changes

• Entering your email is not mandatory anymore to start playing. You should still do it to unlock a new pet, the Grey Snapper.
  
• Added a proper error message for when you are trying to equip gear you cannot use.
  
• The party channel now also supports in-game voice chat.
  
• Added new UI elements for map unlocks, donation points and city centers.
  
• Made sure that target calling [T] now works both in clans and parties (parties are preferred).
  
• The "called target" arrow is now much more visible.
  
• There can now be only one "called target" [T] per clan and party.
  
• You can now see your party members when they are in tall grass and you are not.
  
• Player names in the Help chat channel are now colored again and not just pure white.

Map Changes

• Added a Rare Mob that drops Healer ability sigils.

Visual and Audio Changes

• Renamed all Rare Mobs with names befitting our game lore.
  
• Fixed some missing sound effects (bind to tree, open/close gates).
  
• Added new attack and death sounds for non-humanoid mobs.

Performance Changes

• Reduced the density of tall grass in lower quality settings.

• Made sure that the new cloth-wearing mobs properly get tracked for opportunities.
  
• Fixed a bug where sometimes players would see the old login screen instead of Steam.
  
• Made sure that new players do not get the stars (ranking system) in the tutorial.
  
• Fixed a bug where you would sometimes would get a tutorial server with very high ping.
  
• The server end boss now has a health bar that actually updates when she gets damaged.
  
• Fixed a bug that visually removed (de)buff icons for characters outside of your view range.
  
• Fixed a bug that still displayed (de)buff icons created by links even once those links were broken.

Thank you for supporting The Exiled, do not hesitate to share your feedback with us!

Sincerely,
The Exiled Team

Hello everybody.

In order to make it easier for new players to get into The Exiled we have decided to get rid of the 7-day trial period during Season #3.

Yes, that means that you and all of your friends can play The Exiled for free for the coming four weeks - starting on Thursday. Just start the game and you're in.

You can (and should) still buy a Supporter Pack to unlock more character slots and get unique visuals for your character but it is not required anymore to play the game.

Season #3 will start on Thursday, April 20th at 3 PM CEST with a completely fresh set of game servers and a bunch of cool games changes - expect patch notes on Wednesday.

Cheers!

Fairytale Distillery
(Sebastian & Alex)

Dear Players,

Our Season #2 is starting and it brings a lot of fun with it!

• BR - Papagayo
  
• EU - Mistral
  
• US - Hurricane

• Party System: You can now form parties with other players you meet in the game. That means you can share XP and see each other on the world map without having to be in the same clan (or any clan). Party members will also (like clan members) be preferred target for support abilities like heals.
  
• Diplomacy System: Clan leaders and managers can now add other clans to a "friend" and "enemy" lists. Clan members will then see those friend and enemy tags and be able to easily recognize your clan's status with another clan. These tags are NOT visible to anyone outside of your clan. They are one-directional (the other clan can choose a different status for you).
  
• The Healer: Added the Healer (Cloth) armor class to the game with lots of new abilities. The healer is still work-in-progress and will be balanced based on your feedback. It comes with a new ability type - links - that should open a lot more gameplay options for team-players who like a supportive playstyle.
  
  And of course, we fixed a lot of annoying bugs! Do you want to know more details? Visit our Patch Notes 1.1
  
  This season will run from March 23rd till April 19th, will you survive?!
  
  Thank you for supporting The Exiled, do not hesitate to share your feedback with us!
  
  Sincerely,
  The Exiled Team

These are the Patch Notes for the version 1.1 for the start of our Season #2 game servers (March 23rd 2017). Please check out our list of known issues [forum.the-exiled.co] before playing and reporting bugs.

These Patch Notes are available on the following languages:

• English[forum.the-exiled.co]
  
• French[forum.the-exiled.co]
  
• German[forum.the-exiled.co]
  
• Italian[forum.the-exiled.co]

Your language is not listed? Would you like to contribute? Click here![www.the-exiled.co]

To know the details of this update, please look at the list below:

• Party System: You can now form parties with other players you meet in the game. That means you can share XP and see each other on the world map without having to be in the same clan (or any clan). Party members will also (like clan members) be preferred target for support abilities like heals.
  
• Diplomacy System: Clan leaders and managers can now add other clans to a “friend” and “enemy” lists. Clan members will then see those friend and enemy tags and be able to easily recognize your clan’s status with another clan. These tags are NOT visible to anyone outside of your clan. They are one-directional (the other clan can choose a different status for you).
  
• The Healer: Added the Healer (Cloth) armor class to the game with lots of new abilities. The healer is still work-in-progress and will be balanced based on your feedback. It comes with a new ability type - links - that should open a lot more gameplay options for team-players who like a supportive playstyle.

• Addressed the “gank ping pong” problem where players could be kept KO for unlimited amounts of times:
  1.) You can now only be ganked one time while KO after having been knocked out.
  2.) When ganked close to your bind point you will spawn at a randomly selected bind point, not always at the same one.
  
• Added storage containers to player-owned workshops.
  
• Reduced the effect of playtime on the player ranking system (stars).
  
• Made sure that more white and black pigments drop in the game world, especially for new players.

• Added a “camera lock” option to the control menu (J) that centers the camera on your character, disregarding mouse movement.
  
• Added a new settings menu (ESC) and moved all settings there plus the option to exit the game.
  
• Streamlined the layout of the control settings menu.
  
• Unified the character name and map marker colors for your character (white), clan members (green) and party members (teal).
  
• Added a “open to everybody” button so you can easily share meteorites and carcassess with other players.
  
• Clan and party invites now require one click, removed the need to press (ESC).
  
• All hotkeys in info texts are now highlighted in green.
  
• Added a help text that explains the ranking system (stars) the first time it appears.
  
• Clan and party members are now visible anywhere on the world map, even in unexplored areas.

• Added more exploration music to the game, tied to the swamp biome.

• Improved audio performance through streaming.

• Fixed a bug where a loot window would flicker many times when walking away from a mob’s corpse.
  
• Fixed a bug that sometimes showed your character list as empty even though you had one or more characters.
  
• Fixed a bug that showed the “error 418” popup unnecessarily often to some players.
  
• Made sure that players could not get stuck outside of the world map.
  
• Fixed a bug that prevented the fame reward thumbnails in the customize menu from showing sometimes.
  
• Fixed a lot of small localization and UI issues.
  
• Fixed a bug where even at 0% volume voice chat was still audible.

Thank you for supporting The Exiled, do not hesitate to share your feedback with us!

Sincerely,
The Exiled Team

Today is the final story timeline release. For those that haven’t followed along, we have been releasing bits of the story and lore behind The Exiled weekly, leading up to last week’s launch.


This week, we are going to cover the current state of the world. Just like every week, we are also giving away a Steam key from our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/the.exiled.game/). Make sure you follow our Facebook page as we will be asking a question that’s relevant to today’s post in the near future. If you answer the question correctly, you’ll be entered into a random drawing for the Steam key.

Below are links to all the story timeline posts until now:

- Story Introduction: http://www.the-exiled.co/post/156941147702/story-introduction-and-pre-launch-giveaway-news

- The Past - Part 1: http://www.the-exiled.co/post/157199335479/story-timeline-the-past


- The Past - Part 2: http://www.the-exiled.co/post/157494434256/story-timeline-the-past-part-2

We hope you’ve enjoyed learning more about the history behind The Exiled and we look forward to growing our game with you, during its time in early access.

Fairytale Distillery Team


We in the Mekar valley are sealed off from the rest of the world by Katakan. It is a place of desolation, corruption and sour waters.

It is inhabited by us, the Outcasts. Some are here because they fell foul of the merchant’s council of Katakan. Some are here because heavy bribes were paid to make them disappear. Some chose to be here - some seek adventure and fortune, some seek old friends and vanished relatives.

The Outcasts cluster in crude settlements, some larger than the others. Although there is lawlessness, a rough justice prevails, ever since the Treaty of the Hollow allied the major settlements.

Despite these alliances, the valley is by no means a safe place. There are patrols of the Katakani, out to steal resources or to slaughter rebels. And there are older, stranger things; once-people, the Revenants, the Sasar. These are remnants of the Mekari, twisted and changed by the strangeness of the land. Monstrous things, apparently without intellect, acting on instinct and hostile to any who walk their lands.

Then there are the Keepers. These strange creatures appeared only this year. They are hooded, robed, and faceless, and seem to be shades of a sort - any who have tried to strike them say that their weapon merely passes through. Yet they are not hostile. They do not seem to talk, but are aware of the Outcasts. It is said that sometimes, if an Outcast comes to death by mischance, the Keeper will bring them back to life. Some people believe that these creatures are servants of the gods. Others that they are demons. Those people brought back by the Outcasts are named Kai-nol, Empty Ones, and some settlements treat them with respect and awe; others with terror and disgust.

Flux has become a de facto currency within the Valley; those skilled in the arts of the use of Sigils and Flux use it to reshape their abilities, while others use it as a base for strengthening other more mundane materials for building and other crafting.

The Katakani patrols have increased in numbers. The city’s defences around the dam and the valley walls have grown thick and strong. The Katakani have heard the legends... somewhere in the valley the Exile is building an army of superlative warriors with blue marks on their skin. Dian Batari and her cohorts are now maneuvering to declare open war on the valley - to strip it open for its resources, to destroy Rukh and her revolutionaries, and to rip out the strange magical secrets which will let them use the Sigils.

It’s up to the Exile and her Outcasts to stop them.