Protectors of the Light,

As both winter and Exile’s Return approach, our team has been hard at work adding new features and content. Let’s take a look at what we’ve achieved.

FACTION KEEPS

As players have ventured forth in Erodar and learned more about the world, we’ve sought to represent each faction’s overall identity more and more in Campaign and Survival.

Alongside Exile’s Return, players will start to see Order- and Volatist-specific Keeps throughout the Campaign, with these being used by default for Survival when playing as those Factions. Our existing Keep will serve as the base of Operations for Queen Aelis, Cyrus and their loyal band of rebels.

Below is a sneak peek of the Keeps to come for both the Order and the Volatists.

Order Tier 1 Keep



Order Tier 4 Keep



Volatist Tier 1 Keep



Volatist Tier 4 Keep



VO RECORDINGS

Additionally all throughout September our Audio, Narrative and Design Teams have been hard at work ensuring we have all the remaining VO ready to deliver a gut-wrenching Act III with Exile’s Return.

Previously, we had recorded all our VO Lines upfront when developing Flames of Retribution, with VO lines for Exile’s Return being added in as we created the final missions. This has been incredibly beneficial at ensuring we can achieve the look and feel of missions (with the correct VO in place) as we develop, but it also worked well to highlight any gaps along the way.

Throughout the development of Exile’s Return, our Design and Narrative teams found areas we wanted to include additional VO pick-ups for. This includes narrative gaps that make sense contextually to us as developers, but may not be so readily understood to players who haven’t been entrenched in the lore of Erodar for years – like we have.

This has kept us busy with the team reuiniting with our main cast to record additional lines, all in our quest to ensure we’re delivering the best possible conclusion to our players. As a tease of what’s to come, here's a snippet of the ever talented Peter Wicks, voice actor for Vizargo Oriah.

[previewyoutube=-wCjFqHI1m0;full][/previewyoutube]

For those of you interested in learning more about our VO Process and what it takes to bring a character to life, you can read more about this with our deep-dive into the Voice of Queen Aelis Syren.

FORMATIONS

Lastly, it’s high time we look at a feature that’s been long-requested by our players – and something we’ll have more to say about soon in its own dedicated blog post.

September has been a busy month for our Engineering Team as we look to further iterate and improve upon our Formations feature. This brings with it its own unique challenges due to the intricate relationship it has with unit pathfinding – another area that we’re actively working on to improve.

We’ll deep dive into the challenges this feature has posed and how we have planned to attack them soon, but for now, let’s leave you with a look at the work-in-progress feature of Formations currently.

Below you can see an example of Formations collapsing in to attack and rush enemies once within range of them and commanded to attack. Specific care has been made here to ensure we’re keeping ranged units safely behind their melee counterparts to provide players with a more efficient and safer means of combating the Nightmare threat without sacrificing nearly as many of their units.



Your units will try to maintain their formation as they navigate around terrain together - naturally there are plenty of edge cases to this, but we’re working to ensure even if they break formation they can return to rank and order upon reaching their targeted location.



PAX AUS 2023 AND SXSW SYDNEY

We’re looking forward to getting in front of our Australian fans at two upcoming events.

Visitors to PAX Aus 2023 can check out our panel, entitled Casting back the Veil to learn more about making the Age of Darkness: Final Stand Campaign. Taking place on Sun, Oct 8, 2023 at 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM in the Dropbear Theatre, GM Ryan McMahon will host devs and VO talent as we uncover exclusive BTS assets and more…

Additionally, Age of Darkness: Final Stand has been selected to be part of the first ever SXSW Sydney 2023. Our showcase is taking place Friday, Oct 20, 2023 at 12:15 PM - 9:00 PM at the Eddy Multipace, so please come along and check it out if you can.

That’s all for today, but expect more info as Exile’s Return continues to near…

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We greatly appreciate everyone who has taken the time to let us know about these bugs and crashes you’ve encountered. If you come across any bugs or crashes in the future, please report them to us either through the Steam forums, our Discord server in the ‘player-support’ channel or using the in-game bug reporting tool.

Till next time Protectors of the Light…

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Have a question about the game? We have a handy FAQ we’ve posted on the Steam forums that you can view. If your question hasn’t been answered there, we’ll be doing our best to keep up with questions here, on the forums and our Discord server.
Speaking of which, you can also chat with our team and ask them questions on our official Discord server here!

Age of Darkness: Final Stand