KospY and the Warpfrog team worked their butts off on this one, guys. What was supposed to be "the little update" to bridge the gap between two larger updates, evolved into a huge, feature packed release of its own. ːpraisesunː
We appreciate all your patience for this update, and a huge thank you to all the beta testers who submitted robust feedback and bug reports; it was really helpful!
So let's get into it!
U11: The Home Update
New Home Exterior
The new home and exterior is finally done. As well as being awesome looking and fun to mess around in, this area will be the hub for Crystal Hunt in future updates.
Players will now find the map in a new location, outside the Home and down by the boat. When you return from a Dungeon run, you arrive back by boat and near the map. This is setting the stage for how it will be in Crystal Hunt mode.
There are two Easter Eggs hidden on the Home map; can you find them? ːwftogrinː
Tutorial
The Home map also has an extra purpose of serving as the tutorial map.
Blade & Sorcery has always been a game about discovery and experimentation; we always avoided dumbing things down for the player, and trust in the player to figure things out for themselves, and even find joy in those discoveries - sometimes we read comments about people realizing they can catch fireballs with telekinesis, or stab firey blades into stone, even after a year of playing, lol. But this is great!
But while discovery is still the case, we added a tutorial so that new players can at least learn the basics of the game, and understand some core concepts that might not be too obvious to a new player, like the inventory system.
Animation Overhaul
The White Whale! By Animation Overhaul, we are referring to a new combat system that attempts to make the combat less stilted, where in the old system the enemy is very clearly playing through an animation, you parry, he staggers, repeat.
Instead, the goal here was to try an make the combat feel more fluid with better back and forth parry and ripostes. The secondary goal is to increase the enemy's ability to defend themselves (still a major wip), and then the tertiary goal is to make all animations speeds uniform and set to a speed that is optimal; fast enough to be interesting, but not so fast that any reasonable player couldn't parry attacks.
Let me tell you, as you might imagine when dealing with physics, this is a nightmare task to nail! Please be aware that this is only the first of many iterations of Animation Overhaul, and this will be worked on all the way up to 1.0 release, tweaking, adding stuff, removing stuff, sometimes breaking, redoing, and so on. A huge component on it will be the feedback, and that can only be discovered over time.
Even now we are hyper-aware there is work to do; rangefinding is the big thing at the moment, and finding the balance between the AI wanting to be ready in defending themselves versus wanting to attack. As I say, it's a never-ending game of tweaking!
Oh and on the topic of animation overhaul, it is looking pretty cool in conjunction with death animations!
Stealth
This is one of those, "wasn't supposed to be a feature but players really wanted it so it became a feature" features, lol. Blade & Sorcery's history is now dotted with these type events. ːtmntleoː
Stealth in B&S U11 works by lightness, darkness, enemy FOV, and sound. Crouching is not a factor in the determination of the enemy spotting the player; crouching reduces your speed and slow-walking reduces your footstep volume, so you may still find it convenient for sneaking, however it's not essential as you can slow walk while standing.
To go along with your new sneaky stealthy persona, there is now the ability to stealth kill; killing the enemy without alerting nearby AI.
A slice to the neck will cause the enemy to die quietly, and you can also put your hand over their mouth to silence them when you grab them. Be sure to let them down gently so their clanging armour doesn't make a lot of noise!
You can also use this new muffle to do other stuff, like... well... this.
Stealth kills also look nice with death animations. ːsteamdanceː
New Magic
There is enough here that this could have been it's own update haha. U11 brings a slew of new spells and staff functions to finally round out magic.
For a start, all spells got a cosmetic upgrade.
Imbues are looking particularly nice, and now have better particles, trails and smoke effects.
Fire
Fire now has a merge effect at last: merging two fireballs will now create a fiery meteor that will explode and devastate a large area, sending enemy and objects hurdling. Be careful not to get caught in the blast!
A staff imbued with fire can now reliably sling a fireball from the crystal tip. Some of you guys may have discovered in older updates you could shoot a fireball from the staff as a little easter egg, but now it's officially a feature, and rather than shoot a fireball in a straight line, fireballs are 'slung' from the tip.
Easy to learn, difficult to master as with most things in B&S!
Slamming a fire imbued staff into the ground will trigger the Twin Firebolt effect. Firebolts will shoot from the staff and seek out the nearest enemy.
Lightning
To start, Lightning got a cosmetic upgrade of it's own, and arcs more chaotically now.
You might also notice that there are new conductivity mechanics with lightning. Electricity will bounce to nearby metal targets which can really ramp up the chaos when an enemy wizard is blasting lightning and everyone's sword lights up from the electricity bouncing between them!
For merging, Lightning now has a merge and it's insane! The Lightning Beam can be achieved by merging two lightning together, extending your arms and facing your palms outwards.
You will not appreciate how cool this is gonna make you feel until you experience it in VR. Prepare to annihilate!
Next up, one of my own personal favourites from the magic additions, the Lightning Arc! A staff imbued with lightning can now use this ability by simply pressing and holding the 'alt' button. A chaotic whip of electricity will extend from the staff and can be used to stun or even dismember!
Finally, a lightning imbued staff can utilize a slam effect. Slam the staff into the ground to trigger an AOE blast of electricity that will stun all surrounding enemy. Great for crowd control!
Gravity
Everyone's favourite spell got a little cooler. Live out some Ironman fantasies with the new Gravity Hover feature; while falling, activating gravity will allow the player to slowly glide in descent, kind of like a featherfall spell. It should bring a whole new element to how you think about navigating Dungeon rooms.
Similarly, you can also use the new Gravity Jump when traversing Dungeon rooms. Blasting gravity downwards will cause you to launch up in the air, which is useful for bounding over obstacles.
You could also use it to launch yourself forward, at your own peril... I'm sure we will see all sorts of creative fan videos with this, lol.
And last but certainly not least, a gravity imbued staff can utilize the Gravity Hammer feature.
While imbued, the staff can whip up objects and suspend them as though they were weightless, allowing the player to slam enemy with them or launch the object like a missile. It's insane fun.
New Systems
U11 is an update that is largely setting up the framework for stuff to come in Crystal Hunt, aka "Progression Mode". As such, we added a whole bunch of new systems that aren't being fully realized in a gameplay sense right now, but nonetheless they are fun to mess around with and see the direction the game is headed.
Clothing System
Blade & Sorcery now finally has a clothing system so that the player can change their outfits.
Armour for the player works in the same way armour works for the AI - armour will nullify slashing damage, but you can still take blunt damage from hits, or get hit on the gaps in your armour.
There are two ways to equip armour - the first is very simply via the book spawner, choose your armour and then equip.
The second and more immersive way is to equip armour via the mirror. When you visit the mirror in your Home, pull the little handle by the mirror to activate the footstool - you don't need to put your foot on the stool, this is simply to activate the clothing system.
Then you will see that when looking in the mirror, hovering your hand over body parts will reveal a white highlighter and you can simply grab or replace clothes by dragging and dropping.
As mentioned before, clothing would be one of the systems not full realized in the game right now, so for the moment there is no downsides to wearing heavy plate armour compared to light mage armour. This will very likely change in future updates, but for now the purpose of wearing a less protective armour is simply cosmetic / for roleplaying.
Inventory System
Players can now store small items such as potions, food, or torches in their inventory. This will not take up one of your precious weapon holster slots, so it makes taking potions into the Dungeons a lot more appealing!
To access the inventory, simply place your hand to your chest and press the spell button to open the inventory UI.
Navigate the inventory by rotating your hand like twisting a screwdriver. The concept here is to simulate a sort of rummaging around your inventory. You can interact with the menu via the trigger and grab buttons.
Also check out the options, because you can completely customize the inventory from look to function, or remapping the interaction buttons.
Doors System
Although just a framework and restricted to the Home for now, in the future we will be adding it into Dungeons.
So what can you do for now?
'Nuff said.
Water Interaction
Swimming is not a thing right now (should it be? let us know!) and travelling underwater has no mechanic attached to it, but we still wanted to show off how cool the underwater effects look in the game.
The water will react to players splashing around with their hands and weapons. Careful not to venture too far or you will drown!
Other Goodies
Graphics Improvements
As time goes on, we continue to support PCVR by pushing the envelope when it comes to VR graphics. We simply refuse to believe VR can't or shouldn't look awesome and detailed.
On top of optimized textures and beautiful new lighting, we also have actual 3d brickwork now... which is insane.. and makes it much cooler for climbing. Here is a before and after:
This could be it's own news, and well in fact it was! If you wanna read more detail on the graphics improvements or see more screenshots, check out this news. Do note that these changes only apply to Dungeons right now, but we want to / plan to bring them to Arena maps too.
New Dungeon Rooms
Although U11 was not intended to be an update that added a lot of new content, there are nonetheless a couple of new Dungeon rooms added for you to explore.
Canyon Map Rework
Perhaps a bit of a random surprise, but as a little bonus Canyon got a nice cosmetic and funhouse overhaul. There are now more interactable for your to smash your enemies with, including spikes and a water wheel.
Citadel Makeover
Citadel also got a nice cosmetic overhaul and looks much more interesting and beautiful now. There was also some performance optimization done on this map, so hopefully it is also running better.
New Weapons
Another nice little bonus; more weapons will come in future updates but in U11 we added a couple of small low tier weapons for your to mess around with,
Disarming
It was always the case that the player could lose their weapon via being disarmed, however this feature was a bit buggy in previous updates and led to many "Why do I keep dropping my weapon" threads.
Well consider this the 2.0 for disarming and hopefully the system will behave better this time!
Players can be disarmed if a weapon is yanked from their hand with enough force, or if it is "over-imbued" with electricity. That means you can no longer infinitely block lightning from enemy mages, but the reverse is true for enemies too!
But we know player disarming has always been a polarizing feature, so best of all, if you don't like to be disarmed you can simply disable it in the options. The feature is also now very clearly named in the options as "Player Disarm -> Allow/Disallow", and not the "Max Arm Length -> Block/Hold" as it was before, which was a bit confusing!
Zipline
This new item will always be in your inventory. With the latest advancements in medieval technology, no more sliding down ziplines by hand like some savage. ːcozydarkseerː
Post-Processing LUTS
I wanted to throw this small thing in the news because I think some people (like me!) will be really loving it - Blade & Sorcery now supports custom colour correction profiles! From subtle changes to dramatic changes, tweaking the colour can really give the game a whole new vibe.
We included a few options (high contrast is really nice imo) but we would anticipate modders will add more. ːsteamdanceː
Multi-language Support
We added support for a bunch of new languages. Currently we have English, French, German, Italian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai.
We will likely add more in the future, probably at 1.0 release.
QOL Options
Another small thing but worth mentioning; there are a whole bunch of quality of life options in the book so the player can customize their game how they like it. You can totally overhaul the Inventory UI, disable features like disarming, turn on or off avatar grunting noises, set QOL motion options like crouching toggle or click to jump, etc.
Choice is king!
Holdup, holdup, holdup...
Something is missing I hear you say... Yes, we are missing the character customization!
We mentioned some time ago that we were working on new faces to add to the game, so that the player could choose from a variety of ethnicities and skin tones. In fact it's technically all done - Our modeler has indeed made a variety of faces, hairs and skin tones for the player to finally have a choice of face and ethnicity.
But the reason it's not in U11 right now is that simply we were so crazy crushed with workload that we didn't have the time to actually incorporate our modeler's work into the game. And since everything else was done and there were no game-breaking issues, we didn't wanna delay the release anymore by inserting another feature that could add a bunch of extra bugs and add QA time. So we decided we can always add this content stuff in a patch later, and work on it / test it while everyone is enjoying U11 and there is less pressure.
Eventually we will have lore for these other ethnicities and nations, but for now it could simply be that players playing as these other ethnicities are adventurers from other lands in the B&S universe.
What's Next?
When U11 is launched and confirmed to be major issue-free, the first thing that will happen will be a collective sigh of relief from Warpfrog Studio, I can tell you that, haha.
Next for us will be fixing any minor issues in U11, although we are really hoping to not idle on U11 too long by releasing a bunch of U11.X patches. So probably you shouldn't expect too much other stuff to come to U11, with exception perhaps of the aforementioned character customization stuff.
But otherwise if we could move off U11 we could go straight onto working on U12 that would be great, since there is so much to do there and we lost so much time on U11 from the unforeseen delays and the beta.
In the coming days we will be reviewing the Roadmap to assess the damage U11 caused in terms of pushing back dates for final 1.0 release. Hopefully it's not too bad but we will update that in the near future once we have reviewed the situation.
Phew, a long news but hopefully a good one! KospY and the whole Warpfrog team hope you enjoy Update 11, and as always thank you guys for your continued love and support for our studio and our efforts in innovating VR through Blade & Sorcery!
_________________
Update 11 Full Changelog
Features
- Added home exterior
- Added tutorial
- Added player inventory, (run tutorial for explanation to how to use it)
- Added clothes changing (using home mirror or “Equip” in item book)
- Added edible food support (apple)
- Added doors and levers system (home only for now)
- Added some new weapons
- Added two new hair style
- Added multi-language support
- Added game translation for French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Chinese (traditional and simplified)
- Added muffling NPC with your hand to avoid doing noise
- NPC now react to touch, light, bodies, items being held with telekinesis, and other NPCs being held with telekinesis.
- Updated NPC combat animation and behavior for one-handed and two-weapon AI to be more dynamic, including parrying and riposting
- Added rock throwing ****to NPC when the player is not reachable
- Added water interaction with player hand and items
- Added underwater effects and drowning when player (or NPC) stay too long underwater
- Added new spell merge for fire (meteor) and lightning (ion beam)
- Added new magic abilities to fire, lightning and gravity imbued staff (press spell menu when handled to activate)
- Added new staff slam effect for Fire and lightning
- Lightning now chains between metallic objects, imbuing other weapons nearby
- Lightning can now have a chance to disarm NPC when their weapon is fully imbued
- Grabbing an NPC and casting the lightning spell will instantly shock them
- Added gravity hover, charging the Gravity spell while falling slows your fall
- When gravity push is aimed downwards or when you are airborne, it will push you in the opposite direction
- Added real-time lighting to spell charges
- Added effect and mana cost to telekinesis spin
- Allowed player to tele-grab NPC-thrown fireballs
- Staffs will now steal energy from NPCs when you hit them, recharging their current imbue
- Gravity bubble now have an effect on player
- Game now include game version and minimum mod version directly into the game executable (will be used by Vortex)
- Modder pdb files now loaded if available to help with modder debugging
- NPC are able to blink
- NPCs can now damage each other when they're far away from the player
Changes / Enhancements
- Canyon level update (new water + interaction, more details, misc changes and additions)
- Small touches and lighting changes to Ruins
- Updated character selection scene with new dungeon assets
- Added some new rooms to Dungeon
- New loading music
- Wave and item selector UI overhaul
- Improved gravity spell audio effects
- Reworked Citadel vicinity
- Improved NPC vision by increasing field of view and how well they can see you in the dark
- Crouching no longer impacts stealth (stealth influenced by light and darkness, sound, and enemy FOV)
- NPCs make less noise when killed in stealthy ways
- Grabbed NPCs now behave differently when grappled so they don't try to move and such like before
- Archers stow their bows when their targets are too close
- Warzone is added back on the wave selection menu
- Improved probe based lighting on characters to be more uniform
- Improved stealth mechanics: AI detection has been fine tuned for a better experience
- Added an option to slide with A / X on Oculus touch or touchpad press on Index (so using staves is easier by using trigger)
- Dual-wielding NPCs swap their left hand weapon to their right hand if they drop their right hand weapon
- Improved staff gravity shockwave audio
- Touchpad press is now used to use staff on Index controller.
- Spells and imbues now stop when in water
- Moved further invisible walls near ocean in some dungeon rooms
- Removed ocean kill zones in some dungeon room
- Improved and changed some dungeon room layout and spawns
- Chickens’ wings are now physical parts of their body
- Added handles to most props
- Show player characters in the menu from the most recently played to the least recently played
- Reworked torch model
- Weapons now lose imbue slower
- Lightning stuns metal-armored enemies for much longer
- Increased arm stretch length to avoid hand disconnecting from handles when too far
- Improved spell haptics
- Small improvements to dying animations
- Improved collision performance
- Improved effect spawning performance
- Clarified the “Max arm length reached behavior” option description, and set the default to “Hold”.
- Removed bloom threshold and tonemap options. Added post process profiles options instead.
- Boosted the damage and force behind the player kick.
- Added audio slider in menu option to increase or reduce the slow motion sound effect
- New “Clean visible dropped items” option. Which will periodically clean up dropped items even when you can see them, except for ones in your telekinesis range.
- When cleaning dropped items, only duplicate of the same item will be despawned first, then any will be despawned until the number of items is under the max dropped items limit
- Added kick audio
- Added new jump audio
- Added a compensation force to the player’s hands to stop them from dragging behind when you walk
- Oar can be put in back holster
- Minor balance changes
- Added version revision, game version changed from 11.0.X to **0.**11.0.X (so change mod manifest jsons!)
- Removed the fake game.json that was used by Vortex in the default folder to avoid confusion and errors (Vortex is going to check executable instead)
- Json file loading time improvements
- Optimized ocean quality
- Optimized item spawner book performance
- (Modding) ItemModuleEdible/EventManager now has consume events
- (Modding) Added code events for telekinesis spell OnTarget, OnUntarget, OnGrab, OnUngrab,
- OnSpinStart, OnSpinEnd, OnPull, and OnRepel
- Gravity hover now only activate when palms are down
- Improve game text translations
- Improved NPCs walking down slopes
- Low quality underwater effects will now apply when quality is set to low
- Fall damage threshold is lower
- Added volume to snap/unsnap in ItemData json
- Added blunt damage to arrows
- Improved performance of Human/Armor collisions
Fixes
- Fixed NPCs ganging up to attack corpses
- Fixed NPCs alerting themselves by knocking over items, and also fixed NPCs getting alerted by sounds from friendly NPCs they can see
- Fixed NPCs not hearing player weapons hitting certain surfaces
- Fixed chicken duplication glitch which would spawn broken chickens in the home
- Fixed a bug where the player could take damage from NPC weapons well after their attack is finished
- Fixed telekinesis-grabbing an item on two handles, then releasing with both would cause it to float
- Fixed friendly NPCs treating the player as an enemy if the player makes sound which sets their alertness too high
- Fixed a couple bugs with spectator mode which would cause NPCs to spam the log with errors
- Fixed NPCs being unable to move if trying to test the game without a headset on
- Fixed player hand phasing through NPC when grabbing/ungrabbing their parts
- Fixed static items with penetration capabilities having a small chance to move when NPCs are impaled
- Fixed Jar2H json causing hand to break
- Fixed navigation issues in maps
- Fixed broken handles making your hand become unresponsive (detailed log now displayed with how to fix)
- Fixed loading a level before Warpfrog logo ends doesn’t allow user to use any UI (Books and Menu)
- Fixed some NPC parts not changing colour with SetColor (sclera/iris/etc)
- Fixed an issue disabling kick foot collision when grabbing an item
- Fixed Gravity merge bubble not picking up NPCs unless the player was close
- Fixed the game attempting to break spacetime when you try to drop an item that has a holder - such as a quiver - inside itself.
- Fixed missing physics material on Canyon bridge causing no sounds when hit and causing fireballs to glide across the surface.
- Fixed imbue effects generating a VFX mesh every time a weapon was imbued
- Fixed lag spike when imbuing weapons
- Fixed loadlevel during load loading another level inside the other.
- Fixed thrown items not been cleaned up when they go outside the map / far away from the player. Like fireballs being shot out the map.
- Fixed a variety of visual and render order bugs
- Misc fixes and improvements
- Fixed hard crash to desktop on large number of catalog items (big mod packs)
- Fixed particle pooling not growing efficiently
- Fixed armour detection sometimes failing on edges
- Fixed ocean flickering when changing options
If you are coming from Beta 4, more fixes here (the changelog was too large to fit within the Steam news wordcount, lol -- LINK
