With 11.3, players can now choose from a variety of origin ethnicities, and choose from a wide range of skin tones and hair colours, with secondary colours available too.
At the moment we have limited hairs (mostly Madene style), beards and player faces to choose from, so this will be a constant WIP for our modeler, adding face/hair content any time they get a chance.
We had wanted to add these background options and skin tones for ages, but we also wanted to add something a bit nuanced by putting in the work to create lore for the B&S, so in that sense this is also our first pass at bringing lore to the world of Blade & Sorcery.
To give some context to the player origins, here is the world map for our B&S fantasy world of Byeth.
Our game mostly takes place in the Kingdom of Eraden (the location of Outpost Dungeons), so anyone who is not Eradian would be a traveler or adventurer in these lands. Eraden is a lush land of rolling green hills and farmlands, while some of our arena maps (Arena, Canyon) are located across the sea in the desert Kingdoms of the Khar-Tib; an existential crisis looms for the Eradian Kingdom as the splintered warlords of Khar-Tib have begun uniting under one banner... but we won't get into this too much right now. ːwftogrinː
We have a lot of good lore content written already for each nation - their histories, motivations and agendas, but for now we are withholding it until closer to Crystal Hunt, because it will all make more sense tied into that. So for now this map is just to give you some flavour for player origins.
As we have always hammered, B&S will not have any kind of narrative storyline for the player, but we are striving to make a rich lore for our world in Crystal Hunt mode, which could be revealed passively to the player in-game.
Our dream would be to make our world dense IP, with room for many stories and adventures, creating a coherent universe that makes sense for the player; we are really aiming to push that immersive, anti-gamey vibe that a player in VR feels immersed in another world, and not just a video game.
This now largely wraps Update 11. There is some possibility that we could push an 11.4 patch at some point which may be just some content for U11, but we will see.
In the meantime, our plan is to drop the long awaited "Road to U12" news sometime soon, which will go over the significant damage U11's delays did to the roadmap, and to inform you guys of our reworked plan of attack to get to 1.0 and Crystal Hunt; we know you guys have been waiting a long time for this, so thank you for your patience! We should have some juicy things to share in the "Road to U12" news.
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Update 0.11.3
Features
- Added new character origin ethnicities (only for player)
- Reworked the character customization UI
- Added more colors and new haircuts for character customization
- Added the home local map, to fast travel toward the world map
Changes / Enhancements
- Update handle icon and add interactive scrollbars to the item and wave spawner books
- Wearables have changed internally in regard to edit mode, some mods using this may break
Fixes
- Fixed Post-Processing Profiles not being applied when changed on the options menu, with non-English languages selected
- Fixed a few localization issues
- Fixed culling issues in a few dungeon rooms
- Fixed collision issues with some walls in dungeons
- Fixed mirror highlighter that may stay enabled when it should not
- Fixed some door gap between dungeon room
- Fixed some audio sources not being affected by the options volume audio sliders
- Fixed options audio sliders numeric value not showing the correct value after dragging the slider
- Fixed Pointer not swapping when changing side in menu book
- Fixed armour still being editable when disabling edit mode on the mirror
