Oachkatzlschwoaf?

Yep, Oachkatzlschwoaf!

You might ask yourself: What’s an Oachkatzlschowaf? For those of you who aren't familiar with German - there is a huge difference in the accent and dialects across Germany and Austria. I'm from northern Germany, but most of our dev team is from Austria - so it even took me a while to understand the word. If you speak German, a good trick is to try pronouncing the word veeery slowly. Alternatively, you can ask a friend from Austria or Bavaria. If neither of those are an option for you… It's an [spoiler]“Eichkätzchenschweif”, a squirrel’s tail.[/spoiler] The word is jokingly used to test a person’s German skills in Austria and Bavaria.

Why are we talking about this? As we've already mentioned before, we work in sprints. A sprint usually lasts two weeks. The tradition of giving each of these sprints a catchy name has been established since last year. For example, the sprint that ended last week is called “Church” and the current sprint is called “Holy Moly”.
“Oachkatzlschwoaf” was a very special sprint. It went pretty much exactly from the launch of the hotfix patch EA 0.9.16.5 on December 21st to January 20th, so it lasted exactly one month. Despite the Christmas holidays and absences due to the cold that is common in winter, we managed to finish a lot of tasks. Finally, the most beautiful moment was when the church interiors were installed and the first NPCs went in to pray.

By the way, if you have a great idea for a sprint name, please send it to MrHome@thqnordic.com with the subject "Sprint Name Suggestion" ;-)

But now to the good news of this DevDiary: All features of patch EA 0.9.17 have been implemented and the patch is in our Stabilizing environment, in which, as you as loyal readers already know, intensive testing is carried out and only bugs will be fixed. In addition to fixing bugs in EA 0.9.17, the team is already doing initial work on the upcoming patch.

Our conservative guess right now is that patch EA 0.9.17 will be released next week!

By now you might know from the previous DevDiary what will be in patch EA 0.9.17: the interiors for the churches, a priest you can interact with, more objects you can interact with and the wedding ceremony.
What else can you expect in our upcoming patch?

We have improved the tooltips of all actions: Actions that may or may not be permitted by law continue to display "illegal" or "legal", all other actions no longer have this information as it is not necessary. In addition, you can now see in the tooltip how your dynasty's moral alignment changes when you use the action. Alignment is a prerequisite for later joining a guild. We will do something more with the guilds - together with the arsenal - in the following patch.

We delved deeper into the pathfinding system and found the cause(s) for characters sometimes disappearing into the ground or taking strange off-road paths. That was quite a big change, which among other things also required that we had to put our hands on the road networks in all maps... Even if we couldn't possibly find all the causes, they should have become much rarer now.

In the last few weeks we have received increasing reports of problems with the multiplayer mode. We've been trying to figure out what's causing this and we found and fixed several possible issues. After the patch has been launched, we will need your help: please let us know if your problems have been fixed or if they are still occurring. Thank you!
Another big topic in the community over the last few days and weeks has been that some players were no longer able to save the game. We might have found a good solution for all players. In addition you will receive a notification if there are problems with saving and you will be able to set your custom save game folder if you wish to do so.

Finally, let's say a few words about the patch's feature set:
We've put the biggest chunk of work into the cutscene system, which is new from the ground up. Remember the old, static wedding cutscene and the orphan adoption cutscene? Good. You can forget them :-) Because with EA 0.9.17, both the adoption and the wedding will take place in the interior of a church. So you will be able to see your own wedding and adoption with all characters involved, as well as those of all other human and AI players.
This also means that from now on you have to get engaged before you can get married. Oh yes: you can now also marry “on the spot” and skip the wedding ceremony, however, without getting the bonus of just being married.

Another new feature in the patch is that dialogue options of your active character will open automatically - you no longer have to click on the notification at the top of the HUD.

There is more in the patch, of course, including a good chunk of bug fixes. Please be patient. The patch is coming soon!

Your The Guild 3-Team