Rivals Beta Released!

RIVALS COMBAT BETA NOW AVAILABLE!

It’s finally here! You can now find and fight your rivals. They won’t go down easy though and will put up a good fight, with mages from each school of magic bringing it’s own unique challenges and strategies to the battlefield. We released the beta on Friday of last week, and so far early feedback from the weekend has been positive.

Here are a few of the new things that come with this update:

• New enemy types to fight: Fire Mage, Ice Mage, Earth Mage, Storm Mage. Each mage type has it's own unique challenges to face
  
• New option to attack your rival when you meet them
  
• Rivals are now more difficult to locate. NPCs will not easily divulge their locations.
  
• Bribe or schmooze Conclave Chapterheads to discover the location of your rivals
  
• New NPC greetings - now NPCs comment on you based on a variety of factors (your appearance, their relationship with you, how long ago they last saw you, etc)
  
• Gain additional legacy bonuses for eliminating a rival
  
• You can now hunt down and kill your primary rival in the Mabren's Tower quest after you've completed the quest
  
• New combat arena - Town Street
  
• New death animation over rival portrait after killing that rival
  
• Plus other improvements and bug fixes
  

You can now try out the new Rivals update by switching to the Beta branch in Steam. We’ll be Beta testing it for at least the next week or two for some extra polishing and optimizing before we release it to the main Steam branch.

Emily and Alex, our new hires from last week (with some support from Phil), will be taking on the Rivals beta through to it's official public release. If you try it out, let us know what you think, we’d love to get your feedback on it!

EXPLORATION:

Mark and the rest of the team are continuing to plow forward on the next big Exploration update. For those of you who ready our last weekly dev update, this list hasn’t changed much, but we’re continuing to make progress on all of these areas:

Michal, James, Nolan, Mark - Exploration Events/Encounters.
Tyler - Revised Skill/Stat System
Zach - Dynamic Quests
Jessi, Phil, Jonathan, Andrey - Continuing on UI/UX Overhaul + Controller Support

OTHER NEWS:

By request of some in our Steam and Discord communities, we’re working on putting together a “Known Issues” list that will be publicly available on both the Discord server and the Wiki (which we can hopefully now put a little more attention too now that we’ve got some additional help).

Just a reminder, if you do try out the new Rivals beta, let us know what you think!