Progress update

Hey community!
It’s been a while since we updated you folks on what we are doing, but today we break the silence with what the next magic school will be and to no one’s surprise it’s Spiritism!
We do not have much to show you, but we have tons to write about!
At first glance the choice of Spiritism as the next school might sound like a boring school to add to the game.
But spiritism works like no other school, it adds not only new spells to the game but brand new items,concepts and finally the Etherworld is being fully realized.

The Spell Book

First off, mages will now be required to carry a spell book to be able to cast spells.
These books will decide what spells you see in the spell book menu. You can carry several books with different spells and they will all add their spells to the spell book menu.
Basic spell books do not drop on death, but we can make books that do so we could add special spell books that contain spells that are extra powerful but you are at the risk of losing the book if you die.
All spell books can be sold at brokers, opening up for a new type of player trade.

The Scrolls

You guys have been collecting scrolls for over a year and now finally you will get to use them. Well, some of them.
As you can you see on the scrolls you currently have they are sealed with a coloured ring.
When the patch hits, most of the spiritism scroll locks will break and this means they can now be added to spell books.
Some scrolls will however not open automatically and will require more research before the seal can be broken.

Scribing

Scribing is a new skill that will be introduced with the patch.
This new skill is a secondary skill under studies and gives you an icon in the skill window that can be used to add spells to a spell book.
To add spells players will be required to finish a small mini-game, at this point there is no fail-state other than the fact that you need to redo the mini-game.
The mini-game will be timed and the skill level of Scribing will increase the time you have to finish the game.

Etherworld

The Etherworld a dimension between the living and the dead is getting a massive update.
The Etherworld has been completely rebuilt and now has it’s own coded system.
The idea of a world within another world has been coded into the Unreal Engine core. This was makes it a easier to add and tag things that only show in the etherworld or only in the realm of the living.
What you currently have is code that goes through everything in the world, once you enter the etherworld, and decide if it should be hidden or not. With this functionality built into the engine this is now a much smoother and more reliable process.
It also makes it a lot easier for the art team to add meshes and structures that only show up in the etherworld.

The post-process filter that makes the whole world black and white has been remade so that we now can show specific colors.
This way we can better guide players towards e.g. priest beacons by making it a strong red tint.
Most of the fog has been removed from the etherworld making it a lot easier to see where you are going.

The movement of players in the Etherworld has changed a lot too. It now has its own feel with slightly lower gravity, higher movement speeds and a specific camera system.
This is an attempt to make the downtime while you are running to a priest more fun and reduce the time simply spent pressing W.

Spirit boxes

As a spiritist you will have special skills that make it possible to move items with you into the etherworld, namely spirit boxes.
A spirit box is an item that drops on death as its own loot bag but drops in the realm that you are currently in.
So if you die in the realm of the living it will drop there for anyone to pick up but if you’re banished from the etherworld only other dead players can see it and pick it up.

A new combat system has been added to the etherworld.
Players can now search for and summon lost spirits in the etherworld and battle them using a aim-based combat system.
Once they are defeated their spirit can be trapped inside a spirit box.
The spirit box can then be sold to vendors or used as a reagent for the stronger spells that the spiritist can use as well as being a important component in upcoming schools.

Steam feedback changes

It has now been a couple of months since we released on Steam and during this time we have gotten a lot of really good feedback from brand new players.
As you know our game is definitely not for everyone but a couple of complaints have come up that we feel that we can adress and make the game a whole lot easier for new players to get into.
The absolutely biggest issue new players find themselves in is commonly known as blue-blocking. This is when a blue-flagged player intentionally gets hit by another blue player so that he can then freely murder that players.
The best way we can solve this is by adding an option and that’s what we did. The new “Can Attack Blue” option (defaults to false) will protect players from accidentally hitting blue players.
If they do, a pop-up will come up warning them that they did something bad and stuns them for a moment.

Other changes

As usual a ton of minor updates and balance changes have been done. The major changes are to bows.
The current bow crafting doesn’t really give each bow type it’s own pros and cons, this is something the balance people are currently working on and we have taken big steps in the right direction.

That’s all

Please note that all the information here is still information from systems that can change, some even drastically.
But we want to get this information out to you so that we can collect your feedback on it, so please leave all your feedback on the official forums!