Today we released a major update to Conclave that adds support for single-player parties. Instead of seeking out other players to complete your party, you now have the option to add your own characters instead.
Here's how that works:
When you're the party leader, you'll see an Add button for any empty character slots. Clicking it will bring up a window with options to add a character of your own or invite another player.
When you control multiple characters, you'll see a button with the portrait of your active character in the middle of the buttons for navigating and taking actions. Clicking the button will cycle through your characters.
During story decisions, whatever choice you make applies to all the characters you control. You won't have to make a choice individually with each character.
Other operations -- combat actions, chatting, visiting the Vault of Arms or Pool of Reflection, and so on -- take your active character into account.
If you like, you can also split a party with another player, with each of you controlling two characters. One of you can even control three characters and the other the fourth, if that works better for you.
Enjoy!
Mac version now available
Conclave's Windows version now has a sibling. If you've been looking forward to playing on a Mac, check out the new version on our store page. You'll just need OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) or newer.
With that complete, we're focusing our efforts on our next major update, which will add support for single-player parties. We've already made some progress and hope to release the update by the end of May.
We'll keep you posted!
Soundtrack now available, plus upcoming updates
If you're a fan of Conclave's music, you can now purchase the soundtrack for your Steam music library. Check it out here.
The soundtrack was composed by Sam Hulick, who you might recognize from his award-winning work on the Mass Effect series. Sam did a great job capturing the fantastical feel of Conclave's world and its inhabitants. To share one example, he hunted down a rare medieval stringed instrument, the viola da gamba, to give "Turn of the Age" an ancient and slightly otherworldly feel.
In other news, we've made significant progress on the Mac version of Conclave, and we hope to release that within the next two weeks. We've also made progress on the update that will add single-player parties to the game, though we still have a good chunk more to do there.
A change to the abjured condition
Today we released a small server-side update that includes a couple of changes. The most noticeable one is to the abjured condition.
Until now, an abjured combatant suffered a -2 penalty to all Arcane ability checks. While that's useful against certain combatants, it's a little narrow. As a result, abilities that create the condition, especially the Runecaster's Rite of Abjuration and Circle of Abjuration, weren't pulling their weight as much as we would have liked.
To make abjured more broadly useful, we've modified it to give a -1 penalty to Fire, Cold, and Spirit Damage inflicted, while still retaining a -1 penalty to Arcane checks. Now, effects that draw upon the Concordance for power will be weakened even if they don't require a check, and ones that do require a check will be both less likely to succeed and less damaging if they do. This should give low-level Runecasters in particular a boost against certain pyrophiles that are otherwise a bit challenging.
Today's update also includes a couple of engine changes that lay some groundwork for the larger updates we have in the pipeline. These shouldn't be noticeable, except for possibly making certain actions in the interface slightly more responsive.
Improving the combat interface & a quick look ahead
Although we're still taking care of some post-launch business, today we released a small server-side update that includes a couple of improvements to Conclave's combat interface:
The "Hold on ..." message you see when another player interrupts your action is now much less intrusive. Instead of obscuring much of the screen and requiring a click to dismiss, it's now a small alert that behaves the same way the chat bubbles do. (Note that your action selection is still reset, as the interrupting action can make selections invalid or just unwise.)
We've increased the visibility of special terrain slightly, as some types were hard to see against certain backgrounds.
Looking ahead, we plan to continue making small improvements where we can, but we're also starting to turn more of our focus to larger projects. One of those is the Mac version, while the other is more tentative: we're exploring the feasibility of allowing a single player to control a full party, as that's been a pretty popular feature request. Can't promise anything yet, but we'll keep you posted.
A quick update, and a note of thanks
Whew, what a week!
First off, we want to thank everyone for making Conclave's launch a success -- and a special thanks to those who took the time to write reviews or weigh in with feedback.
Though we've been pretty busy with all that goes into making sure a launch goes smoothly, we did sneak in a few fixes this week:
You no longer need to scroll down to the bottom of the events log when something new happens.
Joining a party at just the wrong moment could cause your character sheet to be unviewable until a new event happened. That's been fixed.
If you were one of the players with the misfortune to encounter overlays that wouldn't always close, that too has been fixed.
For the next week or so, we'll be working on a couple of small improvements as we wrap up our remaining launch-related tasks. After that, we hope to start looking at some more significant features to add to our roadmap.
Finally, if you backed our Kickstarter and received the original version of the game, good news: you'll be getting Steam keys for this version too. Just give us a bit to take care of the bookkeeping and start rolling them out.
