It's been en exciting opening weekend, a great big thanks to everyone who joined us on the support forum to report bugs and share their files. We've worked day and night and hope that the new update will provide players relief in most of the areas they've found issues in the release build.
It's called 1.0.1.5 rather than 1.0.2 because it doesn't solve all the crashes we've been investigating, but the game is more stable now. Those who have been nice enough to pre-test it for us have said that they could load their previously broken savegames from the hotfix in 1.0.1.5.
Fixes in 1.0.1.5
- Fixed an issue with our character streaming system that was causing random crashes all throughout the game on some computers
- Removed some dlls related to a third-party decal system that wasn't actually used in the game anyway, which was being picked up as a false positive in some anti-virus software
- Fixed a gamebreaking bug if you complete the Tomb Raider quest as the last of the Preparations quest and complete it specifically by fighting
- Oddkell outside the grave
- Fixed an issue where you couldn't talk to the leader of the persecutors in
- Chester after completing the quest, so you couldn't ditch them, so you would get stuck in the scene
- Fixed a small glitch where combat with the Praetorians would
- automatically start if you loaded a savegame after allying with the
- Persecutors
- Fixed Rurik's conversation in the longhouse never playing when it's supposed to if you ever clicked on him when his conversation isn't active
- Fixed a dialogue options "I won't enter your church" in
- MorcantConfrontation that was appearing erroneously and would cause the dialogue to get stuck because it led nowhere
- Ranged characters should now properly target tileobjects (no path markers, range visualisation etc.)
- Set some audio not to loop (company intro + intro intro)
- Fixed the infinite XP exploit in Unwanted Guests
- Fixed a bug where some AI would not advance if there was a hazard on the projected path, or if the player used Ready
- Fixed Maucolyn's intro conversation under certain circumstances being retriggerable even when he wasn't there anymore
- Added missing goal markers for the Clear Caves and Clear Milecastle goals, and fixed the Cave River fight not triggering correctly in that storyline
- Fixed the EliminateRemusCult goal getting stuck if you kill them before you deal with Valerius
- Fixed certain party members not leaving the party when they should, if they aren't present in the scene at the time
- Fixed a bug where stat adjustments from abilities would not get applied unless the character moved
- Fixed Æthelred disappearing from Yngilwood if you leave the scene again after entering it when you're about to hand in the Mercian Connection quest
- Made Finnguala leave the party and join the picts if you have her with you in Dun Phris and attack Magnus' group
- Made Finnguala leave the party if you begin the ConquerBritain quest
- Made Skallagrimr's conversation after the mountain cave or Hadrian's Wall close all Pict, Gael, or Northumbria side quests, made it enable all the menhir scenes in case you missed them, and made Caustantin's post-Dun Phris conversation enable Chester, Yngilwood, and the Swamp
- Set up a script to disable the longship after the Althing, and removed the errant fire hexes from the Hrodgærda no-palisades attack map
- Fixed the characters in Lindisfarne still sort of hanging around after the quest is already completed
- Added the Clear All (key bindings) translation in French and Polish
- Fixed an issue where characters would sink through the hexes in the Chester sewer fight
- Fixed an issue where if you left Orkney before fighting Steinn, you wouldn't be able to progress the Viking storyline
- Fixed a wrong localisation reference on the beach camp cooking spit in Scarborough
- Fixed an error that was happening when a barricade got destroyed and the AI tried to switch weapons afterwards
- Fixed a bug where the abducted brother in Chester would not correctly trigger his dialogue
- Fixed an issue where the abducted brother in Chester would not leave the scene when freed
- Fixed an area in the Homestead Forest where you could get stuck
- Fixed Rebuke not knocking down the target as intended if the user has Powerful Kick skill
- Fixed stats in combat not getting updated correctly
- Added "DoPlayVideos" flag in config to help users who are getting crashes from the intro and outro videos (see below for instructions)
- Made some more characters sit down at the Althing and the Mountain
- Cave and made Ragnhildr sit down in her longhouse
- Now Hrossbjørn and Vifridr will leave the village if you lose against Gunnarr after winning the first two fights
- Fixed corrupted save files not appearing in the save/load menus
- Fixed the language setting being English (Norse Names) by default instead of English
- Fixed two occurrences of the typo "whince" in the English text
- Fixed a chest that was open by default in the convent scene when it was supposed to be closed and lootable
- Made the final conversation trigger in the first dream a bit more robust to address an issue where it sometimes wouldn't enable the conversation, making you stuck in the scene
- Added explanations for the timeline in the tooltips, but it's only in the English and English (Norse Names) versions for now as we need to send it out for localisation
- Added some party-wide morale increases for major storyline progress
Video crash bypass instructions
If your game has been crashing immediately after character creation or immediately upon opening, try adding the following anywhere in your config file:
[VideoPlaybackSettings]
DoPlayVideos=False
The side effect is that you will not get any videos. This is mainly a problem for the end of the game, since the denoument will not play. We're working on a "proper" fix for a later update.
What's next?
We still have some stability issues to work through. The most common crash now appears to happen when leaving the Homestead Longhouse in the beginning of the game, but sadly this is almost certainly due to the game being played on video cards that do not meet our minimum system requirements, and we cannot do anything about this. There are other crashes that we will be looking into, however, and of course we won't be satisfied until everyone (whose machine meets the minimum requirements) can play the game without any crashes.
Once the last major gamebreaking quest bugs are out of the way, we can look at the second-tier ones that may still be important - we're aware of issues with several abilities in the game, such as Toss, Talon and Execute. In fact the Execute ability has already been fixed, but it didn't make it into 1.0.1.5.
Once we're through the second-tier bugs as well, we'll be able to start doing some UI tweaks and improvements for issues that have become apparent after release. For example, we plan to improve the way status effects are displayed outside of combat, we plan to add some tutorial pop-ups and warnings about the timeline, and we have some improvements and fixes lined up for the camping system. However, all of that has to wait until we're happy with the state of the game again.
How did this happen?
A valid question. You probably don't want excuses, but you did keep reading after the headline "How did this happen?" so excuses are what you're going to get. Essentially, we had three periods of closed beta testing before release, and we thought they could catch all the bugs. They did catch most of the bugs, but 1000 volunteer beta testers are no match for tens of thousands of new players suddenly getting their hands on the game. Even if there's only one gamebreaking bug secreted away in some dark corner of a questline, it may affect a thousand people.
We're determined to work through the new bug reports we've been receiving, and we want to sincerely thank all of you who are sticking with us despite these early issues.
