Episode 3 Devblog #2: 2.0 Update and Revised Talents
Hello again heroes.
This update is kind of a devblog and patch notes in one as it's time to go into detail about Episode 3's overhauled Talents system - something we're also porting back into Episodes 1 and 2 with today's 2.0 patch.
So, as I just said, the Talents system has undergone a considerable overhaul in End of Days. This is to facilitate the emphasis on different quest solutions in Episode 3 (as detailed by last week's devblog) and add a little more depth to character growth between levels 20-30, where skill trees are mostly already filled out and options for spending AP were previously lacking. The main change you'll notice is that your character's Talents now have multiple ranks:
In contrast to Episodes 1 and 2, where Talents were pretty much a binary flag (either a character has it, or they don't) the game's most used Talents now come in three consecutive rank: Basic, Advanced, and Master, representing increasing levels of aptitude. Speech, Subterfuge, Mercantilism, Herbalism and Alchemy have all been split into these three ranks (Knowledge, Medicine, Awareness and Scouting remain unchanged) and how they work has been drastically changed.
Speech now gives your character a base 50% chance of successfully persuading an NPC (previously, you always succeeded no matter what), with the Advanced rank bringing this up to 75% and Master making it succeed all the time.
Subterfuge now works similarly to Speech, giving you a base 50% chance of disabling traps or finding hidden passages (and it's now possible to fail and permanently break the trap/passage mechanism), with Advanced and Master ranks increasing this chance to 75% and 100% respectively.
Mercantilism now grants you a 25% discount when purchasing items from shops, with Advanced increasing this to 50% (the previous base game value). Where Mercantilism is really different, however, is with the Master rank, which expands the inventory of most shops in the game and unlocks rare, special items for sale.
Herbalism works the same at its Basic level. However, the Advanced rank causes more harvest spots to appear in the game, and Master makes the rarer herbs (such as Harp Leaf and God's Mint) much easier to find.
Finally, Alchemy also works the same at its Basic level, but becomes much more useful at the Advanced and Master levels, which expand the number of mixable items and reduce their costs by 50%, respectively.
Needless to say, these changes allow for many more options during character creation and give your characters something to strive for outside of combat, which brings us to the 2.0 patch. In order to maintain consistency between all three episodes, we're also implementing this system in End of Days and Resurrection, along with brand new and revised skill checks to make use of the new ranks. Your characters in the first two episodes can now access the Advanced and Master ranks of these talents, and they'll actually unlock new content in the game.
Episode 3 Devblog #1: Branching Quests
Hello there, heroes.
Development of Episode 3, End of Days, is coming along smoothly, so I thought I'd treat you all to a series of dev blogs detailing several of the game's features and plot elements. In terms of design philosophy and goals, End of Days is actually a little different to previous installments of Heroes of Legionwood in a few notable ways, and I thought it'd be interesting to go into detail about what exactly you can expect.
The first notable difference between End of Days and the previous episodes is its scope and quest structure. Funnily enough, this is simply carrying on a pattern already established by Age of Darkness and Resurrection, which were both subtly different. Episode 1, Age of Darkness, focused on a journey over a relatively large geographical area, featuring several towns and sidequests requiring backtracking to previously visited locations. By contrast, Resurrection's structure was much tighter, featuring adventures set inside and around one city with a little less linearity.
End of Days is different yet again, returning somewhat to the linear structure of Episode 1 but retaining the content density of Episode 2. In short, you can expect Episode 3 to be a little more linear when it comes to area progression, with less of an emphasis on optional content, but with more to do in each area and a much bigger content ratio in the main story. To demonstrate this, check out Episode 3's opening dungeon in comparison to the sewers from Resurrection:
As you can see, in terms of sheer size, Episode 3's dungeon is definitely bigger, but there's more to it than that. Unlike Resurrection's opening dungeon, this cave in Episode 3 has different versions depending on how you ended the previous installment, with different enemies, a different objective and alternate ways through. There are a number of skill checks and talent uses that affect the difficulty and the boss fight, too, and provide options for different party builds. Compared to Episode 2, there's simply more content here - what might have been reserved for optional sidequests is right there in the story dungeon instead. The trade off, of course, is that there's less of a focus on the optional stuff this time around. Side quests still exist, of course, but they're much simpler and there are fewer of them, at least compared to stuff like the shipwreck exploration or the Champion's Arena in Resurrection.
Most of this structure is due to the scope and context of Episode 3's story. Basically, the stakes are high in End of Days (hence the title). The Darkness is finally descending, and you're racing against time to re-unite the Lore Shards and stop it before there's nobody left to save. You're not simply searching for something, like in Age of Darkness, or engaging in faction politics like in Resurrection. With that in mind, it doesn't really make sense for your characters to be meandering around doing sidequests. Instead, you're moving quickly from one self-contained area to another in a linear fashion, but in each area there's much more to do and more scope for your choices to affect the story itself. We're wrapping up story arcs here - it's all about building up to a satisfying conclusion.
And that's all for now. Join us again next time and I'll go into detail about how exactly we're going about this. Episode 3 is where the consequences for your choices will finally start to manifest in a big way.
NPC Class Overhaul Update
Hello again heroes,
This is just a small update that we were planning to release after the holidays which addresses a few things left over after the Holiday Update earlier this month. We ended up getting this patch finished well ahead of schedule (partly because it uses some of Episode 3's codebase which we're backporting to the previous installments) so we decided to release it early.
The main focus of this update is an overhaul of the class system, tweaking some of the player classes and introducing brand new hybrid classes for NPCs.
The new features in this update include:
<*>The Shaman class has been redone. This class now learns the Cleric's Powering Light tech and the SP costs of existing techs have been reduced. A brand new tech, Spirit Fetish, has also been added to the Shaman's tech tree.
<*>The Warrior, Rogue and Gunner tech trees have been slightly tweaked and certain tech prerequisites changed to allow for more obvious tech progression.
<*>Companions will no longer simply default to Warrior if their usual class has already been chosen by the player. Now they'll receive unique hybrid classes instead which are designed to both fill the same role as the Warrior while still maintaining the character's flavour and backstory.
<*>Gaius will now have the Paladin class, which has the attribute and growth rates of the Warrior but can also learn a handful of Cleric skills in addition to the standard Warrior ones.
<*>Vane will now have the Lorekeeper class, which is a physical tank with access to the Warrior tech tree, but can also learn basic Magus spells.
<*>Jeska will now have the Bandit class, which is a slightly faster version of the Warrior with some of the Rogue's techs available to it.
<*>The Knowledge talent has had its XP bonus recalculated and its description has been updated so that it is clearer that the talent only affects the character who bought it.
<*>Two new talents, Fitness and Endurance are now available, which increase a character's HP and SP growth rates by one stage, respectively.
Holiday Update 1.3.4/1.2.2 Update now live!
Well met, heroes!
With the holiday season upon us and Episode 3 of Heroes of Legionwood progressing at a steady rate, we've taken the time to push a small update addressing some issues reported in the last few months and tweaking a couple of things.
This patch will update Episode 1 to version 1.3.4 and Episode 2 to version 1.2.2 and includes the following features:
Brand new music tracks by talented composer Phil Hamilton (Skyborn, Deadly Sin 2).
Corrected a recent bug where Normal difficulty was giving too much EXP.
Nerfed the Brawler's stances a little and fixed a bug preventing them from unlocking their last couple of Techs.
Touching the projectiles in Episode 1's Trial of Agility will now trigger a battle rather than force you to start again.
Fixed an issue where failing the Trial of Cunning would prevent you from progressing.
Heroes of Legionwood: End of Days is in development!
Long time no see, adventurers!
It's been a while since we've posted an honest to goodness dev diary about Heroes of Legionwood, so we thought we'd just report in and let you guys know what's going on with End of Days, the third and final episode of the game.
The good news is that work on Heroes of Legionwood: End of Days is well underway and, despite some initial hurdles and delays, we're well on track to release early next year. We don't want to reveal too much about the content of the episode at this point (mostly because some of it still subject to change) but in terms of story and player choices this is going to be the biggest installment yet, and simply taking into account everything you may have done so far in Episodes 1 and 2 is no mean feat!
That said, here's a quick list of things that will definitely be making it into the episode, and our main priorities at the moment:
Different opening questlines depending on your faction choice in Episode 2.
Continuation of your companion friendships, rivalries and romances.
Branching mid-game questlines to account for even more choices.
The chance to permanently lose party members.
More revelations about the Darkness and hints concerning its origins.
Multiple endings.
At this stage, we're aiming for a February 2017 release, but this isn't set in stone as this episode is easily the most ambitious one we've done so far. Stay tuned towards the end of the year as we'll slowly dole out more previews and info about the episode's content and story.
Expanded romance options are here!
Greetings, heroes.
As romantic NPCs take on a larger role in Heroes of Legionwood than previous games, we've received several requests from players to expand the romantic options available to player characters, namely to allow players access to either of the game's romances regardless of gender.
This is something we originally planned to include in the game, but which we ended up cutting due to time constraints (it was much easier, code wise, to simply restrict each gender to a given romance, rather than implementing checks to keep track of the player's chosen romance if presented with both) but as we're overhauling much of the codebase for Episode 3, it seemed trivial to finally add this feature back into the game.
As such, both romance options are now available for every player character, regardless of gender, in both Age of Darkness and Resurrection. It is our hope that this will add some much needed diversity to the game, and help certain players feel more represented than they were before.
Heroes of Legionwood: Resurrection is now live!
Only a little bit later than expected, Heroes of Legionwood: Resurrection is now available on Steam!
Saved from the brink of oblivion, you must search for answers amongst a civil war that is tearing Port Alexis apart. It is up to you to pick a side and determine the ultimate fate of Port Alexis and discover the origins of the Darkness.
http://store.steampowered.com/app/445710/
Holiday update 1.3.3 now available!
Hi everyone.
With Heroes of Legionwood: Resurrection just around the corner, we've decided to release a small update for Age of Darkness containing some necessary code updates and a couple of new features.
This update includes the following fixes:
Optimized the save file export system
Corrected several graphical errors in Fort Kaiser and Morrow's Estate
Corrected the Reviving Light tech so that the battle log no longer refers to it as Healing Light
Fixed several instances where the male PC face was displayed when playing as a female PC.
In addition, we've got a cool new random encounter system backported from Resurrection:
Random encounters can now be skipped! When triggering an encounter, a "!" icon will appear above the character - if the cancel button is pressed at the correct time, you'll avoid the battle.
A new talent, Awareness has been added, which tells the player when a random encounter is about to be triggered.
A new Runecraft, Tactician's Tome has been added, which decreases the random encounter rate by 50% when equipped.
Legionwood 1 is on Greenlight!
Hey everyone!
Looking to complete the Legionwood trilogy on Steam? I've just submitted the first game in the series, Legionwood: Tale of the Two Swords to Steam Greenlight!
Check it out, vote for it and, with your support, we'll finally be able to bring you the complete Legionwood saga on Steam.
To keep you busy while we plug away on Heroes of Legionwood: Resurrection, we've added a brand new character class to the game.
Calling upon mystical eidolons to aid him, the Shaman is a summoner class who can turn the tide of battle with some powerful magical abilities, while also being a pretty decent physical fighter who can wield a decent selection of weapons.
In addition, this update fixes a few lingering bugs in the game:
The game will no longer crash after defeating the Lethifold in the Arcane College.
Fixed an issue where the Scholar class was unable to learn the Speech talent.
Fixed a rare issue that would cause the game to crash when beginning the Road To Ruin quest.
