Attention, brave warriors of Wartales!
We're excited to unveil Community Update 1 (the first one since 1.0 release), a result of your invaluable feedback and requests. Community Updates are designed to enhance your gameplay experience and bring a selection of your desired changes, in line with our vision for the game, to life.
Prepare to customize your mercenaries with a stunning array of helmets, adding both style and protection to your adventures.
We've also prioritized accessibility and quality of life features, ensuring that every player can fully immerse themselves in the world of Wartales.
But that's not all! This update includes a host of minor content additions, carefully balanced gameplay adjustments, and crucial bug fixes.
Your input continues to shape Wartales, and we thank you for being an essential part of the game’s development.
Protect your heads!
Helmets are making a grand entrance in Wartales!
There is now a distinct helmet by weight category for every faction, matching the existing armors and bringing defensive attributes. Moreover, each of these helmets can give its bearer a specific combat Skill. This means we have added close to 30 new skills to the game!
What if you’d like a companion to use the skill of a helmet that doesn’t suit them? This is made possible thanks to a new customisation feature: Stamps. By dismantling a helmet with a master tinkerer, you can obtain a stamp bearing the helmet’s skill. This item can then be applied (just like a layer) on any other helmet, replacing its skill with the one on the stamp. With this system, build possibilities are multiplied!
All leaders will wear helmets, but other enemy units will start wearing helmets gradually as the player’s level increases. Combat length and difficulty should be affected, since the pre-existing armor and guard bonuses have been distributed between helmets and armors, with little to no change in the total amounts.
Another detail: If your character’s hairstyle looks too good to be concealed, you can click the helmet’s display toggle at any time without disabling its effects.
Rare layers
A new foe joins the ranks of the ghost pack: the Ghost Bear! It will only show up against seasoned adventurers, who might have a chance to obtain the much sought-after Colossal Paw.
This useful item is the base ingredient for the newly introduced Rare Layers. If you already learned the recipe for an uncommon layer, you will be able to learn the matching rare recipe from your compendium.
While designing these new layers, we chose to give a little boost to the old ones. The armor bonuses, in particular, have been increased.
You can run AND you can hide
Ambushes have existed in Wartales for a long time, but we are now making them easier to understand and to use.
By remaining concealed in a forest for a few seconds, the player will reach the ambush state and notice that potential Targets are highlighted in the forest’s surroundings. Once this state is reached, targeting one of these groups will cause the player’s troupe to chase it.
If they reach their target, a combat will begin and the player will be off to a very good start. Every attacker will gain +20% chances of landing a critical hit, while every enemy will gain +10% damage taken.
Experience and progression
We believe that the experience accumulated in Combat up to level 5 is fairly consistent. Beyond that, your feedback has indicated that gaining enough experience is a tedious task. While we're convinced that the final levels should be a little hard to reach, we don't want the game to become a grindy monster. With this in mind, we've decided to adjust the experience curve to make the experience smoother and more enjoyable. The overall experience requirement up to level 12 has been reduced, but levels 6 to 9 in particular should be much easier to reach.
We have also made a few changes to the experience gains of each Profession. It seemed that the Scholar and Miner were especially easy to upgrade, while training a Thief or a Woodcutter was far more troublesome. Now, the learning curves of the different professions should be more harmonious.
Balancing
At higher levels, there was a lack of Difficult Missions on the Bounty Board. We have now linked the minimum amount of difficult missions on the board to several factors:
- Game difficulty
- Player level
- Amount / Difficulty of completed missions
Three more changes should make the game a little more challenging for advanced players. First, we increased the average level of the enemies you will encounter in forests. More importantly, we started scaling the Movement attribute of enemy units depending on their level. Finally, we introduced a few differences in AI behavior between Hard and Normal/Easy difficulty.
Finally, we noticed that thievery was an intimidating path for newer players, while also being way too profitable for those who are well versed in the art of Crime & Chaos. In an attempt to make theft less cryptic while also preventing abuses, we made several changes to the calculation of Suspicion and Fines.
Both of these numbers are now much more proportional to the value of the stolen items. Additionally, an item that is consumed or used for crafting will now continue to be tracked for as long as the player is researched (the Guard knows you’ve stolen those, after all). However, once the Guard stops chasing you, these items will be forgotten. Meanwhile, items that are still in your possession will continue to count until they’ve been either given back, paid for or laundered.
Changing our tune
The Bards are perfecting their Art! Their repertoire has increased, with the addition of 3 New Songs that can be unlocked as your troupe accomplishes glorious feats. A new series of chords has been designed for each of these songs.
Accessibility
- A toggle has been added to disable screen shakes in the Options menu.
- Clearer feedback when hovering over environmental hazards such as fire or poison has been added.
- It is now possible to customize the size and color of the outline highlighting interactive elements.
- A Magnifying Glass option has been added (P key, rebindable).
UX
- A Quick Save shortcut has been added (F5 key, rebindable).
- When crafting, repairing armor or healing units, you can now use resources from the camp’s chest (including in co-op mode).
- It is now possible to run by holding a double click.
- A tutorial has been added to explain how bonus Action Points work.
- In co-op mode, you can now see a preview of your allies’ AOE skills.
Fixes
Co-op
- Fixed an issue where Merchant caravans wouldn’t spawn in Co-op.
- Fixed a client-side crash at the start of the secret camp’s fight when siding with the tracker.
- Fixed an issue where Clients wouldn’t be able to end their turn after scoring during Rouste.
Items
- The recipes for the Layer of the snake and the Layer of the fox are now sold by the trackers in Ludern.
- The recipe for Conversion oil is now sold by the traveling purifiers.
- Fixed an issue where recipe component requirements would not update properly in the compendium.
- Fixed an issue where the Tier 2 and 3 alchemy sickles required themselves in order to be crafted.
- Fixed an issue where the scrollbar in a seller’s inventory wouldn’t appear when selling size 1 objects.
Skills
- Fixed an issue where the Aimed Shot skill would not appear in the player’s skill bar.
- Fixed an issue where an archer using the skill Wrath would trigger an incorrect animation.
- Fixed an issue where archers would fire twice when pairing the skills Shoot order and Barrage.
World
- Fixed an issue where both Tracker & Scholar camp would be required for the completion of Drombach’s location.
- Fixed an issue where the lock in Mount Altis’ Sepulcher was invisible.
- Fixed an issue where a Weekly bounty would reward the player with the Elderguard dagger instead of the Basher mace.
- Fixed an issue where Early Access saves new runes couldn’t learn and find and codices in previously completed tombs
- Trade bounties will now appear on Gosenberg city’s bounty board.
Misc
- Fixed an issue where resting would set your party’s happiness value to -2147483648
- Fixed an issue during the Bard minigame where the music would stop before the end of the minigame.
- Fixed an issue where friendly units could spawn in the fog during encounters with the Ghost pack.
- Fixed an issue that prevented reorganizing the party members when you had a Captain and/or Lieutenants.
Thank you all for your feedback and suggestions, we can't wait to hear your thoughts and feedback on this update, you can do so by joining our discord, reddit and following us on twitter.
Remember to take a look at the roadmap to find out what’s up next for Wartales!
- Shiro Games
