Critical Choices update is Live!

Good morning, Tavernmasters.

We are all kinds of psyched to unleash our new Critical Choices update, including an overhaul of adventuring, hunger, spirit management and resting on the road. The Critical Choices feature will allow for greater control over your parties in the field and more opportunities to use their specific skills.

Included in this feature are Conditional buttons that only appear if you have certain heroes or skills present. In the screenshot above, the Fireball button only appears if you have a fire mage in your current party. Casting fireball will cost a bit of spirit, weaken enemies for the upcoming fight (if not end the battle outright), and potentially damage any destructible loot. Below you can see that the fireball destroyed the treasure chest, so instead of the Bandolier of the Goblin Chief, you receive the slightly less powerful (but definitely more cool) Charred Bandolier of the Goblin Chief.

The first widespread usage of this Critical Choices feature is in our new approach to adventuring and spirit management. We got rid of micromanaging hero meals and removed Hunger/Starvation effects entirely. In their place is a new Rest Stop/Side Quest choice. Midway through each adventuring day, your parties will be offered a choice between Resting (+10 Spirit for everyone), Healing (conditional button that only appears if you have a healer along), or pursuing one of our new Side Quests.

Side Quests come in many forms, such as exploring a nearby cave, volunteering to serve as a lovely assistant for a traveling magician, gambling at a pop-up pavilion (Undermarket-aligned taverns only), attending wine/food tastings in hopes of unlocking rare new menu items, or your heroes can shop at one of three new traveling vendors, each with a rotating inventory of goodies. Each Side Quest has at least 10 different results and many include conditional buttons and little Easter Egg rewards if certain skills are present, so there is a ton of variety baked in. Below is a little peek behind the curtain at what’s actually happening in just one of the data fields controlling these new stages.

Skill Scrolls are another new item in this patch. Purchasing one from a traveling merchant will award that skill to a random hero in your party.

There are some extremely powerful artifacts to be discovered on the shelves of these new traveling merchants and in the results of the new Side Quests, along with a secret or three, but there are dangers as well. Drawing a card from Oracle Ophelia's Deck of Mixed Blessings is not an action to be taken lightly.

This patch also contains our first efforts at explicitly labeling when results have changed due to your having a particular skill or class or item in your party. Having a healer or medic along can often reduce damage as you receive it, or prevent effects like Poison or Disease from happening at all. Having the Illusion skill can sometimes reveal hidden walls and unlock bonus loot. Our old approach made these things super easy to miss if you aren’t carefully reading results. So over the coming patches, we’ll be making it more clear when the story has changed due to your particular party configuration or actions. “Ignatius will remember this.”

A huge, huge thanks to the players who dove into our last few testing builds and provided invaluable feedback to help with the multiple rounds of testing/tuning required to make these sort of foundational changes to our spirit management and adventuring systems. We appreciate you.

We Want to Hear from You If you have thoughts on these new changes or encounter any bugs, please stop on by our Discord and let us know: https://discord.com/invite/epictavern

Thanks and happy adventuring!