Version 1.0.5 is now live!

New caps on skill ranks

The most significant change we've made is to introduce caps on all skill ranks based on the total amount of skill points you've spent. Ranks 1 and 2 are freely accessible, but in order to upgrade a skill to rank 3 you must have spent a total of 100 SP. To reach rank 4, you must have spent 175, and to max out a skill at rank 5 you must have spent a total of 250 SP. Recall that you begin the game with 50 SP and that there is a total of just over 300 SP in the campaign. The result is that you'll have no skills above rank 3 when you go to Britain, and you won't be able to level up to rank 5 until quite late in the game. This update trades away some freedom of choice to enforce a better levelling curve. Previously, we let you max out your weapon skills quite early in the game, with the predictable result that you would outpace the enemies before you even reached Britain, and the enemies wouldn't begin to catch up until near the end of the game. Now, you're forced to distribute your points among the different categories, perhaps buying some Utility and Passive skills for a more well-rounded character. This does have the drawback that characters will be a bit less specialised, but the improvement to the game's difficult curve is profound.

Surprise round on enemy initiative

A new feature is the so-called Surprise Round, which occurs when you trigger an encounter where the enemy acts first. Previously the enemy would get a full turn before you had any chance to position your hirdmen. Since there is no formation system in the game, this felt unfair. From version 1.0.5 and onwards, the player always acts first, but in encounters where the enemy would previously begin, the player will not have any attack action, nor a bonus action in the first turn. In other words you can only move or change your weapons in your first turn because your party was caught by surprise. This has also allowed us to change the initiative back to Enemy-first on all the encounters that were previously set to Player-first to avoid unfairness. The result is a slight but significant increase in difficulty in many encounters throughout the game. Bear in mind that this update is not the final word on difficulty. These are major changes that will fix our difficulty issues, but they are not intended to increase the upper ends of difficulty on the Hard and Insane settings. The next update will contain more tweaks intended to make the Hard and Insane settings live up to their name, as well as the promised Iron Man mode. And now for the full change list. As with the 1.0.4 update, I have divided it into two sections: one for changes and additions, and one for fixes. Since this update has a far greater variety of changes than previous patches, I've decided to further subdivide each section into categories based on the type of change or fix.

Changes and additions

New stuff

• As explained above, added new "surprise round" feature to allow player positioning before enemy turn when ambushed

• Added full Danish localisation

• Added three new campsite scenes to the Denmark campaign for improved visual variation: Plains 2, Marsh 2, and Deep Forest

• Added new animations for Taunt and Dust abilities

• Added a new generic support ability animation for when you're wielding a spear

• Added an animation for consumable utility items (ie. drinking potions)

Skills and items

• As described above, skill upgrades are now capped by your total amount of SP spent, so you must spend 150 SP to upgrade a skill to rank 3, 200 for rank 4, and 250 for rank 5

• Made substantial improvements to the algorithm that assigns skills to enemies by rank and archetype, which will increase the effectiveness of enemies throughout the game

• Made the Archer archetype use axe and shield instead of dane-axe or spear, and changed the loadouts of all Archer characters in the game accordingly

• Items crafted with the Artisan skill can no longer get the "Cursed" property

• Decreased the cost reduction for repairing and the gain % from deconstructing items

• Discarding a weapon will now yield at least 1 Salvage or Hide even if you have no Repair skill

• Increased item degradation during combat from 1 point per crit to 10% of max durability per crit

• Added a 50% chance each round that a character is on fire that they'll get a Burn injury - subsequent rounds of being on fire then has a 25% chance of the injury deteriorating

• Taunt will now make the target move towards the caster even if they can't entirely reach them - they'll just move as far as they can

• Changed the Aimed Shot ability to have a 40% damage penalty instead of a 5 percent-point crit chance bonus, and changed Sharpshooter to reduce that penalty from 40% to 20%

• Sharpshooter now requires Bow on rank 3, Steady Hands no longer has a skill requirement, and Backstabber now costs 4 SP instead of 8

• Accuracy for ranged attacks now falls off by 6 points per hex instead of 5

• Walk Your Shots now reduces the per-hex distance fall-off for ranged attacks back to 5 instead of simply adding 5 points every time you take a shot

• Parrying no longer cancels all damage from the parried attack - the parrying character takes damage as normal, but with the doubled base DR from Parrying

• Changed Opportunist so that attacks of opportunity now apply Stunned to the target if you have the skill, instead of just giving you an extra AoO every round - also raised its cost from 3 SP to 6

• Increased the damage of Hailstorm from 50% normal attack damage to 75% normal attack damage and reduced its charges from 2 to 1

• Changed Stone Fists from a 10 point bonus to Melee Damage to a 10 point bonus to Armour Piercing damage

• Raised the cost of Powerful Kick from 6 SP to 9

• Revive is now restricted to 2 charges

• Gave pit traps a massive damage buff

• Increased all Tinkering material costs

• Reach weapons no longer inflict non-lethal damage at close range, since this was not explained anywhere

Encounters

• Changed quite a few of the encounters in the game to have the enemies start, which is no longer frustrating now that we have the surprise round feature

• Nerfed the damage of all wolf types except the Wolf Mothers, whose damage is now doubled

• Added a couple of guards in Perth's treasury and set all the loot in the main area to Owned - when you visit during the betrayal, the guards have been killed and the loot is no longer Owned

• Buffed all occupied campsite fights in Britain and tweaked the cover in some of the scenes

• Buffed the assassins in Ribe

• Buffed the fight against the youngsters in the Ravine Cave

• All the bounty fights have received a significant buff

• Added reinforcements to both of the wall fights during the invasion of York

• Doubled the number of enemies in the prisoner room fight in York's dungeon

• Made Leofric and Steinn brown-haired and made Steinn waaa-hay-haaay more badass

• The monks and nuns in Lindisfarne Church and the Scarborough Convent will now run into corners and cower in fear when you attack (the Cower animation is new)

• Made the female guard outside the Skerninge passage grave drop a damaged, cursed chain mail upon her death

Other changes

• Added icon tooltips to the Tinkering menu

• Injuries now deteriorate in combat with a probability based on how long the character has been incapacitated - characters can never die outright in combat, however

• Injuries now deteriorate during camping as well, and we've added some UI logic for this to work - fatally injured characters can die when you make camp if left untreated

• Increased injury penalties

• Tweaked injury settings to allow groin and chest punctures and eye trauma

• Reduced the Armour-smithing level of every blacksmith in the game by 1

• Made the faction reputation number show up even when your faction reputation is Neutral

• Added a menu option for disabling reflection probes so you don't have to mess with the config

• Made the farmer in Skerninge and his wife lie on the ground to match the description text

• Added thrall deco characters to the homestead depending on how many Slaves you have (up to about a dozen)

• Added a Medium reputation increase if you complete the Rats quest peacefully

• Reflection probes will now automatically be disabled the first time you launch the game on an Intel videocard, and you'll get a pop-up about it - you can manually re-enable them afterwards if you'll risk it

• Tweaked the morale changes in the initial conversation with Maban so they're more intuitive

Bug fixes

Stability and performance

• Fixed one more set of crashes related to loading characters into the scene

• Fixed the unreproducible issue some players had reported where the game would crash at the end of camping and potentially at the end of a fight

• Added check so corrupted fog of war files do not prevent loading scenes

• Made some optimisation in the level loading

Quest logic

• Fixed the Ab Urbe Condita side quest hanging around in your quest log even if you choose an outcome for Chester that causes Fabian Quintus to leave, so you can't complete it anymore

• Fixed a bug whereby Myrddin would not spawn in the stone circle if you entered his cave instead of bringing Cillian directly to him after the rescue

• Fixed a spot where you could get stuck after the battle for Yngilwood

• Fixed a bug where you could start the Snakes Among the Trees or Lost Hunting Party side quests during the Battle of Yngilwood if you hadn't started them previously

• Fixed the fight at the entrance to Jelling potentially repeating with no enemies if you leave the town through the hidden tunnel and then attempt to re-enter it from outside

• Fixed an issue where Grainne would sometimes appear inside Caustantin's hall after the wedding when she wasn't supposed to

• Fixed a bug whereby you could no longer free the Yngilwood Scout's loved one in the York Dungeon if you chose not to do so the first time you were given the option

• Added a fade-out if you sentence Geirmundr in Orkney to the blood eagle, during which he'll be despawned

• Fixed the non-interactive parts of Geirmundr's "camp" in Orkney also highlighting along with the interactive parts

• Skallagrimr and the other thegns will now disappear from Steinn's house once you complete the first of the Viking ending quests

• Received and implemented the Russian and French versions of a single branch of conversation with Hulda that had been missed in the original localisations for those two languages

• Fixed the higher difficulty-related completion achievements not unlocking the lower levels

• Fixed being able to interact with the haystack behind Erlingr's farm after the fight if you already set fire to it once

• Fixed the fire in Erlingr's farmhouse persisting forever (it now stops once the quest is closed)

• Fixed most of the dead characters who were supposed to show up as ghosts in Grimnir's Helheimr dream not showing up

• Fixed Olbjørn and Grimkell's character spawners creating a very long delay in loading the goodbye scene in Skjern if they were killed on Holmgang Island

• Fixed Maucolyn not being set as immortal if you encounter him at the village after raiding the monastery, which could result in you speaking to a very clearly dead man

• Fixed Conall mac Taidg's death variable not being set, causing some narrative inconsistencies

• Fixed an error when teleporting the player party to waypoints in conversations which showed up if you lost the fight against Maucolyn in front of the village

• Fixed a bug whereby if you set an ambush for Osred's men in The Mercian Connection and leave any of them alive, the fight in front of the Roman tower wouldn't begin

• Osred's spy token will now be removed from your inventory when you show it to a scout in Yngilwood

• Changed the logic in Torfinn's tree conversations a bit to make the quest more robust

• Reduced the trigger radius on the sewer tunnel conversation in Chester to be what it's supposed to be

Skills and items

• Fixed a bug that was causing characters to play their incapacitation barks at entirely the wrong times during combat

• Fixed the highest rank ability of each skill not displaying its action type in its tooltip

• Fixed several issues with the implementation of Gungnir's special property - the weapon will now damage enemies in the two hexes in front of you, three if you're using Extend

• Fixed an issue where pre-damaged looted items would be using the current Salvage value to calculate tiers rather than the undamaged one

• Resistances are now capped at 100% in the UI

• Fixed Adrenaline Junkie applying its bonus as soon as a character is at less than max health, instead of only when they drop below 20% as described

• Fixed the missing icon for the British silver cross talisman types

• Replaced an old hack to prevent non-Vikings from getting the Dane-Axe skill with a more general solution that checks the nationality condition for all skills before assigning them (this will also prevent non-Vikings from buying Galder, which they cannot use anyway)

• Removed the track quest input from all contexts except Default (which will stop it showing up in the other sections of the input bindings)

• Fixed the Amulet of Macha not getting its special property correctly (this fix is not retroactive, if you already picked up the Amulet of Macha, it will remain useless - however you can give yourself a new, working amulet with the console command giveitem party Talisman_Macha)

• Fixed a 10-second pause caused by a timeout if a Parrying character is Stunned and subsequently attacked; all immobilisation now cancels Parrying as well as Hypnotised, Interrupting, Panicked, and Ready

• You can no longer parry attacks from weapons with reach from 2 or more tiles away

• Fixed missing sound effects on the Parrying animations

• You can no longer trigger an execution with any weapon type other than a sword

• Fixed a pretty unlikely combat timeout that would happen if Condemned characters took fire damage

• Fixed the Tactical Move button being selectable even if no attack action was possible

• Fixed Stunned animation not being reset if a character is defeated while that animation is playing

• Fixed the wolf mothers' Nuzzle ability placing the wolf inside the incapacitated wolf's tile instead of adjacent to it

• Fixed wrong health displayed in the UI when using Nuzzle or Revive

• Fixed the Sacrament ability tripling ally resistances instead of doubling it as intended

Other fixes

• Fixed certain music tracks being controlled by the main volume slider instead of the music slider

• Fixed the input system overwriting user settings with the defaults in some situations

• Removed Crouch Control from the input settings

• Fixed non-lethal attacks being able to proc critical hits

• Fixed certain blacksmiths being set up with a higher armour-smithing rating than is actually possible, which broke the UI

• Fixed bug where an occupied campsite would be marked as captured when entering the campsite but then reloading the previous saved file without even playing through the fight

• Fixed an issue where tinkering items in camping might not be loaded properly by the save system

• Fixed a missing line of subtitles in the intro cinematic in English and English (Norse Names)

• Fixed the player's ship reverting to the default sail colours in Orkney

• A loading screen will now be displayed while loading the main menu after the credits

• Fixed dead follower pop-up appearing during loading screens if you made a save after a follower had died in the scene and then loaded that save

• Fixed a typo "a dirty flash" (should have been flask) in Røskva's first romance conversation

• Fixed a typo in the to-do list reminder for unassigned shifts

• Nefja and Ketill can no longer die from injuries in Denmark

• Fixed switch weapon button being greyed out after an attack of opportunity on the selected character

• Fixed the localisation ID for homestead upgrades not being retrieved correctly for upgrades that only have 1 branch

• Removed an erroneously placed trash pile in Skerninge which was unlootable and would disappear when you looted another trash pile next to it

• Removed a lootable barrel from inside a house in Perth

• Added ability icons for the wolf abilities so they don't show up as white squares when you look at wolves with the character info panel, and added explanatory tooltips for them as well

• Fixed a weird-looking tree in the Britain forest menhir campsite