Patch Preview

Dear Community,

Last week we presented our roadmap to you. As promised, we would now like to go into more detail step by step and show you what you can specifically expect in the next update.

Here are the key points of the upcoming patch:

Skills & Combat We are expanding the skill pool with 9 new skills. Our goal is to offer more variety in combat and give you the opportunity to experiment with different playstyles. Here are a few examples from the upcoming update:

Stone Shield Envelops a marked target in a stone shield that greatly increases armor and resilience for 8 seconds and protects against all damage types.

Whirlwind Launch into a spinning attack with full freedom of movement. While active, you continuously spin through hordes of enemies. However, the skill consumes mana continuously.

Spartan Kick A powerful boot strike that deals physical damage, knocks enemies back, and briefly slows them.

Fan Shot Fires a volley of five arrows in a 30-degree cone. Ideal for hitting multiple enemies at once or dealing concentrated damage at close range.

Chain Lightning Unleashes a bolt of lightning that jumps between up to six different targets, dealing damage and briefly slowing them.

In addition, we continue to improve the combat system. We are adding dedicated in-place animations for blocking and parrying to make combat flow more smoothly.

Technical Updates We are upgrading Varthos to Unreal Engine 5.7.3 including plugins.

Furthermore, when starting the game for the first time, it will automatically set suitable graphics settings based on your hardware. This is intended to make the initial experience more comfortable and ensure optimal performance.

As part of our ongoing development, we are restructuring our online infrastructure. This is a technical backend step that is particularly important in the long term, especially with regard to future options such as consoles and cross-platform gaming.

Fixes & Adjustments

We have also resolved several issues:

• Spiders can no longer be killed during their spawn animation (while they are still crawling out of the ground). In some cases, this had caused enemies and their loot to fall through the floor. • The map selection has been adjusted: instead of selecting only a biome in isolation, its position on the world map will now be displayed to provide more context.

Your feedback and ideas remain important to us. If you have thoughts or suggestions, feel free to join our Discord and discuss them with us there.

Thank you for being part of this journey. Have fun playing, The Nightshift Game Development Team