It is with great pride that I’m releasing the first major update for Morhval: Ravenglaire!
First of all, I want to thank shadowspectre, who gave me several suggestions for this update, many of which, I believe, have improved the game a lot. I also implemented a suggestion from Hammer.
Here’s what’s new:
New Procedural Quest Story System
Procedural jobs can now develop into small storylines, instead of always being simple one-step tasks.
Added physical evidence and clues, including the new Evidence/Clue Pouch.
You can now investigate incidents by talking to local residents, hearing different versions of what happened, finding contradictions, and potentially uncovering lies.
Persuasion is now integrated into investigations, allowing you to pressure NPCs for additional information.
Some objectives now show an approximate search area on the map instead of revealing their exact position.
Added quest follow-ups, allowing certain jobs to continue after their apparent initial resolution.
Added more ways to resolve situations, including conversation, persuasion, intimidation/threats, payment, compromise, and combat, depending on the circumstances.
Rescue quests have been expanded, with dialogue from the rescued character, more context about what happened, and additional choices in certain situations.
Added a new referral system: NPCs who do not have work themselves may point you toward someone else who needs help.
Added new anti-repetition systems that take recently used quest structures, evidence types, and objectives into account.
Quest failsafes have been significantly improved, especially for rescue targets, enemies, and other critical objectives that could previously disappear.
Quest-critical NPCs and enemies are now specially protected from aggressive world streaming.
Combat, Magic & Enemies
Five new PS1-style creature models: boar, deer, wolf, jackal, and giant insect.
Improved creature grounding, reducing cases where animals could appear partially buried or floating above the terrain.
Fixed several issues with spells hitting animals, including improvements to Flame Jet and other spells detecting wildlife correctly.
Boars now have a more reliable hit area, particularly for magic and projectile attacks.
Added a new physical arrow projectile.
NPCs and enemies now have a much more complete ranged combat system, including bows/crossbows, line-of-sight checks, drawing/reloading, preferred combat distance, and retreating when the player gets too close.
Several weapon visuals have been corrected, including the spear and bow.
Enemies now have improved persistence across save/load, preserving states such as health, death, surrender, and other combat conditions.
New Character Background System
Added a new Upbringing/Background system during character creation.
Your character can now begin the game with different combinations of attributes, starting gold, and magical knowledge, depending on their upbringing.
Potions, Alchemy & Survival
Added potion hotkeys to keys 1–9.
Hold the assigned key to consume the potion, with new visual feedback.
Potion hotkeys now remain bound to the potion type even when your inventory reaches zero, automatically becoming usable again when you obtain more.
Alchemy can now craft multiple items at once.
Added a new Alchemy Results screen, displaying attempts, successes, failures, time spent, and skill progression.
Fixed raw/cooked meat balance: raw meat is now less nutritious, and even a poor cooking result provides more food than eating it raw.
Fishing has been improved, including better detection of valid water and the possibility of being given directions to a nearby lake.
Major Open-World Performance Overhaul
This update includes a large rework of how the open world is streamed, updated, and simulated.
Added new performance settings:
World Detail Distance
World Streaming Quality
Actor Distance
Environment Collision Quality
These options should help players adjust the world to better suit lower-end PCs.
NPCs, enemies, and animals now use a new LOD system, reducing physics, animation, and processing for distant actors.
Wildlife now uses spatial indexing, preventing the game from constantly searching through every animal in the world.
Added a special combat performance mode, temporarily reducing less important background tasks while combat is taking place.
Forests have been restructured with much cheaper medium- and long-distance LODs, allowing them to maintain visual density at a significantly lower performance cost.
Added a configurable environment collision system, using reusable collision pools and prioritizing trees and objects close to the player.
World loading and streaming have been improved with background workload distribution, resource prefetching, and progressive region preparation.
Added Warm Reload, allowing parts of the nearby world to be reused during certain loading situations instead of rebuilding everything from scratch.
World, Travel & Interface Improvements
Horse-travel destinations can now display additional information about settlements, including their specialties and local economy.
The Contracts panel now automatically becomes more compact when necessary, preventing long descriptions from covering combat hotkeys.
Problematic tavern smoke effects have been removed/adjusted.
Save Compatibility & General Fixes
Improved deterministic compatibility with encounters from version 0.2. The original sixth encounter slot has been preserved so existing saves continue generating the same world IDs and encounter types, while the retired roadside_argument encounter itself remains disabled.
Numerous smaller fixes and reliability improvements have been made across loading, UI, procedural objectives, world streaming, wildlife, NPCs, and general world simulation.
Thank you to everyone who has been playing, reporting problems, and sending suggestions. There is still a lot I want to improve, but I’m very happy with how much better Morhval feels with this update.
And this is only the beginning!