Hello mates! Baron here, and before we all break for the holidays I wanted to give you guys a little sneak peek at the upcoming 1.2 update.
The Rakta update is now fully complete, so the team have already moved onto the next in the Byeth series releases - The Sentara Update.
This update is themed around Sentara, the small maritime nation west of Eraden, renown for its sailors, mercantilism, and piracy!
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This news is only going to be a little preview of things to come. I will do a deeper dive in January, and our hope / ballpark is that this update will be ready for release around the end of February, 2026.
But for now, let's get into this news!
The meat and potatoes of every Byeth update is going to be new weapons and armour, and you can count on every update having these.
In Sentari weaponry, the design direction was inspired by Mediterranean maritime nations, drawing influence from sailors, pirates and privateers.
I will save most of the previews for later, but here is one little teaser to keep you going; the cutlass!
There will be 8 weapons in total, ranging across categories from blades to axes to spears.
In terms of armour, Sentari attire is more suitable for sailing than it is for fighting, so their outfit will consist of lightwear that is more oriented towards mobility and comfort over protection.
And dare I say, it is quite fashionable!
Following up on the additions we made in 1.1.1 by making Rakta playable in dungeons and adding more waves, I can confirm that the same will be true for Sentara.
In 1.2 there will be Sentari waves in the sandbox arenas, and their faction will also be possible to select as the enemy faction in sandbox dungeons. ːpraisesunː
We will do this for all the future Byeth factions too.
You know at Warpfrog we like our little secrets... You heard me say a million times, we need these Byeth updates to be tight and not succumb to scope creep because we don't wanna break the game or sidetrack from development on our new game. However... we couldn't resist... something didn't feel right...
The absence of faction maps was simply too glaring an omission from the Byeth updates to leave alone.
After chatting with the environment team, the guys were really awesome and took a break from working on our next game to jump back to Blade & Sorcery and design some new maps for each of the Byeth factions!
And yes, that includes Rakta, which we will add into 1.2!
A sneak peek of Rakta for you:
The maps will be playable in Sandbox mode, but you will also be able to access them in Crystal Hunt - they will appear as random opportunities for player to visit and fight for money, same as when the maps for Citadel, Canyon, Arena, etc, appear.
However the big difference is that for lore logic you will only fight Raike in the Rakta map, Sentari in the Sentara map, and so on, whereas in the vanilla maps you can fight Outlaws, Wildfolk, Eraden, and The Eye.
In Sandbox mode however, you are free to mix and match as you please! Sandbox is always a good "what if" mode. ːlunar2019piginablanketː
Each update will have one faction oriented map, but in 1.2 you are getting the added bonus of receiving both Rakta and Sentara maps. The enviro team worked under tremendous pressure here to get two entirely new maps created in such a short amount of time, but they crushed it.
Now you are probably now thinking, okay, so then where is the Sentara map preview?? Well I will save it for the next news! ːwftogrinː
To go along with these new maps, we needed a way to have player access them, but you may recall the mapboard was a map of Eraden, so it didn't really make sense to have Rakta and Sentara map locations slapped on there.
In thinking about this solution, it led to a bit of a redesign spiral (but so worth doing!) and as such the mapboard was redesigned in layout and functionality.
As you can see, the interface is much cleaner and legible thanks to the new layout, but you also might have noticed the little tabs down the bottom. This is our solution for the Byeth faction maps.
These are a nice and immersive little way to change areas of the world map, by clicking on the action icon tabs. When you do this, the background world map changes to the canon lore map too.
For example, switching from Eraden to Rakta:
You might also have noticed the tab for Sentara is there too. ːtmntdonː As we add new maps around Byeth, we can add more tabs, for example for Khar-Tib and Madlu.
But something else cool about this new system is that it is modder friendly!
Space has been reserved so modders can add their own custom tabs and maps. So for example, a modder could add their own tab for some brand new place and then add all their own maps under it.
Survival mode has always been a pretty underused gamemode among players and it is fairly understandable why, as it had a lot of similarity to Sandbox which didn't add a ton of motivation for players to play it.
We addressed this and went a bit overboard in doing so - coming in 1.2, we have a whole new survival mode that is super-customizable so you can tailor really cool and unique gamemode experiences.
To start, we added a bunch of totally new functionality to the Survival mode - now you can earn skills as rewards and accumulate power across each wave like a progression mode, unlock new armour sets as a reward, or acquire entire themed bundles as rewards for unique playstyles!
We even added elements so you could play a completely unique roulette gamemode for a truly roguelite experience; choose one reward per wave and whether good or bad you can only use that reward for the round, then it is reset on the next wave. So one round you could be fighting off a wave with a rusty dagger but then annihilating with molten beam the next round.
But best of all, in the true Warpfrog spirit, we don't like to tell you how to have fun! We added lots of customization options so you can tailor survival any way you like. Maybe you want to get just weapons and armour as rewards but not skills; no problem! Or how about magic only, but you are not allowed use enemy weapons; go for it! Or if you even wanna play survival mode but with your character kitted out with weapons and skills acquired from sandbox spawns; do it!
If you really wanted, you could even tailor it to be like the old Survival mode for nostalgia purposes and come full circle, lol.
Our hope is that players who have played Blade & Sorcery to death can enjoy this mode a new way to experience the game that the player may not have previously considered or been motivated enough to self-enforce in sandbox.
This way, player can tailor the game to give them a little structure or limitations to motivate them towards playing a playstyle they might not normally be used to playing.
You will be able to play the new Survival mode on any map including the new maps.
I should also note, the gamemode is very modder friendly! It is really easy for modders to add their own modded weapons or skills to spawn on the reward pillars.
This is not even everything!
I have some more really juicy stuff to share but I am going to save some goodies for the January news, so stayed tuned for more surprises to come. In the January news I will also be able to do a deeper dive into all the aforementioned new stuff.
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From all of us at Warpfrog, we hope you guys all have a great time over the holidays and we will see you next year!
Bye for now!