1.5 Update
Happy Friday and welcome to the 1.5 update for Greywind's Legacy!
Areas of focus this week:
-A cleanup of damage types and some ability systems.
-A stealth and thievery rework
-A few visibility changes to make loot and quests easier to read at a glance.
And finally a big thank you to SirSquatch, who has now finished going through all 399 ability descriptions in the game! They really bring a new sense of excitment and immersion to game through better fleshed out descriptions and I think you'll all agree the game is much better for it =)
Abilities
Ability Descriptions
- Another 143 descriptions rewritten. Every description has now had a finishing pass!
- Six more descriptions were corrected to better describe what they do: Whirlwind Axe, Power Smash , Armour Crush, Void Blade, Smite, and Nature's Wrath Bolt.
Damage Types
- Several abilities used "Physical" as a damage type, which was never actually a type. Those abilities are now resorted properly into Blunt or Piercing.
- The Arcane school has been split into Force and Psychic across its nine abilities, so they now resist and land like every other spell. Arcane is no longer a damage type on its own to avoid confusion.
- The four incorporeal undead (Shade, Noble Wraith, Soul Siphon, Glacial Shade) are now immune to all physical damage.
Renamed Abilities
Eight more abilities have new names. If you already know them, you keep them.
- Whirlwind Slash is now Cleaving Slash
- Hammer of Gods is now Godsmash
- Death Rain is now Rain of Arrows
- Arrow God's Volley is now Monsoon of the Arrow God
- Spear of Destiny is now Gae Bolg
- Legendary Ambush is now Flawless Ambush
- World Breaker is now World Shaker
- War Cry is now Battle Chant
Stealth and Thievery
- One number now tells you everything. The success chance shown in the sneak menu is also the share of the enemy's gold you take and your odds of finding an item. A 74% steal takes 74% of the purse.
- Enemy difficulty for stealing is now based on the enemy's level instead of its XP value. XP is a reward scale, not a difficulty one, which produced some odd results: a level 5 story enemy was harder to rob than most level 60s, while a level 35 enemy was as easy as a goblin. Every thievery tier now opens up a new band of targets instead of the top three doing nothing.
- Bosses can no longer be robbed at all.
- Sneaking successfully no longer eats stealth level-up message. The skill was levelling the whole time but the message was clearing by itself before the player could read it.
Combat
- Lowering an enemy's defense with stacked abilities could give some of it back. Two separate systems were tracking the same debuff and overwriting each other, so alternating between a dedicated debuff and an ability that carries one as a rider would hand defense back to the enemy.
Readability
- Item names in loot are now bold, so the reward line stands out instead of blending into the text after a fight.
- The 15 zone signature relics also carry a ✦ when they drop, so you know immediately that something unusual fell rather than another Health Potion. This applies to stolen items too.
- Chain quest dialogue now uses one label per state instead of four labels for three meanings. You'll see [NEW] where a chain starts, [CONTINUE] where a step is ready for you, [IN PROGRESS] where a chain is running but there's nothing to do yet, and [COMPLETE] when it's done.
- A ✦ marks anything you can act on right now, so walking into a town you can tell at a glance whether an NPC has something for you. This covers Raltre's trial as well, which now clearly shows when it's available to start.
- Fixed a misleading quest label. If you found all three of the Lost Children, Warden Sorex still showed the quest as merely in progress with no sign it was ready to hand in.
For existing saves
Your saves carry across as normal. All eight renamed abilities are converted automatically on load, so you won't lose any of them.
Future plans
Mac and Linux are still where most of my time is going (as always). Alongside that I'm carrying on with the review for bugs and clarity. Please keep it coming with player reports!
Special thanks to Ebrill who had two great reports this week that helped me fix a Thievery and Defense bug!
And one final thank you to SirSquatch for once again putting so much of their own time into this passion project of mine to help create better descriptions for everyone! Please check out those descriptions!!
Let me know in the comments or in discussions if you have an idea or a bug and I'll respond quickly as always!
Have a great weekend!
-Lansdolli