After 2 years of development before Early Access and 2 years in Early Access, the final update has arrived: Ortharion: The Last Battle is now version 1.0!

This means the game is now considered its “definitive version”:

• There will be no more major structural changes.

• However, the game will continue to evolve with balance adjustments, visual improvements, and additional tweaks to certain zones.

The future of updates will mostly depend on the number of active players.

Here are the improvements included in the 1.0 update:

Performance Optimizations

A significant amount of work has been done to improve smoothness, especially for PCs with modest CPUs, but also in situations with a large number of enemies on screen (for example in Arena mode, I personally gained an average of 3–5 FPS, going from 44 to 48 FPS during the end of the arena).

⚠️ Note: GPU-related performance has not been modified. Some areas with heavy decorations may still cause slight FPS drops.

Notable improvements:

• More stable FPS when many effects are on screen (AOE skills, equipment damage, etc.).

• Optimized target searching by NPCs and your skills.

• Optimized cursor tracking and displayed health bars.

• Reduced memory allocations (GC Alloc) to prevent RAM-related crashes after long play sessions.

• Faster zone loading, with fewer micro-freezes and a lower chance of crashes.

• Removal of unnecessary code lines that overloaded logs and slightly slowed the game.

• More robust save system: even with missing or incorrect data, the game now launches without blocking progression.

Specific zones:

• Improved loading times in crypt areas, especially in B2_crypte.

Quality of life:

• A message now appears when you try to pick up an item while your inventory is full.

Visual and Audio Improvements for Skills

• Knife Rain (Acrobat): new visual.

• Destructive Strike (Assassin): new visual + sound.

• Acid Blade (Chaos Manipulator): new visual + sound.

• Poison Familiar (all classes): new visual.

• Rage Shout: enlarged visual.

• Fear Shout (Gladiator): new visual.

• Fragility Shout (Brawler): new visual.

• Fury Shout (Barbarian): new visual.

• Death Shout (Necromancer): new visual.

• Hemorrhagic Shout (Berserker): new visual.

• Powerful Shout (Madman): new visual.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a critical bug related to enemy creation from a predefined pool, which could cause instability.

• Added safeguards to prevent “null ref exception” errors that sometimes blocked the behavior of single-target skills.

• Fixed a bug where Lightning Bolt could crash if cast on a dying target between activation and the visual impact.

Ortharion officially leaves Early Access. Thank you to everyone who has supported the project so far!