Ethereal Legends update for 7 May 2018

After more than a year without updates to Ethereal Legends, I am excited to finally release version 1.3 on Steam!  Grab the free update, now.

This isn't a huge update, and it's purpose is more for stability and maintenance than anything else.  While I do not have as much time these days to dedicate to Ethereal's development as far as features go, I also don't want to allow the game to get too far behind, as far as keeping it running on modern technology is concerned.  I've used this opportunity to fix a couple things that had been bothering me as I'd collected feedback from players throughout the last year, repairing a few obvious bugs and making the game a little easier overall.

Specifically, I adjusted the randomized level advantage applied to boss monsters so that they can spawn up to a maximum of 10 levels greater than the player's current level (they could spawn up to 15 levels greater in previous versions).  While this change affects all boss monsters, it will specifically make the final boss battle less of a chore on average (considering the stat difference of a capped level 60 player with average gear, it was really drawn out if The Eternal spawned at level 70+).

Additionally, I made a rather significant change to the algorithm that distributes drops when you defeat an enemy, with the intention of making it faster to farm all of the items in the game.  Enemies in Ethereal adhere to a loot table; in previous versions of the game, because of the loot table design, the enemy would occasionally roll (behind the scenes) to drop an item that already existed in the player's inventory.  When this happened, the player would simply receive no drop from the enemy.  This mechanic made "Rare" items (with a 10% drop rate) actually rare, considering you could sometimes go many kills before finally seeing the "Rare" item drop from a specific enemy.  With Version 1.3, I've modified this mechanic to check whether or not the rewarded drop already exists in your inventory, and if it does, the drop will "fallback" to the next available item within that enemy's loot table.  For example, if you defeat The Eternal and he drops Comet, but you already have Comet in your inventory from a previous kill, then he'll try to give you the Beam Saber instead.  As you can see, this change will limit the number of times players have to defeat a particular enemy in order to obtain all it's loot (at the expense of making certain items far less rare).

Along with a few general optimizations around lighting and collision, these changes help make Version 1.3 a pretty good update!

Ethereal Version 1.3 Update Notes

• Updated to Unreal Engine 4.19.2.

• Updated lighting builds on all maps.

• Resolved an issue in Arcadia where a glass smashing sound effect would play at an inappropriate time.

• The level advantage for boss enemies has been reduced to a maximum of 10 levels greater than the player's current level.

• The algorithm that distributes drops was modified to make all drops significantly easier to obtain.

• Signet Rings are no longer 100% drops from boss enemies.  Instead, they now drop as Common rarity (60% drop rate).

• Modified the collision capsules of certain enemies and weapons.

• Fixed two collision bugs in Arcadia that allowed the player to fall beneath the castle walls.

• Fixed some user interface clipping issues that were introduced by updating the engine.