Gameplay

• Finished talent rework. Mages, summoners and buffers have had their talents reworked. These were the last characters to be updated. Every character has had their talents updated to provide more structure for your choices and offer more differentiation between those choices.
  
• Reduced frequency of random loot finds from 1 in 7 days to 1 in 8 days. This value is chance-based.
  
• Prevent spamming of interactive world objects such as statues, these will now go on a default 1 day cooldown after interaction.
  
• Reduced number of guards given to the player for liberating first settlement.
  
• Re-worked selection of units in various shops around the map.
  
• Liberating settlements now grants experience.
  
• Added world events. This is a new mechanic. World events occur randomly and have a strong impact on game rules, for a limited period of time. They can help you in a big way, or result in an embarrassing defeat if you're not careful. Currently there are 7 possible events.
  
• Re-balanced enemy difficulty across the map, almost all enemy groups are now tougher.
  
• Increased enemy hero strength.
  
• Increased prices of most items in the game.
  
• Reduced item loot chance by 10%.
  
• Reduced strength of hero aura talents
  
• Most items now share a common group restriction, allow a character to have only 1 consumable item buff at a time. This means that you can't use 30 different items on the same character before a fight. This has been a hard decision to make, but it makes the game easier to balance and removes a boring mechanic where you have to stay in the inventory screen for a few minutes using different items before a tough fight. The rest of the game has been re-balanced to accommodate this change.
  

Audio & Visual

• Updated textures in combat scenes (we worked on these for about 3 months in the background, finally done!)
  
• Reworked visual and sound effects in combat. The intention is to make combat flow more readable and easier to understand.
  
• Arrow above the character's head has been replaced with a better-looking effect.
  
• Added a small delay after combat turn ends, to help distinguish turns.
  
• Added victory and defeat audio jingles to combat scene.
  
• Dim the lights during enemy turn in combat
  
• Dim the lights during enemy turn in adventure mode
  
• Added level-up effect, distinct visuals and sound.
  
• Combat effects will now fade out gradually instead of disappearing abruptly.
  
• Minor cleanup of terrain textures. Making roads a bit more clear and moving them away from the mountains in some places.
  

Technical

• Optimized fog of war calculation speed, people on lower end hardware should see a performance improvement.
  
• Optimized GUI performance
  
• Better scene transition, the loading screen will now hide most of the mesh loading and shader compilation. When the scene loads - you will see it in the final form.
  
• Spatial index performance optimization. Removes most of the FPS spikes caused by garbage collection.
  
• Optimized effects engine, better resource usage and improved overall performance.
  
• Optimized performance of graphics engine.
  
• Optimized loading speed for Water shader, switching between combat and adventure mode is now a little faster.
  
• Story screens now stay up until all choice actions are completed. This removes flicker when going form one story screen to another.
  
• Added pre-loading for story screens based on active choices, this hides loading of images when switching between story screens.
  
• Improved scene load times.
  

GUI

• Turn order GUI has been reworked. cards are smaller and offer less information, this is to reduce screen clutter. Same overall amount of information is displayed on the screen, but some duplication has been removed.
  
• Changed colors for enemy unit names for better clarity.
  
• Interactive world objects now show a special mouse cursor when you hover over them.
  
• Added sound effects for various GUI interactions.
  
• Unit shop GUI layout improvement
  
• Minor readability improvement in stat GUI
  
• Chopped text in radial menu will now end in "..."
  
• Moved mini-map away from the corner of the screen
  
• Hero marker will now shine when the hero is not on screen to help you find the hero.
  

Bugfixes

• Fixed a rare animation system bug that would cause animations to freeze under very specific set of conditions.
  

This update brings last set of features that we have promised in our Early Access plan. From this point on - we will be preparing for the full release. Thanks to everyone who has joined us on this journey so far. See you in the next update!