Sands of Salzaar update for 22 December 2021

Hello Travelers,

Five days past the official launch and we are truly grateful that we can share this thrilling desert journey with players around the world. In the past few days, we’ve been receiving lots of feedback, suggestions and support from our community and continuously fixing in-game issues with daily patches. Now it’s time to sit down around the fireplace, talking about our future dev plans and bringing you the freshly-released update V1.0.0.4!

For upcoming weeks we will release updates regularly about once or twice a week while later on move to a more steady pace of iteration.

First of all, we would like to address those major in-game issues that players are most concerned about:

English Localization and Text UI

Localization is one of the most discussed topics to be improved among players’ feedback, especially regarding UI issues of English texts (including incomplete display of dialogs, text truncation and overflow…) and some misleading translation of quests.

To better locate these issues, we will run a thorough localization QA test after launch to find and fix them. This might not be a short-term project considering the huge amount of in-game texts but we will keep optimizing it step-by-step in the following weeks.

In-Game Tutorials and Guides

As for an open world RPG, our initial aim is to encourage players to freely explore the desert, shaping adventure differently and becoming stronger in every playthrough based on the Legacy system as well as experience and discoveries borrowed from previous runs. However, we are also aware that such an idea of a highly open-ended design might lead to unclearness of directions for many players especially at the early stage - such as about how to use skills or follow certain quests.

Therefore, in future updates, we are planning to optimize those in-game systems to be more comprehensible to use as well as adding some tutorials and guides to assist new travelers in order to provide a better gameplay experience.

Fix Crashing, Blackscreen, Missing Saves

Those basic functionality bugs like game crash, freezing, blackscreen as well as lost save files and save loading issues will be continuously addressed in the upcoming patches.

Talking of old save loading, though we would encourage players to try the new game and embark on a brand-new journey in V1.0, we also designed an old save conversion tool to help those Early Access players convert their old saves to be compatible with the new version in terms of skills and arms units porting. However, it is worth noting that some custom buildings and old equipment entries cannot be fully ported to the new saves due to version differences, while saves with mods installed will also require updates of specific mods for 1.0 compatibility.

For those individual save issues, our team has been continuously fixing them one-by-one in recent updates based on players’ reports and save files provided. If you encounter any save issues, please also send a ticket in our Discord or submit a bug report form directly :D

Game Stats Balancing

In V1.0, we totally reworked in-game stats in all aspects in order to adjust combat difficulty, skills, arms units, resources acquisitions and the economy growth curve that players had required for optimization during Early Access. However, according to current players’ feedback, there is certainly scope for more improvement in game stats balancing, especially regarding the mid-late stage of the game.

In this sense, we will continue to adjust overall gameplay difficulty in terms of combat, resources acquisitions and equipment stats in the following updates, and keep them layered in different runs as well as further distinguish stats systems of each difficulty level in both Story and Sandbox Mode.

Future Roadmap

Based on the above discussions, here’s our post-launch roadmap addressing the expected major updates in the future:

December

• Fix UI issues of English texts;

• Keep troubleshooting and fixing major bugs reported by players;

• Keep fixing missing saves and save loading issues;

• Sustainly fix crashing and lagging issues;

• Add more guidance info at the early stage of the game;

• develop options to adjust combat speed;

• Combat optimization such as on difficulty balance, equipment entries, resource acquisition;

• Improve the early-stage game experience by adjusting legacy skills, sorting combat items and more;

January

• Keep optimizing combat stats including difficulty, resource acquisition, and more;

• Keep improving localization;

• Sustainly optimize combat maps and siege maps;

• Optimize modding environment by providing dungeon MOD samples, maintenance and update on MOD Wiki pages;

February

• Enable playing as a tribal chief at the start of the game in Sandbox Mode;

• Optimize siege maps with more new siege buildings;

• Keep improving game performance to address lagging issues
  ……

Also, we might adjust the update plans according to the actual development progress and will definitely let you know how they’re coming along in future blogs.

Update V1.0.0.4 is Live Now

Also, besides the roadmap, we are bringing you the newly-released update V1.0.0.4. Please check out the update log below:

New Additions:

• Now NPCs who teach magics in each region will provide hints about the number of Arcana skills you can obtain according to your Arcana Talent

• New UI Added - A new Combat Shortcut Bar

Adjustments:

• Before the player’s level reaches lv.10, it will no longer assign a higher level NPC as the target in the random quest - debt collector

• Nerfed ⅓ obtainable Favor of NPC Lord

• Added an ATK range to Weapon - Staff such that Witch’s shadows now own the ranged attack ability instead of dealing melee attack only

• Increased the gear drop rate from dungeons as well as the diversity of Lv.1-10 gears that could be obtained from dungeons

• Optimized map art of Twinluna Valley & West Docana Desert

• Random quest - Retrieve runaway villagers, reduced ¼ range of the 3 villagers‘ spawn area

• Random quest - Tavern Brawl, the quest object will no longer be settled in the city of Ifrit

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that caused wrong ownership of the lord title when the lord had been exiled by the faction. (With the update, All save slots will be converted to the correct version, which the ownership of lord title will be given back to the NPC)

• Fixed a bug that caused a wrong duel target addressed while the target was in another team in the random quest - Debt Collector

• Fixed a bug that erroneously caused a city lord to be in the wild when trying to convince him to join your team but your team was already full

• Fixed a bug that caused the actual effect of Sultan’s skill Epoch Crystal Core is unmatched with its description

• Fixed a bug that caused wrong quest target appearance in the map when random quests - redemption & chase are expired to complete

• Fixed a bug that caused a non-response issue when the number of magic skill pages to be learned exceeded your learning capacity (now it’s able to auto-hide “Self-learned” skill pages)

• Fixed wrong stats & description of skill [Aegis Aura] from Role - Sentinel

• Fixed a bug that caused talent [Malitia] not to be applied functionally

• Fixed a bug that caused the error when loading save slots, now after improving system compatibility, some of them will be able to load functionally (We’re looking into the associated UI display issue and will fix it soon)

If you have any other feedback or suggestions, please let us know in our Discord channels or submit a bug report form which we will be checking regularly. We are also hosting a variety of prize-giving events in our Discord Tavern. Join us and have fun with other fellow travelers!

Stay tuned for more updates underway and we will see you then!