Good Day Mercians

We have paused the storefront/purchasing of the black death, this is due to recent server instability over the past weekend and the on-going homestead save issues combined, made it the right thing to do.

We have also hit delays on the development of our new update "Rebellion", sales of the game have been low over the past 3 years, this was something we were expecting but makes it hard to deliver this new patch at a timely manner.

However don't fret! The game will continue to be playable in your library, servers will remain up and work on the new update will continue (slowly but surely).We still have a burning desire to finish the game and as soon as the new update is ready and stable we will continue the sales of the black death and reactivate the storefront.

We have no release date for the new patch but we thank everyone for playing and the massive patience demonstrated.

See you in Mercia

Happy new year Mercians!

We wanted to post an announcement (yep another one!) on the progress of the rebellion update. Work is still going ahead and we are making strides on the major content required for the patch. One internal milestone we hit was completing the brand new (safe/starter zone) kingdom, we were unhappy with using current assets and wanted to give the city a fresh lick of paint. We have created a new layout and added an additional 20 houses bringing the total to 55 purchasable dwellings.


Vast range of unique buildings to live in have been added such as these apartments overlooking the town square


Most buildings come with private gardens, such as these peasant hovels in the slum district


However if you are after a life in agriculture then plenty of farmland is available outside the city walls


Once you have the coin, you can move into the royal quarter and live in the large manor houses


but fear not, if you are all out of gold there will be plenty of rooms at the inn

A new locomotion system has also been added, since the third person system has been fully re-worked, we thought it would be best to improve the overall presentation of player and A.I. movement. Here is some GIFs of the player running around the new kingdom:


Now entering the kingdom's entrance and the new "safe zone" so the player is free to trade and socialize


Here's the player approaching the market square, full of purchasable market stalls to start your very own business


The treasury is located in the royal quarter, where you can deposit your biggest valuables



A more dynamic day and night cycle has also been re-worked






The new "tiredness" mechanic has also been added, this requires the player to use various furniture to recover lost maximum stamina at different rates.


The new craftable royal bed will recover your stamina in no time!

The coffer system is now reaching completion which features 4 types that reflect the value of it's items inside. So make sure to make it back to the treasury alive if you find the ultra rare royal coffer.


That's all Mercians, if you are curious to what else is coming in this mammoth update please help yourselves to the previous announcements regarding this patch. Thanks to everyone playing and the patience shown waiting for this new content and much needed bug fixes.

Hopefully we can demonstrate more soon.

Take care.

Good Day Mercians

We once again apologize for the persistent delays on the current update for the black death "Rebellion" we understand this is the main cause for players to believe that we have abandoned the project, which is completely understandable, however we wanted to note we are still developing the game but if we did decided to stop development we would have the professional courtesy of announcing it but no need to worry, we have full intentions to build up to a full release (out of early access) before even considering ceasing development.

So why is it taking so long?

Fair question, the answer has 3 main points:

• First point was upgrading the engine (twice) required some mechanics to be re-built from scratch which resulted in the live build being more stable than our current one. So unfortunately this can be very time consuming to make sure the game is stable again on our side.
  
  
• Second point is we've had a "higher than average" refund rate (around 20%) the entire early access period, no matter the content or fixes. We have acknowledged that this has climbed a little in recent months (due to server activity/player count, which is understandable) but we have discovered this is due to the game's systems at a base level and it's initial impression, so we are fleshing out the game almost to the point it will feel like a fresh experience but being careful to keep the themes and mechanics people are so fond of. (However, no need to worry we will make sure the current version is backed up and available through steam launcher separately including servers so you can still play the previous version when the new update is released)
  
  
• Third point, which is the most impactful, is the past 2.5 years we've had to acquire part time work to pay for the game's development and server charges. We were prepared to do this since it's our upmost priority to complete the game no matter the cost but this directly affects the amount of time can be spent on developing the game. This was manageable but has become more demanding in the past year but we are actively trying to dedicate more time to the black death so we can get this update out to you.

We want to iterate that the community/players that have purchased the game, refund or not, are integral to the game's progress and we will be the first people to admit that the slowed development is caused by us and not our community, if we built the game to be more desirable earlier we wouldn't have these issues. So thank you for bearing with us, that being said, let's discuss/reveal new content being built:



The Kingdom

A new capital city has been built from the ground up where all players will spawn/start their life within the black death, this area will contain new mechanics for beginners and veterans alike to enjoy and progress. This area will be the only "safe-zone" throughout the game and act has a home base for all players.



The Treasury

The capital city will contain a treasury/bank, this is private storage that allows players to store any item/gold they wish, however to prevent impact of building storage chests later on within the game, each player's bank allotment is limited.



Rentable Property

Houses that are pre-built within the new capital city will be available via a rent system allowing the player to deposit gold and access the building's buildable area, so players can freely place anvils in rented workshops, crops in rented farmland or storage chests in their very own city home. Missing rent results in loss of the property so make sure to keep up with payments. We've had similar systems in the past but now feel we are capable of providing a more fleshed out experience.



Siege/Raids

The raidable/siege locations (which were available at the ferryman) are now placed around Mercia, as you can see above the northern siege is placed on the east side of the map within the snowy mountains of Frostfall. The new Celtic siege is now in Skenfirth, the arena is near freeman's port and the crusade is deep south beyond the wall at Duffus.



The Coffer

More dangerous areas around Mercia will now spawn various coffers (common, rare and legendary) which are small chests containing valuable loot, however these will require to be opened/unlocked at the treasury. This is to provide thrilling risk and reward gameplay and to challenge some of the most experienced players, since they have to survive obtaining the coffer and the return journey to the capital. Dozens of new items and recipes are being created for this mechanic including:


The War Axe


The Iron Hat


The Combat Scythe


The Iron Sallet


The Royal Messer


The Reinforced Tower Shield


The War Pick


The Royal Tower Shield.

and many more... so make sure to get that coffer back alive.

The King/Queen System 2.0

We are improving the current system to require players to "capture and hold" the crown in raven's reach to become the new leader of Mercia, this will provide the throne and it's royal coffers (within the new kingdom). However dying results in the crown being "reset" allowing others to attempt being King/Queen of Mercia. Hopefully resulting in a more dynamic player vs player experience.

We hope you are looking forward to these changes as much as we are but we felt it's necessary to take our time introducing new core mechanics to the game to provide longevity and meaning to the player and keep players playing.

If you wish to see other content coming in this update please feel free to read previous "rebellion" update news in the community page.

We currently do not have a release date yet but as previously mentioned this will be uploaded to our beta branch before releasing and will be announced publicly so everyone can try it early.

Thanks for reading!

Good day Mercians!

We hope everyone is well in these turbulent times and wanted to let you know that we are still in full operation on our end still adding final touches to the rebellion update.

In the meantime we wanted to show some more groundbreaking changes we are making to the black death as we are starting to reach completion on the rebellion update. If you wish to know more about the update please refer to previous posts in the news section. Anyways lets get to it:



We have re-built the item and inventory system to work around cell sizes, giving a more realistic approach to storage! The bag system has also been re-built to provided additional storage cells. (Don't worry you can rotate items with your inventory to your hearts content to maximise your space management.)



This new system covers all containers throughout the world, even dead bodies. We are also placing every item within the game into containers and spawn locations throughout Mercia, including the new feature recipe items.



All recipe items can be looted but can only be learnt (permanently) using recipe study benches which can be found around populated landmarks and will be buildable at a later date. We are adding over 300 recipe items to the game, the largest content addition to date.

Anyways we hope you are as excited for the update as we are and we are extremely grateful for you patience. We will post another announcement as soon as a playable beta is live.

See you in Mercia!

The S.I.G. Team

Good day Mercians!

We are aware that the original date set for the rebellion update has not been met, we apologize for the delay and the frustration this has caused.

We were trying our best to get this update complete for a soon as possible but have internally become unhappy over it's contents. So we are now adding more drastic changes since this is the biggest update ever, we wanted to make it truly special.

We hope you can understand this but we are hopeful that the update will be coming in weeks rather than months.

As soon as a playable beta is live we will post an announcement!

See you in Mercia

The S.I.G, Team.

Good Day Mercians

We are now proud to announce our upcoming update which is officially named Update V0.39 - Rebellion. To be released January 2020! If you missed the previous information about this update you can find it HERE


First of all I would like to express our sincerest apologies to the community for having to wait so long for this announcement we understand this is the largest time between updates in our history but we couldn’t be more focused on getting the black death to the finishing line!

In other news, our contract with the publisher Green man gaming has ended, Green Man Gaming were crucial in a great marketing push pre-early access and of course during it, so we would like to thank them for getting our message out and aiding in the community. We wish Green Man Gaming the best and a great future.

Now let’s get behind the scenes on more content to look forward to in the next black death update….. Rebellion


Harvestable Trees.



Yes! That’s right, finally we will have every tree throughout Mercia harvestable, once cut down they also grow back overtime to give an immersive experience of medieval logging. This will come with some re-balancing to the value and weight of wood and the amount of wood required in recipes.

Character Level



In an attempt to address issues with skill point distribution, especially with mid-game progression, we have now built a robust leveling system that provides a set amount of skill points earned at each level, this is a system popular amongst most RPGs and fits well within the black death, currently there are no plans to have a level cap but who wouldn’t love bragging about being level 1000…..

Inventory UI Refurbishment



We’ve noticed a large amount of confusion when dealing with items especially when equipping them in our current system. In the next update we will have all items displayed in a tidy square format which is immensely intuitive to place those square items into square equipment slots. Another huge benefit is being able to display A LOT more items within your inventory!

Player Built Stables



One of the largest bits of feedback we’ve had in the expedition update was horses being too rare or simply impossible to find, in the next update we will be providing players the ability to build a stable which will spawn a single horse. This horse can be taken wherever your heart desires but will return to the stable after being idle for too long.

Plagued Zones



In addition to our current expanding plague area we have now built permanent plagued zones in the dangerous south of Mercia, this is to provide new experiences and environmental storytelling about the disease. New enemies, loot and structures will be found throughout, however tread lightly and bring a mask.

Rebels

As previously mentioned this update will contain a new siege/raid map which will offer players a chance to squash northern rebels encroaching in the north however new rebel groups will also be spotted throughout Mercia so take them on and earn some valuable loot in the process.

Post update information

We originally planned to come out of early access by the end of the year however we now would like to develop/experiment with a few more elements to the game before doing so. (but also fix all those pesky bugs!) These elements are incredibly early still but we would like to share our thoughts. These are the following:

• Mod SDK (Allow for user created content)
  
• Full Controller Support
  
• Achievements
  
• Expanded Character creator (More options)

When we do finally come out of early access we will be increasing the price with an additional 15% , we felt it was important to keep the game affordable to grow the player base but also reward players with something that increases in value if they purchased it within the early access time period. We hope you can understand this and we greatly appreciate everyone’s support.

That’s all folks, we look forward to delivering this beast of an update! But we will make sure to provide more details closer to the updates launch/completion.

See you in Mercia.

Good day Mercians!



We apologize for the radio silence on steam however we have been busy getting our new content stable including a large engine update, we also wanted to let everyone know the current progress being made on the beta which is being updated frequently and is free for everyone to try out in the “the black death” properties setting.

Here is a quick breakdown of current beta and upcoming features in the next update for the black death:

Engine Upgrade

Utilizing the new unreal engine version has aided in stability for the black death and increased performance greatly. Some of our lower tier machines are reporting a solid 60 FPS (45 FPS previously) This has also addressed some crashes that were occurring in various siege maps. If you are curious about the unreal engine version we have implemented you can read information HERE



Master Professions & Profession Redux

In an attempt to make professions more essential to the games core mechanics we are altering attributes to be hard bound to professions (rather than being leveled up separately) and including new professions that provide a larger variation of gameplay. We will also be removing renown and having profession purchased using skill points, we found renown was lost on some players and added an unnecessary wall/block to obtaining professions. We are especially excited to announce master professions which is designed to be mid to late game content. Here is a breakdown of how some of them work:

• Master Peasant (higher attribute levels and triple item forage passive ability) Unlocked after level 20 peasant. 5 Skill Points to select
  
• 
  
• Master Blacksmith (higher attribute levels including cheap item repair and faster building passive abilities) Unlocked after level 15 blacksmith and level 15 Mason. 6 Skill Points to select
  
• 
  
• Master Outlaw (higher attribute levels including bandits are friendly, guards are enemies AND double loot from hunting passive abilities) Unlocked after Level 10 Bandit and Level 10 Hunter. 4 Skill Points to select

New Siege Map

A lower difficulty/cost map set in celtic territory, fight your way through barbaric defenses and cleanse the area of unlawful clansman.



Integrated Custom Server Hosting

You will be able to host custom servers of Mercia (PVP or PVE) from within the game for you and your friends to enjoy the black death in full publicly or privately including seamless travel between our own servers.

Blast destruction technology

All player built structures will now fall apart accurately using Nvidia’s blast plugin. You can learn more about it HERE

Here are some GIFs taken of it in action with various structures:



We greatly appreciate the patience the community has shown and we are understanding of the frustration the lack of recent updates has caused however we will continue to strive to build the black death to a full release and look forward to getting it to the standard you expect. This next update will also include large amounts of bug squashing, one step closer to the visceral medieval survival experience we envisioned.

Thanks for reading.

The S.I.G Team

Hail adventurers. In this latest update we bring you some exciting new features as well as fixing some issues which we know have been plaguing you.

Below are the patch notes in full:

New:

• King/Queen of Mercia - Rule over all of Mercia, let the people hear your name!
  
• Major revamp to the Arena map - Battle your way through for gold and glory!
  
• Gladiators A.I. (Arena Map)
  
• Gladiator weapons (Arena Map)

Fixes:

• Fixed a bug which could cause your homestead to wipe
  
• Fixes added to armour recipes which were not crafting correctly
  
• Fixed a bug that would cause some weapons to do 300% damage when in first person
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented loot spawning in raidable locations around Mercia
  
• Fixed server crash to do with chest armour UI event
  
• Fixed server crash to do with House serfs begin play on network
  
• Fixed server crash on AI end swing null pointer while dying
  
• Fixed duplicate AI weapon loot spawning
  
• Fixed bugs relating to degrading over time not working correctly
  
• Fixed a ui bug which stopped storage chests number of items updating when you put in/take out items

once claiming the throne in ravens reach you will be known throughout the land as the ruler of Mercia but be careful your position will be known on the map

Updated:

• Updated tooltips to be in line with the recent content changes
  
• Updated HUD and map to reflect the kings/queens changes
  
• Added additional tooltips for new features within the game

Balancing:

• Increased the damage output for primitive weapons such as the crude hammer, stick club and crude spear to make them more viable than punching

Optimising:

• Optimised game icons

Thanks again to everyone helping us find these issues, we are continuing to see an increase in activity which is great, we hope you enjoy these fixes and brand new content.

The S.I.G. Team

Good day everyone!

First we wanted to thank everyone for playing (highest player count in 5 months!) and letting us know about your issues, we are going to release another content update and hotfix this friday! This update will include the following:

• King/Queen of Mercia - Use your royalty status to fight and claim the throne, allowing you to build in raven's reach as the single leader of Mercia.
  
  
• New Arena Map (replacing the current one) - compete in multiple arenas to earn loot and gold.
  
  
• Recipe armour fixes - multiple weapon parts are currently not crafting correctly we will address all of these items.
  
  
• Tooltip Quests - currently players are unable to progress due to recent changes of content, we will address these issues.
  
  
• New Tooltip Quests - we will add more quests to provide more opportunities of learning and XP rewards.
  
  
• Crashes - we will be addressing reports from the community to eliminate existing crashes.

Thanks again to everyone and we look forward to getting you this new update.

The S.I.G. Team

WARNING THIS UPDATE INCLUDES A FULL WIPE TO PLAYER SAVES AND PLAYER BUILT STRUCTURES


Good day Mercians!

We have now released a content update that provides a new armour system (that allows players to build parts and allow for underneath clothing) and a new raid map named "the crusade".

Server Migration

We have also changed server providers after we received the following statement from multiplay: "we have made the difficult decision to close our community hosting services including both game and voice comms servers". We have transferred our servers over to citadel servers, so please feel free to join us with your community servers. We will try and keep this change disruption to a minimum although some alterations may happen to server name,capacity and location. PVE and PVP megaservers will be unaffected.

Here are the patch notes in full:

New:

• Crusade raid map - explore cave systems in the far east where riches and heavy infection lies.
  
• Armour part system - craft individual parts of armour and equip underlying clothes
  
• Full Server and Player wipe
  
• Heavily infected - new A.I. enemies in their last hours of life
  
• Leather armour set
  
• Procedural item quality set by crafting level to all weapons and amour. - This affects item name, durability and gold value.
  
• Studded club weapon

enjoy endless combinations of armour and clothing

Updated:

• Iron Helmet recipe
  
• Leather Helmet recipe
  
• Silver Helmet recipe
  
• Royal heavy helmet recipe
  
• Khopesh weapon loot

Experience the heaviest infection yet but also untold riches

Balancing:

• Daily XP bonuses increased by 200%
  
• Stick club recipe
  
• Armour values reduced (since you can equip more parts in new system)

Journey far and travel deep into the mines of the middle east

Fixes

• fixed an issue that can cause triple durability damage
  
• fixed an issue that would shields to parry rather than holding block
  
• fixed an issue that would cause crashes when trying to stream item icons
  
• removed old armour recipes

Thanks for playing everyone and we look forward to seeing you in Mercia!

The S.I.G. Team