Dear Denizens of Issilith,

"It's not the fall that gets you, it's the landing"

Deep within the shadows, the Tikiri emerge as a small race of rat-like beings. Despite their weak constitution, they excel in the arts of stealth, dirty fighting, and the intricate craft of traps. Preferring to avoid physical confrontations, they employ a "one shot - one kill" approach, eliminating targets swiftly and silently. With no allegiance to any faction, the Tikiri mostly keep to themselves, but some offer their mercenary services. Specialising in dirty tricks and infiltration, they are sought after for their ability to leave no trace that connects them to their employers. Though they may appear less intelligent, the Tikiri are fierce negotiators, ensuring profitable agreements and guarding against deception. While most honour their deals, some will attempt to scam their employers if they believe they can escape without consequence. In the realm of secrecy, the Tikiri Trapmakers command respect with their elusive nature, unpredictable motives, and mastery of survival in the shadows.



The enigmatic Tikiri Trapmaker embodies the essence of deception and lethal prowess. With a power of 1 and health of 2, these rat-like beings masterfully navigate the shadows, relying on their expertise in traps and dirty fighting. Tikiri Trapmakers possess an ability that triggers whenever an enemy dares to summon a unit within their proximity. As the opposing forces place their units, the Tikiri trapmaker with its intricate web of traps ensnares your foes and disrupts their well-laid plans! With calculated precision, these masters of deception deploy cunning traps that scatter enemy forces and sow chaos within their ranks. As unsuspecting adversaries stumble into these cleverly placed traps. The Trapmakers solidify their reputation as skilled and relentless adversaries. Tikiri Trapmakers stand as a testament to the power of strategy and cunning, a testament that the smallest and seemingly insignificant beings can tip the scales of battle in their favour.

May the cunning and lethal prowess of the Tikiri Trapmaker guide your path to triumph! Share your favourites and if you haven’t already, join our Discord channel and exchange your favourites with other Residents of Issilith!

Yours truly,

PHAGEBORN team

some simple UI changes

We're hosting a Live Stream Event for Rival Rides this Saturday, June 17, 2023 1:30pm PT on all our social media!

Here's what to expect:
👉 Exciting giveaways
👉 Sneak peek at our updates & roadmap
👉 AMA session
👉 Epic game sessions (Devs vs Founders and Founders vs YOU!)
👉 Surprise guests
👉 Plus...a MAJOR announcement!

Can't wait to share all the exciting stuff with you. Mark your calendars and see you there!

The Rival Rides Team

Greetings Everyone!

Today we want to introduce the first feature coming out during early access: NEW GAME +!

This option will be available to you after completing the main campaign, and it will not be directly tied to your standard campaign game saves.

• You will start a new campaign with every hero card from the standard campaign already unlocked.
  
• You will unlock brand new Hero Cards after defeating certain bosses.
  
• Enemies will be tougher, showing up in different party configurations, and with a few surprises along the way…
  
• Neutral Cards drafts will always include the full pool from the standard campaign + a new set of Neutral and Adaptive cards!
  
• Skill Point and Orb rewards are doubled!

NEW GAME + will feature Vestal + and Everchosen + difficulties.
We will take this chance to also improve the difficulty scaling of the game as a whole, tuning the scaling of enemies’ HP and Damage in both the standard campaign and new game +.


During the next few weeks leading to the update we will reveal some of the new cards you can expect to find along the way!
And, maybe, something more…

Stay tuned for more updates and the NEW GAME + update, releasing in July!

Hello everyone!

First of all, thank you to everyone who has picked up Mask of the Rose. We had a bit of a rough start, with a lot of feedback about the difficulty of adequately completing goals in the time available in particular, but we’re hopeful that we can make some changes that will improve the play experience significantly for you straight away, and follow those up with some that will require a bit more time to get right.

We really appreciate the show of faith in your comments and reviews, and hope with a little time we can bring Mask of the Rose to a delightful state for your enjoyment.


Extended Seasons

In the Constance update, the seasons of Confessions and Yule are both twice as long: fourteen days instead of seven. This is in response to hearing that you felt that you couldn’t get your teeth into enough of the stories in the game. We’ve now let you loose, as it were, and look forward to hearing about everything you get up to with your newfound freedom!

Hand in hand with this, there are pacing changes to the opening of the game which will help new players focus on the elements that it’s essential to take on board before proceeding with the second act: census taking and storycrafting.

Lastly, as you now have more time, you will no longer be invited to dismiss what you might call ‘economy quests’ at the end of the season of Confessions (for example, closing yourself off to census taking, which is one of the income sources that you might want to keep hold of).

We don't expect the update to cause any mischief with your save games, but you might want to consider starting a fresh run to best enjoy the longer play time.

Detective Signposting

We have also had much heart-rending feedback around being unable to save Archie, so we’re making some tweaks to Investigation:

• Talking to characters about murder theories which include unknown elements is useful for progressing your investigation, but we’ve heard people were finding it counterintuitive. Now, during the storycrafting tutorial, Archie will ask you to demonstrate using unknowns in your stories in order to highlight that it’s the right thing to try.
  
• After Archie’s arrest, it is now much clearer that there are multiple ways to save him, and that some are more challenging to achieve than others.
  
• All characters will now be up for helping you with the investigation as a matter of course, but with slightly different dialogue about why.
  
• You can also now take your murder theories to Harjit as a free action, and he’ll remind you to try using unknowns if relevant.

Full patch notes are also available, though there isn’t too much more to add; by necessity most of this week has been focused on the above and less on bug fixes.

Forthcoming Patch Possibilities

We’d like to see how you get to grips with the longer playtime before making more adjustments, but these are some of the things that we’ve heard this week which we’re thinking about.

We’re hearing that initial flirtations are happening too early, and you’re being asked to form an impression about someone romantically before you know them well enough. We’d like to address this in tandem with potential changes to how much you can change your wardrobe/presentation to give the impression you want in a scene. Now there’s less time pressure on going shopping for outfit items, you might be able to put yourself across in more precise ways from the get go, and we want to see how all of that interacts before we decide whether to make changes to any of it.

The last piece of significant feedback we’ve had has been around saving. At the moment the game autosaves whenever you return to your attic activities.

• People feel the first autosave is too late in the game; we’ll look into this!
  
• There are some points in the game where it goes some while without an autosave; we will investigate where we can add a natural break to include additional saves.

However, we aren't likely to introduce manual saving at this juncture. This is because we need to maintain some amount of predictability of save files to ensure that the updates we release are compatible with playthroughs in progress. Perhaps in the future, when other substantive changes that would risk save compatibility are complete, we may be able to consider this.

A note on fast forwarding and replays

Some players have asked if there could be a "skip scene" option, or if the fast forward mode could automatically stop when you get to text you have read before in another playthrough. Unfortunately, this isn't really possible for Mask of the Rose. The way Mask generates text is a bit too complex for this to work; rather than set speeches, it uses a combination of pre-written lines and lines that are generated programmatically from written components. Many lines will appear in different orders, or only trigger if your current character has a certain background, costume, personality type, knowledge in the game, relationship with NPCs and so-on. Aside from the technical complexity of achieving this, it wouldn't be a great play experience; imagine the fast forward stopping every couple of lines because you'd never encountered a particular aside or reflection in that conversation before.

We’re cognisant that, once your pacing concerns are addressed, other new reflections will bubble up as you experience the game in a new light! So all of the roadmap plans above are subject to influence from incoming feedback.

You’ve been fantastically honest and supportive thus far and I hope that you’ll continue to send in your thoughts and bug reports.

Stay tuned for news of further updates, which we’ll of course announce here and on Discord, twitter, etc.

This Friday at 8pm BST (UTC +1) we’ll be live streaming the new update! Perhaps to coincide with something else very exciting that’s also happening on Friday, who knows. I hope to see you there!

We are happy to announce that the very last DLC for Concordia: Digital Edition is going to be released next week!

What can you expect from Venus?🌿

The most important feature is Teamplay Mode - with Venus you and your friend can partner up to compete with other teams in up to 6 players mode! And that's not all!

Join forces with your friends in business endeavors in ancient Rome!

⚖️ Venus offers players a team variant of classic Concordia for 4 to 6 players divided into teams of two. The team partners win and lose together and are affected by each other’s actions.

That's right - the DLC contains 3 new maps!

🗺️ Ionium is a map with two variants - a large 30 City map and a small 22 City map, which introduces a land bridge between the ancient cities of Brundisium and Apollonia; Land Colonists can cross it, but can not stay on that connection.

🌿 Hellas is a medium-sized map with 25 Cities and 10 Provinces and no additional rules



Don't let this awesome DLC miss you! Grab your friends and wishlist Venus together! Teamplay Mode will be officially on in 7 days!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1707532/Concordia_Digital_Edition__Venus/

If you are a Season Pass owner - it will simply appear as unlocked the second we press the "release" button! 🙂

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1708670/Concordia_Digital_Edition__Season_Pass


That's all for today! Keep expanding your Roman Trading Empire! Soon on new lands! ;)

Cheers!

Hey everyone!

Update #5, focused on WEAPONS, is now available!

It introduces a brand new melee weapon, that is very different from every other piece in the arsenal. The Sword allows you to cut down foes at a close range, but also its shattering shards will surely reach distant enemies.

We're also reintroducing Pump Shotgun as a unique weapon, and overhauling The Harvester. On top of that, all weapons have received a visual update!

Here are the full patch notes:

• Added new unlockable weapon - Sword
  
• Reintroduced Pump Shotgun as a unique weapon
  
• Balance overhaul of the Harvester (kind of like the Flak Cannon from Unreal Tournament)
  
• Added 4 new unique weapon upgrades for sword and Harvester
  
• Improved each weapon's art

• Player air control increased by 40%
  
• Evil offering no longer jumps around because it’s annoying
  
• Cluster nades no longer emit mini nades on a direct hit (causes some cheap one-hit kills)
  
• Slimes no longer emit projectiles when detonating on the player (avoids cheap one-hit kills on player)
  
• Bullet time AOE perk reworked to shoot a wall of grenades in front of you (more effective now)
  
• Retractor obstacles retract when shot by player
  
• Changed “Heavy Foot” achievement to only require killing 3 enemies instead of 5 (more achievable given the balance changes to stomp splash damage)

• All first and third person weapon art has been enhanced
  
• Improved various particle effects such as explosions
  
• Improved sound randomization
  
• Audio balance improvements
  
• New bullet casing sprites
  
• Minor improvements to weapon recoil animations

• Weapons have new, unique names
  
• New more stylized font for all menus
  
• Reworked the weapons select screen to include a second page of weapons

• Max vertical FOV increased to 95 degrees

Thank you all for getting through the patch notes, make sure to let us know what you think about the changes and new weapon(s) on Steam forums, or our official Discord server.

As always, please share Impaler with your friends and leave a Steam review if you’re enjoying the game to help us reach even more players.

See you in the next one!

Apptivus and Retrovibe

A lot of you have already been asking about Smushi's cozy soundtrack and we're very happy to tell you that it's finally here :) Relax to chill music and wholesome vibes and reminisce about that time you dropped the last acorn in that hole or stuck a marble in a sand sculpture!


Visit the store page

With a total of 14 tracks including the trailer song by composer Failpositive this soundtrack is sweet and short and hopefully will bring the cozy atmosphere of Smushi Come Home to your home as well!

Platform: PC (Windows/OSX/Linux/)
Build Versions:
Steam: 1.2.735-win, 1.2.97-OSX, 1.2.736-Linux
GOG: 1.2.737-win, 1.2.95-OSX, 1.2.738-Linux
Epic: 1.2.739-win, 1.2.96-OSX
Release Date: 15/06/2023

Platform: Switch
Build version: 1.3.0
Release Date: 22/06/2023

• Extended Seasons. The seasons of Confessions and Yule are both twice as long: fourteen days instead of seven.
  
• Pacing changes to the opening quests to help new players focus on the elements that are essential to take on board before proceeding with the second act: census taking and storycrafting
  
• You will no longer be invited to dismiss ‘economy quests’ at the end of the season of Confessions, such as census taking.
  
• Now, during the storycrafting tutorial, Archie will ask you to demonstrate the correct way to progress your investigation by using unknowns elements in your stories.
  
• After Archie’s arrest, it is now much clearer that there are multiple ways to save him
  
• All characters will now be up for helping you with the investigation as a matter of course
  
• You can also now take your murder theories to Harjit as a free action.

• In the event you have arranged multiple back-up plans for rescuing Archie, the likeliest rescue will now take precedence over the contenders.
  
• Archie is no longer allowed conjugal visits in your attic after he has been arrested.
  
• It is no longer possible to attempt a certain Rubbery conjoining more than once.
  
• Several typos and grammatical errors have been fixed.

• Resolutions settings now update correctly when launching the game in windowed mode, and prevent a sporadic crash experienced when loading new scenes.
  
• On Steam and GOG sigils are now unlocked correctly when playing offline, allowing players to access additional backgrounds after completing the game. This change will follow on Epic in a future patch.

Hello, Bravelanders!



The new Knights of Braveland update is on its way! Heroes and items from two new DLCs will appear in the game: Around the World Pack and Fantastic Beasts Pack. Keep in mind that the new items are not included in the 100% completion. It means that if you didn't buy the DLC, you can still reach 100% by collecting only the basic items, but after the purchase the limit is extended, and you can continue collecting.

There will be new portraits in the Guild Hall - get ready to meet Werewolf, Ogre, and Crab King, new bosses that will be added soon!

We're also working on the balance of Arcade Mode. You will now be able to buy and pick up food, which in this mode instantly replenishes 5% of your max health.

Thanks to your feedback, we have identified and fixed many bugs. For example, the Guild Leader will now be positioned lower so as not to prevent you from accessing the library, and the Skeleton King will no longer skip his final phase.

Best regards,
Tortuga Team.