Hello, everyone!

The two of us here at Swordlake Entertainment want to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of Mistwinter Bay's release with you! It's crazy to think that it has already been an entire year since we hit the release-button and anxiously awaited the reception of a game that we had put so many years of work into. Thankfully, the game seems to have resonated with most players and that, we are very grateful for. A massive thank-you to all of you beautiful people who have given the game a chance - you are what allows us to keep going! While we're still quite a ways off of earning a proper living by making games, we have been able to start the production of a new game (more on that below).

But now, let's talk about the game we're all here to celebrate!

As you already know, there are many ways to play the game. Some of the results of this freedom are reflected in the Steam-achievements. Let's look at some excerpts of the achievement statistics, as they are at the time of writing!

The foreign leaders are quite popular, since every fourth player has married a foreign leader, even though there are significantly more townsfolk. Orreg is the favorite foreign leader in terms of completed personal quests, whilst Gaird is the least popular. About 40% of players have entered an alliance, and an impressive 21% have had three alliances at once.

Naturally, the three starter characters are at the top of the list in terms of completed personal quests, but Erewen (30.9%) and Cecil (30.2%) are quite a bit ahead of Dawn (21.6%). Since Erewen and Cecil were in the top of all characters, we put them on the anniversary picture above! The most popular non-starter-character is Kieran, with 20.4% of players having completed his personal quest. (For those interested in optimal strategies, Kieran seems to be a favorite pick as well!) The least popular townsperson is Birgit, with only 2.9% of players having completed her personal quest. Considering that Kieran and Birgit are mutually exclusive, those stats aren't that surprising.

About a third of players have had a townsperson die or move out, but only 1.6% have had at least 5 townsfolk die in a single playthrough. 12% have decided to change things up by replacing the Avallerist building with a Voidist one. However, more than 60% have constructed at least one building.

Players tend to prefer to be “good” in playthroughs, since achievements related to giving nice gifts and hanging out with characters are more common than the one about giving a mean gift or being detested. Many seem to enjoy creating townsfolk couples as well, with more than a fifth of players having tried it.

In terms of “special” characters, 34.7% of players have invited Robin, Sasee or Mallowan (perhaps all three) to stay with them. 19.8% have encountered a god, while 28.7% have met a pegasus. Only 3.1% have met a creature from The Void who offers some very powerful boons…

So yes, it has now been one year since Mistwinter Bay was released. Since then, we have added two major content updates, bringing the game up to the ideal vision we had for it. This new content brought the total word count of the game up to around 1.8 million, which is an absolutely insane number! Of course, the number of words in a creative work doesn't measure quality, but we have done our best to address player input and mechanical things as well, such as adding cheats. We have also released several small fixes, addressing bugs, balancing and grammar (there is definitely a lot of spelling mistakes left, though, and will so remain).

We teased in the intro that we have a new game on the way. We have been working on it since March of this year, after the official development of Mistwinter Bay ended, and it is shaping up nicely! If you want to be notified when the game releases or learn more about it when the time is right, please consider following our social media pages. Another great way is by following our new developer page here on Steam, by which you will be notified every time we release new games!

Hopefully, we'll have a store page up by the end of the year. We're very excited to show off our hard work then! While we can't give any specific information about the new game right now, we'll leave you with a list of key features:

• 3D

• First person

• Focused on story and characters, but reliant on some skill as well

• A fairly linear narrative, but different endings

• Four playable characters

• Fully voiced in Japanese (by real, human actors!)

Once again, a massive thank-you to every single one of you! It is thanks to you that Mistwinter Bay is a game we can look back on with pride.

Sincerely,

The Swordlake Entertainment duo

Howdy Agents (✿◕‿◕)

I have some quick bug fixes for you today. Special thanks to everyone who left a review since our last update, and to those of you who reported these bugs. As always, be sure tohttps://discord.gg/ZZcY8HAfffjoin the discord!

Here are da notes.

• Fixed a critical bug that caused the game to crash when in stealth and tracked by black knight radar.

• Fixed Black Fish and White Fish movement to reduce jitter.

• Fixed a problem with Black Fish and White Fish not working correctly while a doppelganger was in the area.

• Fixed a bug causing the Threshold ability to reduce your hacking range.

• The Threshold ability now correctly follows your aim when used in conjunction with the Arms Runner perk.

• Fixed an issue causing bubble drones to get stuck in the corner of rooms.

• Fixed how the perks Bloodmage, Out Of Bound, and Neuromancer interact. Combining the three will now allow you to hack through walls and ignore data costs. In situations like this where there are multiple valid interpretations of how different perks interact, I like to learn towards the outcome that benefits the player the most.

• Fixed a bug causing dopplegangers to incorrectly copy legendary weapons.

• Fixed an issue with All Eyes On Me that caused shots to not pass through walls when pressing up against them.

• Fixed typos.

Hey, players! 🌟
We’re thrilled to announce the start of the super testing of our game! This is your chance to join the dev team and help make the game even better.

Hunt for bugs, share your findings, and leave your feedback – everything directly shapes the project’s future. Report issues in our Discord or in the Steam discussions.

Every comment matters, every idea counts. Join us and let’s make the game flawless together! 💥

Improved ability/item targeting, thanks to Mean & Evil. There was a bug that said target was out of range if he was immediately north of you and you clicked on the top of his head. It now checks for target's current position, as well as the position he's currently moving into, so it should be a lot easier to target baddies in combat now. Also fixed a couple minor bugs and added a new persuasion opportunity to Ch.4.

Finally, changed default settings so game remains paused after ability targeting and dialogue windows. It seems like most people prefer this. If you don't like it, you can turn it off in the game settings.

I still have a short to-do list of new dialogue and party banter that I need to cram into the game, and then I will be ready to start on Ch.6.

Complete list of changes:

-Fixed bugs with player item/ability targeting, greatly improved range check (thanks to Mean & Evil).

-Fixed minor problem with crafting abilities when interacting with crafting stations (thanks to Mean & Evil).

-Fixed bug where Dabi would incessantly tell you to take high ground in Lockdell Outskirts in Ch.1.

-Auto-Pause after ability/item targeting and dialogue windows is now on by default.

-Added another persuasion opportunity with Berindal in Ch.4.

-Wood spears now cost 12 wealth instead of 18.

-Fixed some tiles in Lockdell Farms in Ch.1.

This update addresses a number of minor bugs and includes subtle tweaks to improve gameplay.

Specific changes include:

• Reduced the cooldown of the Slime Tentacle Monster’s tentacle ability.

• Adjusted the reward chest respawn time to 120 seconds.

• Removed certain firearms from the map.

Happy Saturday Hikers!

• Fixed enemy forgets player when killed

• Fixed Substation 1 roll door references

• Increased night brightness

• Fixed Field Lab Charlie front door

• Fixed collision on all doors

• Added Sightline Games logo to opening movie montage

We found a few bugs while we played with Sgt kelvin yesterday, we had a great time and we recommend everyone check out their content!

FIXES & IMPROVEMENTS

• Reworked the map system — the map is now a dedicated application inside the in-game tablet.

• Added location names to map markers — hovering the cursor over a marker now displays the location’s name.

• Updated the tablet keybind — the tablet is now opened with the T key.

• Fixed a critical issue where returning to the main menu sometimes failed to correctly restore or detect the player’s SteamID. Returning to the main menu now reliably preserves player identity and network bindings.

Hot Fix: The reference for the Mercury F2 dev-tool cameras used to create some scenes for the launch trailers has been removed. Calling it would cause a recursive stack overflow exception as some of these dev-tool cameras was missing. This would lead to a CTD. I plan to re-introduce these cameras with some additional orbiting cameras in a later patch.

Thanks for reporting, as this is a crash that can ruin a long mission flow by accident I wanted to roll out a hot fix for this to correct the behavior as fast as possible.

Note: If this patch causes new issues for you, please report them. You can always revert back to a previous version using the Steam Betas tab for the game. The latest previous version is: 1.0.7.

Thank you for reporting!