ORX News

Hello, Kings and Sultans!

Today we’ll explain the Fatigue system and once again talk about our future plans and community events.

[h3]Contents[/h3]

1. Fatigue system explanation
   
2. Future plans update
   
3. Build-a-Castle Phase Two
   
4. Friday Community Stream
   

[h3]Fatigue System[/h3]
We’ve introduced the Fatigue System a couple days ago in the patch 0.9.2.1 — so what is it and why was it added? We found that players would create very small decks, built around looping the same cards over and over — without experiencing any consequences. While we’re not against the idea of playing ORX with a small deck — we don’t want it to become a go-to strategy. Hence why we came up with the idea of Fatigue — a system that would disincentivize using small decks over bigger ones.



So how exactly does it work? Every time you play all the cards from your deck, you increase the fatigue. Each stack of fatigue subtracts 1 second from the wave timer — up to a maximum of -5 seconds, — meaning when you reach 5 stacks of fatigue each subsequent one will subtract 5 seconds from the timer.



We’re constantly monitoring player feedback and already made some changes to the fatigue system — so let us know what you think of this system and how it plays!

[h3]Future Plans[/h3]
Recently we’ve introduced our first feature update into the game — The Righteous Crusade. It consists of various balance changes, new mechanics and, of course, new cards. The changes are focused around Rune Guardians, making the faction more flexible in terms of playstyle and enhancing the late game options for it.



If you were wondering if we got something in mind for Dune Reavers — we absolutely do! The marauders of the sands are next on the list and will receive a similar-sized update, aimed at making them even more fun and engaging to play. Expect changes to the warriors, Barracks and new faction cards! We’ll also take a look at command issuing interface for warriors and make it more comfortable to use — all according to your feedback.

The update also introduced Low graphics settings and a new system for texturing. As we stated in the update — these are only the first steps from our long list of performance optimization improvements. We have also recruited the help of the Unity team, so we’re confident that we can make ORX run smoothly, even with huge ORX hordes and giant castles.

Apart from these changes, we’re continuing our work on:

• Adding new Localizations
  
• Eliminating various bugs
  
• Implementing Ultra Widescreen support
  
• Adding 4K resolutions
  

If you encountered an issue or have a suggestion — share them on the platform most comfortable for you. We’ll be sure to read and answer your feedback on all of them!



[h3]Build-a-Castle Contest[/h3]
Our castle-building, power-flexing, architecture-appreciating contest is moving to phase two! The entries are now closed, and we’ve selected the most popular submissions which will enter the next round. We invite everyone to vote for their favorite submissions on our Discord and help us pick the three most impressive builds, voting ends on September 16th! The winners will be announced during our Friday Community Stream and published in the announcements channel on our Discord, and here on Steam.

[h3]Friday Community Stream[/h3]


We’re continuing our silly-goofy streams with ScaryRussianWizard! If you liked watching her here on Steam — be sure to join us this Friday, at 2pm GMT and watch fellow ORX enjoyers put her to the ultimate test — community challenges! That’s right, this time we’re asking our community to come up with challenges which we’ll have to beat on the Community Stream — become a part of our Discord family and share your own suggestions on our server!

That's it for Today! Stay tuned for more news, patches and updates coming up! In the meantime keep sharing your feedback and ideas — we’re always looking forward to those! You can do it here, in Steam Discussions or join our lovely Discord community.

Don't forget to follow us on Social Media for the newest updates!

—max fatigue decreased (from 10s to 5s)
—time before wave at later stages of the game increased

we will be looking at this further to see how it performs, so it is subject to change

—fatigue system introduced (reduces time before ORX wave arrives when the player reshuffles his deck)
—ORX wave spawn times increased to counter balance fagitue
—defense penetration now works as a % (not as flat)
—same artifact drop in rewards removed
—several ORX spawn point bugs fixed
—rotate/confirm interaction reverted to 9.1 behavior

Hello, fellow orx slayers!

It's time for the first Content Update since the Early Access launch — featuring more cards and mechanics, as well as fixes to some of the most commonly seen issues players had reported! We're hoping that this patch will improve your experience with ORX — and, rest assured, this is the first of many more updates to come, in the upcoming weeks and months.

[h3]Patch contents:[/h3]

• New cards for Rune Guardians
  
• New neutral cards
  
• Balance changes for orx
  
• New stats: defence and defence penetration
  
• Extra upgrade tiers for Rune Guardian’s cards
  
• Low Graphics Settings option
  
• Textures and memory usage improvements
  
• IMPORTANT - Fixes for the black screen issue
  
• IMPORTANT - Fixed unlocking Dune Reavers
  
• Other various bug fixes, additions and changes
  

[h3]New Content and Balance Changes[/h3]
We’ve received a ton of feedback regarding game’s difficulty and lack of viability for different strategies. We take your suggestions very seriously and, honestly, agree with a lot of them. Some of the changes, however, will take time to implement, so don’t expect from Today’s patch any radical changes — but they’re noticeable nonetheless!

Firstly, we’re moving towards allowing players have more control over Corruption. Now if you decide to skip the card rewards from the vault, your corruption will go down. To accompany this change we’ve also made it so orx buffing cards and curses now change dynamically — by lowering the corruption level you will also lower the potency of orx cards, and vice versa!

Next we’ve made some changes to Rune Guardians to improve build variety and long play strategy. Now all Rune Guardian cards have a tier 3 upgrade available — the stats for previous tiers were also adjusted to accompany this change.



In addition to this we've added a number of new cards which allow you to focus on other strategies, outside of building one mega-castle.



Next time we'll be taking a closer look at Dune Reavers to address your feedback and make them even more fun to play with!

We’ve also added new stats — defense and defense penetration. We hope that they’ll allow us to create an additional level of strategy and make dealing with orx less one-dimensional. This is a first stat addition out of series to come!

Speaking of orx — their difficulty and attributes were rescaled to reflect the new balance. Hopefully, they’re much more of a menace now, without becoming an undefeatable plague!



This is our very first attempt at addressing balance and replayability issues — remember, we’re not stopping until it feels truly great to play ORX!

[h3]Low Settings Option and Other Graphics Changes[/h3]
We’re introducing the next change in the line of performance optimisations — sprite atlases and texture rework for reduced memory consumption!

We’ve also added Low settings option for Graphics settings — it includes even further texture optimisations, lower texture resolutions and disables certain VFX. You can find the option to enable low graphics under the the resolutions list in the Settings.



Oh, and for machines running ORX without a problem we’ve added experimental VSync option and made the game capped at 120 FPS!

As a reminder, this is only the beginning of our performance optimizations. We think of Lower settings as a temporary solution for lower-end machines — our end goal is to make ORX run well on any machine!

[h3]Bug fixes[/h3]
We’re happy to report that we finally solved the issue causing the black screen to appear.
And if you were one of the unfortunate players unable to unlock Dune Reavers — this problem has been solved as well! Hopefully, after this patch we won’t see any of these anymore.

[h3]Full Patch Notes - v0.9.2.0[/h3]

Bug fixes
• Fixed an issue that lead to black screens
  
• Fixed an issue with locked dune reaver faction after completing the 1st act
  
• Fixed an issue when player could redraw in game-full-pause state
  
• Fixed a vfx error on caravans
  
• Fixed multiple number fields to format text correctly
  
• Fixed errors that lead to disabling of certain weather effects (rain, snow)
  
• Fixed an error that would deny the player from receiving cards on reward
  
• Fixed an issue when starter cards weren't correctly removed after the first playthrough
  
• Fixed an issue when you could grant a double enchant to infinite cards
  
• Fixed an issue that lead to a pathfinding crash in boss fights
  
  Optimization
• Sprite atlases and certain textures reworked to reduce memory consumption
  
• Low graphic settings introduced (reduced texture memory usage, disabled certain vfx)
  
• VSync option introduced. Right now it's an experimental feature, so let us know how it performs!
  
• Game now caps on 120 fps
  
  Corruption system
• Corruption rework. Now ORX cards level and de-level depending on current corruption letting the play modify the power of the ORX deck dynamically
  
• Skipping rewards in vaults now reduces corruption
  
  Content and balance
• New rune guardian cards added to improve build variety and long play strategy
  
• All rune guardian cards now have a tier 3 (except some cases such as certain road tiles)
  
• New starter events for rune guardians
  
• New neutral cards added
  
• New attributes added: defense and defense pen.
  
• ORX difficulty and attributes rescaled to reflect new balance
  
  UX
• New attribute icons are now visible on cards (defense and defense pen. also attack speed is now also visible)
  

[h3]Friday Community Stream[/h3]


Don’t forget about our Weekly Community Streams! If you enjoyed our pre-recorded stream on Steam — be sure to join us playing live this Friday, 2 pm GMT! Head over to our Discord server, open the Events list and hit ‘Interested’ to not miss the start of the stream!


Also don’t forget about our Build-a-Castle Contest — 3 winners will receive a month of Discord Nitro subscription! Read the details on how to enter the contest in our previous post:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1071140/view/3346759006185391598

And that’s it for Today’s update! Let us know what do you think of the changes — join our friendly community on Discord and share your feedback, we’re always there to help and discuss anything!

Don't forget to follow us on Social Media for the newest updates!

Greetings, Sultans and Kings!

New week is upon us, and the astrologists proclaimed it the Week of the Community! Join us as we share our plans on community contests and events, status of known issues and plans for the future!

[h3]Friday Community Stream[/h3]
Liked watching our pre-recorded stream? Then join our Discord and watch ScaryRussianWizard slay hordes of orx live — this Friday, Sep 9 at 2 pm GMT! During our weekly Community Streams we answer questions, listen to some tunes and just have fun. Join the family!

[h3]Build-a-Castle Community Contest[/h3]
Are you the Michelangelo of Rune Wardens? Do orx faint at the mere sight of your castles? The map is too small for your grandiose builds? Then share the biggest, most powerful castle with the community — three winners will receive a Month of Discord Nitro subscription! Top 10 participants will also be knighted and get a special role on our server!

How to Enter

1. Build your castle!
   
2. Post the screenshot here on Steam with the tag “Build-a-castle Contest”
   
3. Go over to our Discord and share the build in the 🏰┤build-a-castle channel.
   

Do this until September 11th 11:59 pm GMT and you’re in!
Not sure how to publish screenshots on Steam? Check out this handy guide by Valve themselves!

Next week, on September 12th we’ll select the most voted screenshots and start the final round of voting which will last until September 16th. The winners will be announced on our Friday Community Stream and published in announcements channel on our Discord, and here on Steam.

[h3]Upcoming Community Events[/h3]
The fun doesn’t stop with the Build-a-Castle contest, and we’ve prepared even more community events for you to participate.

• The best guide for beginners contest
  
• Weekly movie nights
  
• Weekly game nights
  
• And more!
  

We also have an addictive card collecting game on our Discord, featuring art from the main artist behind ORX — which we’re actually planning to expand into a fully fledged card game. So get the good cards early, before anyone else — join the server now!


[h3]Plans for the near Future[/h3]
As we’ve already mentioned in one of our previous updates — ORX will learn
Korean and Traditional Chinese languages this week!

However, we’re also hard at work on a lot of important and highly requested things like:

• Better User Experience for the game’s interface
  
• Fixing critical bugs like crashes, freezes and black screens
  
• Optimizing the game’s perfomance and unlocking FPS limit
  
• Localisation problems. If you notice any inconsistencies in text, bad translations or outright missing descriptions — let us know here in Steam Discussions or on our Discord!
  

Rest assured, this is done in parallel with fixing critical bugs and doesn't affect our progress with solving those issues. Stay tuned for the upcoming patches!

[h3]Known Issues[/h3]
We take your reports seriously and are dedicating a lot of time to fix the issues. However, some of them turned out to be harder to solve than we initially anticipated. So here's the status update on the most important ones:

• Black screens upon launching ORX. Currently we’re solving these on a case-by-case basis so if you encountered this problem — please, report this via Google Form
  
• Dune Reavers not unlocking after completing Act 1. This randomly happens to some players, and, unfortunately, the logs don’t tell us why. While we’re actively looking for the cause behind this you can try resetting all progress and completing Act 1 once more. To do this go to Settings and click ‘Reset all progress’ button.
  
• Crash on start up. We’re planning to roll out fixes for these in the nearest patches.
  
• Ultra Widescreen support. Will be implemented very soon.
  

Due to the nature of some problems we will be deploying some of the fixes gradually, so stay on the lookout for the upcoming updates.

As always, if you encounter any issues, please share them at:

Video of the Day
Today’s video of the day features Wanderbots! He likes slaying orx, he likes building castles — but what does he have to say about ORX in Early Access? FInd out by watching the video!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

That’s it for Today! Thank you for your support of ORX! We’re amazed by the amount and quality of the feedback and suggestions we make. Only together with you, our dear players, we can make ORX the best it can be — so keep the discussion going!