The Spring Major Update for Northern Lights is now LIVE on STEAM! And to celebrate its release we are offering a -25% discount on the Steam Store for a limited time! To learn more about the discount, check out our Steam Page.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1090800/
A lot of work and effort has been put into all the features and changes that made it into this update, and such, we want to outline a few of the important ones. So without further ado:
We heard you! Based on the feedback we've received, we redesigned the whole world of our game to be more fun to explore and feel less like a walking simulator while maintaining the core experience of the game! More vegetation, less empty space, better design and more intuitive navigation, the new world has it all!
The new island also spans a vast road system that connects the big locations. Got lost? Just find a road and follow it, maybe you will reach civilization!
The addition of location signs across the world also means that there is no more wandering around in nature without finding anything! Road signs can be taken as hints to what you'll find at the end of your journey!
The caves scattered around the island also got redesigned from ground up, with brand new assets, extra detail, and better level design. No more plain corridors with nothing to see around!
On top of that, we also added new ambiance and detail sounds to caves for that extra immersion!
The new world also comes with improved loot spawning! This means that it will be easier to find natural resources in places where they should be.
We have also introduced group spawning, meaning that you can find more resources of a kind in a location that is rich in a given resource. This is still a work-in-progress feature and we will keep improving it with the next updates based on your feedback!
Performance just got better! We've made sure to fix a big chunk of the freezes & hiccups that were occurring during playthrough (some we are still looking into though), as well as to improve the general performance of the game.
The scalability of the graphics settings and the performance in relation to hardware was also addressed, meaning that changing the settings will actually make a difference in performance now!
Along with the big changes, we have also improved and fixed the following:
- Added camera warm filters in interiors
- Added an extra ping in intro quest to facilitate navigation to the objective through blizzard
- Added back some missing audio lines to some dialogues
- Added some new sounds to water, vegetation and caves
- Improvements to animal and loot spawning balance
- Improvements to sound design
- Improvements to world survey mechanics
- Fixed various issues with herb spawning
- Fixed various issues with graphics
- Fixed various issues with interactables
- Fixed various issues with UI
- Fixed various issues with quests and objectives
- Fixed an issue causing some particle effects to tank performance
- Fixed an issue causing credits to be unskippable upon finishing the story
We are also aware of all the issues that have been reported during the past few weeks. Unfortunately due to the sheer amount of work that has been put into making this update possible, we were unable to look into those issues in time for this release. We will investigate and solve them as soon as possible!Be aware! Old saves will still work, however, we strongly recommend starting a new game if possible as some data from the old map will not be carried over with the save upgrade, and certain aspects of the play-through might break.
And as a side note, it is still possible to access the v0.2 version of the game by accessing Library/NorthernLights/Properties/Betas and selecting the legacy_v0.2 branch!
As always, we want to thank everyone for the support and feedback! And as Northern Lights is still an Early Access title, we encourage everyone to get in touch with us over Discord or Steam Community about potential issues or ideas!
