Hey, everyone!
Since it’s the holiday season and most of you are probably busy with last-minute shopping and trying hard not to lose their minds after hearing “Last Christmas” and “All I Want For Christmas Is You” for the millionth time, we’re going to keep this update rather brief! :)
So, first of all, you can expect a small - but really significant at the same time! - patch in January.
It’s one of these crazy things about game development that our patch notes for the upcoming update/fix are essentially three bulletpoints… and yet we’ve spent A LOT of time working on it. There’s just so much stuff happening behind the scenes that it’s sometimes hard to even describe it properly. But let’s try!
[h2]What to expect in January[/h2]
Over the past few months we’ve noticed that some of you were experiencing very weird, yet very specific crashes – these are edge cases that stem from the middleware we use for vegetation. So, if the game was crashing for you over the past few months, there’s a high chance that for really crazy reasons that my non-technical brain won’t understand… our trees & grass are to blame ;D
In order to address it we’ve finally done what we were joking we’re going to do for the past four years – we’ve started creating our own vegetation system. As you can imagine, this takes a lot of time and effort – but we’ve finally arrived at version 1.0 of the said system and we’re really happy that it happened. One of the greatest benefits of this is that we’re not reliant – or “at the mercy” – of middleware we have no control over ;)
In short, thanks to this and some further work,you should see three things in the game in January:
- Less unexplainable crashes of the game
- Some optimizations related to CPU (people with strong GPUs and weak CPUs should see improvement in the game’s performance and stability)
- The grass will be greener (and more dense), and there will be more variety in vegetation – new trees, bushes, and so on
[h2]Upcoming Things[/h2]
Obviously, this wasn’t the only thing that we were working on for the past months – the entire team is simultaneously building an entirely new region of the game.
We’re moving north of Horns of the South into what those of you who played the board game might remember as Cuanacht.
However, we’re not rebuilding what’s already been done in the board game – we’re building an entirely new storyline with new locations and interpretations on top of some motifs that you’ll know or remember from the original. This means that, yeah, you’ll be able to meet Beor or Ailei – but they’ll be rather… different from the characters you may remember from your board game campaigns ;)
The town of Cuanacht will be only the beginning. It’s going to work as a hub, too – you can expect a lot of other places to visit and find on the map, because we’re still keeping to our design idea that density is more important than a large (but empty) map. So, the new region itself will be a little bit bigger than the first region you can play in our currently published Early Access release, but it will contain A LOT of new, cool places to explore.
We’ll be sharing more info about the new region in the coming months :)
>>> ATTENTION!
Be aware that this is an early version of the region and it’s still very much a work in progress. Things will look a lot better at the time the update goes live.
[h2]Some other upcoming improvements[/h2]
There’s a lot of different stuff going on, of course. Most of it isn’t exactly newsworthy – for example, we’ve finally prepared smaller alchemy stations (because it was weird to see those huge tables full of alchemical components in the open world) – and we’re constantly fixing bugs, and so on…
However, there’s one really nice thing we’ve spent some time on and we’re really proud of it – improved character models. We’ve finally managed to devote time to setting up our characters properly, mainly fixing their body proportions and approaching this topic with more care and thought than before (gaining more control over how NPCs and enemies in the game will look in the end).
In short, this means that you can expect more variety in body shapes and postures in the game! Also, we’ve improved some tools in the meantime, and it seems that we’ll be able to squeeze better quality out of textures used for our characters – comparisons below!
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So, that’s all of our update this month – you can expect a bug-fixing patch in January and more info on our progress every month.
For now, though, we’d like to wish y’all happy holidays and a happy new year! 
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1466060/Tainted_Grail_The_Fall_of_Avalon/
