Renown News

Alpha 1.3.3

Server Optimizations
Fixed an issue with servers window not refreshing properly
Toggling autoclose off clears the auto behavior now
Added Terracing map features to Algara Isle
Added new Rivers to Algara Isle
Improved the Chat bubble
Fixed some issues with animations
Raid mode gatherphase 15 mins -> 20 and is server configureable
Added more Iron to raid map
Added breakable Pots and Baskets
Fixed some AI pathing issues
Fixed Chatbox turning on when the message isn't supposed to be seen
Added Signages on the roads pointing to Settlements
Added New Research Window
Added New Item description window
Added New Recipe window
Added new NPCs
New Reclaimer Forge Model
New MOTD menu
Fixed Building menu not showing construction resources
Fixed Archer loadouts not spawning with arrows
Fixed peaceful mode canceling out when using attacks that aren't bound to LMB
Fixed Siege Timer indicator

Alpha 1.3.2

Reworked Tech Tree
Fixed an issue with resource nodes not spawning
Added the building optimizer
Fixed audio occlusion issues
Algara Isle updates
Fixed inventory showing in research menu
Fixed reclaimer forge not being placeable
You can split stacks by holding shift and left clicking now
Fixed an issue where team selection wasn't loading properly in team modes
Fixed some building placement issues
Raid mode improvements
Added more starting resources
Added gold ingots in banners to move them once easily
Added starting components
Players in raid mode can now spawn on unclaimed team owned beds that aren't on spawn cooldown
Added tier indicator to workbench indicators
Chat requires a player to validate first
Fixed campfires being required for some recipes
Added additional logging for admins
Technical debt clean up
You can assign marker colors for players/friends in the settings menu now
Added last used code button to code locks
Added a chat bubble to players who are typing, and a talking animation
Added a heart beat sound effect when low on hp
Fixed server travel breaking servers
Fixed melee attacks not cancelling peaceful mode

Alpha 1.3.1

Fixed AI melee attack hit detection
Fixed last bandage not being applied
Fixed fire arrows being pickup able
Fixed issues with arrows bouncing off surfaces
Unowned buildings show their hp bar now
Reduced Zweihander size slightly
Fixed issue with vanity mode allowing players to switch to melee mode
Fixed stamina costing twice for ground hits
Tweaked resource rates from nodes
Reduced champion loot
Fixed npcs switching weapons when staggered
Players can no longer repair items while in combat
Lots of landscape fixes
Fixed new river areas not slowing down players
New POIs have been polished up
Added a Reverb effect for being indoors
New sound effects
Fixed an issue with sound looping when moving vehicles
Spear was buffed
New Tech Tree
New Ocean mesh
Fixed issues with the chat box not going away
Admin fixes
Added r.HZBOcclusion toggle to video menu
Triangle Half wall meshes added
Fixed a duping bug
Fixed building destruction not being synced sometimes
Improved player reporting functionality

Mr. Z here!

Last Dev blog I said I was going to discuss some of Renown’s game design and that's what we’ll be doing today.

During the demo we had our largest number of players yet, over 1000 at one point even. This meant we got to stress out the game servers extra hard and we got a lot of performance data out of it. It also meant we got to see what high pop gameplay looks like.

One of the things I noticed during the demo is a lot of players were not crafting their own gear, but finding it from looting. Going forwards we’ll be adding more ways to acquire tier 2 gear from looting to support this more active playstyle. We’ve added many new POIs to the map so there will be way more ways to acquire better gear without having to craft it. Of course tier 3 gear will always need to be crafted, and looted gear won’t be a replacement for crafting.



Another thing that happened is groups were rushing through the tech tree way too quickly. We are in the process of finishing up a new tech tree that allows players greater choice as to which weapons to unlock while also making it more difficult to rush the research. Also to note, all our servers were running at x2 resource gold coin gain which made it super easy to tech up. We will also be adjusting costs accordingly so that rushing plate armor and t3 weapons isn’t super trivial and also be running our playtests at x1 gold rates going forwards.

There was definitely an overabundance of resources during the demo, this was by design to onboard new players more easily. For the next demos we’ll be running the game the way it was meant to be played with x1 rates. There are also now less resources in general spawning in the map to encourage players to roam around more instead of staying near their homes. Gold and Silver were especially too common and have been made rarer. Animal Hunting grounds should also become more contested now.



Raiding bases was a little too easy in the demo, due to the abundance of resources. We’ve made the Sapper’s axe a little harder to unlock and silver much rarer so people don’t get raided so easily so early. That being said, I’ve added an even earlier raiding tool, fire arrows .They can be used on plaster and wood doors. Fire arrows do not cost silver, so they can be used to cheaply raid any really underdeveloped bases quickly. Petards will be getting many changes so players aren’t able to use them so quickly to explode their way through a base. Another issue with petards is the placement range, it’s way too far so the attackers do not place themselves in nearly enough danger when blowing through a base, this will be addressed soon with a big rework.



As far as Gear disparity goes, having better weapons is much more beneficial than good armor, so costs will have to be adjusted to account for this. Plate armor is also not quite good enough I feel and would benefit from being stronger but also more expensive so it really fits into the elite armor role. Additionally, the damage resistance calculation isn’t quite giving the results I want and will be tweaked to make higher tiers more useful, especially against lower tier weapons. We don’t want to see sticks being used to beat plate armored players to death so easily.

We’re now in full production towards preparing Renown for Early Access release, some things that will be coming is an animation rework of many of the attack animations, shield gameplay rework, UI polishing, server + client optimization, and additional map improvements.

In the next Dev blog I’ll be discussing some of the UI improvements that have been in the works lately.

Hello everyone!

As always I need to say a massive thank you to our amazing backers. The recent Kickstarter campaign is just the thing we needed to keep us in the game.

This dev blog is more of a general update to let you know our broad plans for Renown in the next few months. We’ll also be going over wrapping up the Kickstarter campaign.

What’s the plan for Renown going forward?

With a combination of the Kickstarter funding, the ongoing feedback from our backers and the recent demos, we feel we’re in a very good place to move forward.

The next steps for Renown are not very sexy, but they’re super important.

We’ve identified these as the primary areas that need improvement:

· Improvements to server infrastructure to reduce crashing. - Server browser needs to be more consistent and streamlined

· Anti Cheat Implementation and improvements to Admin Tools

· Building optimization and Fixes – Allow for more player buildings and fix building exploits (Floating bases, double walling etc)

· Key UI changes primarily focused on the Tech Tree

· Ongoing Bug Fixing

· Combat Animation Overhaul

Effectively, if we can help alleviate the exploits and cheating, improve the overall server stability and building optimisation, the game will be in a very playable state.

Alongside this we’re working on some key UI changes. The major example being an overhaul of the Tech Tree to make it much more usable.

Another major area we want to address is Combat Animation. Almost all the animations specifically relating to combat are still place-holders from our earliest version of Renown.

The issue we ran into with the Mocap animation, is that Mr. Z is still needed for the extremely high level implementation of the attacks.

Due to the high precision nature of melee games, a key amount of “design programming” is required. Mr. Z will no doubt have a more high level explanation of this process in the future for you.
We’ve also begun work on the stretch goal inclusions from the Kickstarter.
The first area we’ve started on is the Sound Overhaul given how important hearing is in a survival setting. We’ll have more from our expert MattGibsonMusic in the next update.
Thank you to everyone who’s taken the time to report bugs. We’ve got a very detailed log to work through. This will be an ongoing process as more pop up, and other ones get squashed.

The End of our Kickstarter Campaign – Thank you so much to all Backers!

Another bit of news to announce is that we’ll be ending our Fundraising efforts for the time being.

Steam has a limit of 5,000 “Default Release Steam Keys”.

These are the full game steam keys we’ll be sending out as part of the crowdfunding perks when we hit Early Access.

Currently we’re standing at just under 4,500 backers so we’re effectively forced to end the campaign.

For this reason, (and because it just seems unethical) we didn’t want to announce early and create a sense of FOMO or some other bad sales tactic.

Steam is very strict with Key rules. We’ve been trying for a month to get more “Testing Keys” but they won't budge, so we don’t want to risk going over the Release Key limit.
This means if you’ve already backed, you’re right as rain for continued testing all the way till we get the game onto steam Early Access.

If you’ve missed out, don’t fear, we’ll still be doing “Steam Demos” in the future to help stress test the game. We can’t make any promises right now when the next one of these will be that said.

Again, a massive thank you from our entire team for anyone who’s helped support our work, either in the past or the recent Kickstarter.

We are super excited for the future of Renown, and it thanks to you folks we can keep working at it.

Stay tuned in the next couple of weeks for another update from our team relating to our progress and future plans.

Till next time.

Hello Everyone

As always, a huge thank you to our amazing backers and supporters. The Kickstarter being a success is a huge win for the future of Renown. A big shout out to our moderators here on discord for their awesome help likewise.

So we’ve got a bit of a more wordy update for you. Given it's been a little bit, we figured it best to go into detail about what the team has been up to.

Kickstarter Send out waves – Xsolla store, and the future of our Crowdfund.

The first thing I wanted to clear up is how we’re currently handling Testing Key send outs for our Kickstarter and our PlayRenown store.

Due to how Kickstarter works, we need to “manually” send out the keys. This means that we take the data, extract anyone already sent a key, format that and send it off to Xsolla to distribute.
Learning from our previous Indiegogo, there isn’t really a way to directly automate this process from Kickstarter/Indiegogo. This also means we’re required to send Kickstarter keys in waves due to the volume of support we’re receiving. Currently Kickstarter waves are sent Wednesday at 9:00 AM CEST - 12:00 AM PDT - 6:00 PM AEDT.

The alternative we came up with is to use https://playrenown.com/ if you’d like to support our work. It has a much more limited range of tiers but has many more payment options including PayPal and others, alongside the keys being sent automatically on Backing.

As was promised to our original backers, the “legacy” skins will be unavailable for purchase and thus exclusive at the end of the month. We really appreciate the community's understanding in letting us bring those back for a short run. It directly helped with the success of this Kickstarter, and thus the future of our work.

We’ll likely do a fairly full swap over to the Xsolla storefront in the near future as well, so all backers are directly getting keys sent instead of waiting for a week.

Mental Health Break/Working Holiday

One thing I just wanted to raise with the community so anyone new doesn’t think we’re lazy buggers slacking off, is that we’re completely exhausted after this campaign. Preparation started in March, and we’ve been going full tilt since then.

Chatting about it as a team last week, the solution is a quick Mental Health Break/Working Holiday. Basically for the next two weeks, our work might be a bit slower and more random/fun (Mental Health part) but we’ll still be around doing tickets, chatting with the community and generally keeping on (Working Holiday part).

The downside of this, and the reason I bring it up, is things might be a bit slower for the next two weeks. We really appreciate the understanding of this community, and a quick rest will do wonders for future progress.

Onto some much more relevant updates, Mr. Z has been kind enough to do a big explanation of his recent work;

Update from Mr. Z

Mr. Z speaking here, today I’ll be going over some of the more technical aspects of our recent demo and how things have held up (or not!).
This current demo did surprise me quite a bit in how well it held up under stress. We had the help of modern server hardware on some of our servers and some very clutch optimizations.
We were able to achieve a player count of about 70-80 with stability for a much longer period of time than before. We even had working voice chat this time, the last demo the voice chat was causing massive server instability and had to be disabled.

Of course it wasn’t all good news, after about twenty thousand buildings were placed on the map, we started running into fairly serious performance issues. Fixing this is going to be the focus going forwards in the optimization department and once it's done I believe we can have a stable full week wipe with at least 64 player servers.

We may also need to enforce more sensible building limits as people built so large this time around that one extremely large clan base was costing up to 11% of the building performance on the server.
Due to the popularity of this demo we ran into another issue, Cheaters and griefers… Going forwards a lot of work is going to be done with Anti Cheat and Moderation measures. There's a lot of things cheaters can mess with currently and while not totally devastating, the fact there was no anti-cheat at all in the demo meant they could do it with impunity.

We’re glad to see the game got so much activity that this has finally become a high priority issue to deal with. Despite being a bad thing to have cheaters, it's a very good sign that we’re making good progress towards getting the game ready for early access.
Another thing that went quite well for us in this demo is the map expansion that KZ worked on, which gave players enough space to build out their bases this time. More of the map is spread out, perhaps too much right now for our current supported player counts, but once the game is stable at 100 players it should be an ideal size.

The additional POIs on the map added way more variety to the gameplay experience. It also made it so that smaller groups and solos could stick to the borders of the map and be relatively unmolested by larger clans who prefer to stick near the center, which has the higher concentration of loot and PvP encounters. One very hopeful thing to note is that the map expansion didn’t actually reduce performance by a perceptible amount, yet the map size is significantly bigger now.

In the next dev blog I’ll be discussing some game design (rather than technical) focused topics about how the demo went and what we’ll be making significant changes to. There's a lot to talk about between the combat and survival mechanics so it may need to be a two parter dev blog for next time…


KZ’s Progress Update

Kz has also been hard at work doing some majorly large arts tasks. So far hes:
Designing and optimizing more Interesting/bigger points of interest also planned to make current Point of interest more interesting alongside more interesting Npcs to go with
Here’s a list of what he has planned:
* Not currently on the map
· Winterhold
· Winterhold Village
· Safezone
· Fishing town
· Stronghold
· Coastal Keep
· Northwest Village
· Bandit camp
· *Trader camp
· *Rus camp
· *Mongol Camp
· *Viking Village
· *Port Village
· *Port Centre
· *Port docks
· *Port Keep
· Island Castle
· *Farm
· Tavern
· *Sewers
· *Mine caves with crumbled entrances

Npcs planned:
· Winterhold peasants
· Winterhold guards/archers
· Winterhold swordsmen
· Winterhold Knights
· Winterhold lord
· Dewsbury Guards
· Dewsbury Merchants
· Yarlford Fishermen
· Elkmire Soldiers
· Calchester Knights
· Calchester lord
· Caershire Villagers
· Thirsty Swan barkeep
· Thirsty Swan Drunkard
· Selasund Peasants
· Selasund Vikings
· Dannamore Nobles
· Dannamore Cooks
· Dannamore Knights
· Dannamore Lord
· Brimdurn Peasants
· Brimdurn Monks
· Brimdurn Champion
· Brimdurn Guards
· Brimdurn Knights
· Brimdurn Lord
· Brimdurn Sailors
· Woodland bandits
· Woodland Travellers
· Steppe Travellers
· Travelling merchants
· Street Riff Raff

He has also been working on cleaning up the armour system and killing as many Clipping issues as possible.
so far he has fixed:
· broken chainmail texture on Jupon
· Jupon under leathervest
· Jupon over Pauldrons
· Jupon over breastplate
· Jupon under certain breastplate
· all coifs sit correctly over armour now
· fixed Peasant vest under jupon
· fixed Coif clipping issues
· fixed emblems not working on jupons
· Fixed emblems not working on tabards
· Fixed hosen clipping through boots
· fixed character skin clipping on some characters skins
· fixed archer helmet clipping with arming cap
· fixed gambeson clipping with breastplate
· fixed Womens hosen clipping with shirt
· Fixed monk outfit bulging out
· fixed mail hauberk clipping through leather vest
· fixed overthrow rigging issue
· fixed gambeson broken under peasant vest
· fixed tunic clipping through leather gauntlets skin
· fixed broken tunic under peasant’s vest
· fixed broken women’s tunic
· Fixed peasant shirt clipping through leather vest



Once we have polished most of the clipping issues off he will look into getting all the backer skins up to scratch and ready for EA
We will show these off in game via sneak peaks. He also has plans for optimization work making sure nothing is detrimental to fps.
Of course, there’s also implementing all the points of interest and increasing map polish.

Again thank you so much for the awesome support folks. We’ll be putting out another dev blog in a couple of weeks with our overarching plan for the coming months.

As always a huge thank you to all our amazing backers, both in the past and from our Kickstarter.

I’ve got some quick-fire updates for everyone so let’s dive in!

“The One for All Renown Demo” – Starting June 27:
So, we’re firstly very excited to announce the return of Renown’s Alpha Demo as promised to the community.

It’s only been a couple of weeks so don’t expect big changes. However Mr.Z has been working hard at fixing what he can, trying to improve stability and optimisation.

For the duration of the Demo, full testing access will be open on steam if you know folks who are keen to try Renown but haven’t backed or played yet.
We should hopefully be posting launch and wipe times for each region soon.

Our Community Manager Volker has also been kind enough to whip up a Server Region Survey.
This survey will directly help inform us of which servers we’re missing, need more of, or are solid. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSc-rFISah0j7lTWrvLMh6j_H7TdkJ4FmhFoWY6pOJI7bWYWCA/viewform


Kickstarter Credit Notice:
One thing Kickstarter suggests we remind the community.

If you’ve pledged on Kickstarter, payments are sent to your card/bank during the first week after the 27th.

The recommendation is calling your bank if you’re worried about the payment. Otherwise, if you have any issues, they should email you, letting you know.

Testing Key and Title Distribution:
Likewise, we’ll be starting our Title and Key Distribution after the 27th. We do need to beg for some patience from the community as we’re doing so.

Testing keys will be sent out via Email during the Demo so all backers will still have access to the game at this time. Due to the steam testing key policy, we’re forced to use Xsolla testing keys for a while longer.

I want to reassure all backers that Early Access and the Full game will be on Steam. Xsolla is only our stop gap measure to ensure all Backers have testing access to the game.

Discord Titles will be available via the “Get-Backer-Roles” bot channel. We’ll put out another update with specifics on how to use this Bot to get your titles after the 27th.

Xsolla Store – Alternative backing methods – PayPal, Google pay and other:

We’ll also be bringing back our Play Renown Storefront for backers who are outside the Kickstarter backing regions, or for those without credit card access.

This store will have the exact same pricing (excluding currency conversion) as the Kickstarter, and purely functions as an alternative for those who aren’t able to use Kickstarter.

This site should be coming back online sometime soon after the 27th.

Also please see attached for some awesome photos coming out from KZ's new work on Lighting Systems. These are still in testing and should hopefully be coming to a patch soon.


We very much hope folks will enjoy The One for All Renown Demo. Thank you again for the amazing support of our work.


Till next time.