Rivals Combat is Officially Released

It's been a while coming, but now you can finally fight your rivals! Prepare for a brand new challenge, as your rivals not only bring magical attacks your way, but they also bring some interesting defensive challenges for you to face.

We've had a great beta period with some good feedback and squashed some bugs related to Rivals, but now it's officially here! Here's what's in this version...

[h2]NEW:[/h2]

• New enemy types to fight: Fire Mage, Ice Mage, Earth Mage, Storm Mage. Each mage type has it's own unique challenges to face
  
• New option to attack your rival when you meet them
  
• Rivals are now more difficult to locate. NPCs will not easily divulge their locations.
  
• Bribe or schmooze Conclave Chapterheads to discover the location of your rivals
  
• New NPC greetings - now NPCs comment on you based on a variety of factors (your appearance, their relationship with you, how long ago they last saw you, etc)
  
• Gain additional legacy bonuses for eliminating a rival
  
• You can now hunt down and kill your primary rival in the Mabren's Tower quest after you've completed the quest
  
• New combat arena - Town Street
  
• Added new magic XP book reward to Innkeeper starter town quest
  
• New death animation over rival portrait after killing that rival
  

[h2]IMPROVED:[/h2]

• Prompt to abandon a quest when talking to a quest giver now shows the name of the quest
  
• Added AP cost to button tooltip on weapons
  
• Additional "do not know" NPC responses
  
• Knocking on doors now actually sound like knocking on doors instead of bashing them down
  
• Made the spell power slider easier to adjust
  

[h2]FIXED:[/h2]

• Fixed VFX glitch when casting Fireball
  
• Fixed a bug with enemy difficult scaling
  
• Fixed some gender-related text generation bugs
  
• Fixed some minor combat background formatting issues
  
• Fixed a bug where abandoning the tower quest wouldn't remove the prompt to abandon the tower quest
  
• Fixed dynamic greeting bug when speaking with Shipwrights, Ship Captains and Harbormasters
  
• Fixed an issue with selecting dialogue options with keyboard shortcuts while services and subject pop-up windows are open
  
• Fixed an issue with creatures not showing up in the subject pop-up
  
• Fixed an issue with notifications (for example, letters from the Chapterhead) being hidden behind US in resolutions higher than 1080p
  
• Fixed a bug preventing the spell power slider tutorial from popping up
  

There are likely more fixes and additions not listed here that I may be missing :).

As usual, this is our first initial releasable pass at the Rivals / Mage monster-types, so we welcome any feedback on how they play so we can tune them up and make them even better.

[h2]Weekly Dev Update:[/h2]

Here's what the team is working on this week:

Exploration Team: (Mark, James, Michel, Tyler, Nolan) Building a prototype of the updated Events/Encounters system
UI Team: (Phil, Jessi, Jonathan, Andrey) Framing the new HUD into the game so we can test it
Dynamic Quests Team: (Thomas, Zach) Building a testable MVP quest generated by the Dynamic Quests system

Emily has been helping us getting better organized for running our sprints from here on out, which will hopefully help us move faster and more efficient, and Alex has been hard at work revising our internal QA process and finally help us get a start on a Known Issues list (thanks for asking for it!).