The Hand of Merlin News

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.

Hello there! Some spoilers for the end of the campaign below. Beware!

Quick one today, as we’re busy making all the preparations and tech work for the hardmode update, which we iterated a few times over already.

While we were working on enemy behavior, we noticed that there was quite a bit of interesting feedback and discussions regarding how the final combat works in The Hand of Merlin. In particular, players were a bit concerned about some of the Pylons, the units that are created to fight your warband in the later stages of the game, which were a bit unbalanced and… well, unfun.

Few opportunities for counterplay, differences in power, and debuffs a bit too severe were some of the thoughts, and we agreed! Part of the EA experience is to get to pursue the fun live with our players, and we definitely have enough information now for some touch-ups.

We just uploaded a patch that addresses this. We took the pylons, considered them against each other, gave them some cleaner abilities and fixed a few bugs. Summons make a bit more sense now, and the “maximum unit count” in that fight has also been reduced, leading to a more coherent experience.

We believe it to be an improvement, and it's all based on your input, specially over in our Discord server. So, hey, thanks for making my life a bit easier, and keep that feedback coming!

Mat

New features:
• Created several new encounter illustrations.

General fixes:
• Fixed an infinite loop with the bookmark mode for gamepads.
• Fixed a bug where unit tooltips would sometimes erroneously be shown on the world map when using a gamepad.
• Fixed a bug where skill tooltips from the base ability would remain on the screen when upgrading skills and cover up the cards.
• Fixed certain issues with the interaction between Opportunist (Wyvern's passive) and The Holy Grail.
• Vengeful Martyrdom (upgrade of Mystic's Martyrdom skill) should no longer proc on player's turn, as expected and described.
• Fixed several typos.

Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Fixed issues with several more Al-Andalus skirmish maps on ultra-wide monitors.
• Fixed an issue where the camera would sometimes make sudden movements during enemy (AI) turns.

Gameplay balancing:
• Revamped the Pylons, changing the base abilities of most variants, with the intent of normalizing their power levels, reducing "chore" mechanics, and providing mechanics with counter-plays instead.
• In addition, Pylons will no longer summon more units if there are 6 enemies already present. Instead, each Pylon variant now has a unique new ability to use in such a case.
• "Weak" status effect is now capped at 5 stacks max.

New features:
• Created several new encounter illustrations.

General fixes:
• Fixed an infinite loop that could happen when using directional aiming via gamepad for cone attacks / abilities.
• Fixed a rare crash that could happen when spawning enemies.
• Fixed several UI layout issues when using Big Picture mode.
• Fixed a bug where the Holy Grail spell couldn't be hotkey activated with the keyboard.
• Fixed "The Maze" encounter to no longer halt progress if lacking Supplies to proceed.
• Opportunist, Wyvern's passive, should no longer be triggered at a distance, only when the Wyvern is adjacent to a unit who just took damage.
• Toxic Buildup, Basilisk's passive, should no longer decay when the creature is hit with ranged attacks.
• The "Stunned" status effect now interacts correctly with the new 0-AP unit selection feature.
• Warrior's Stand Ready skill (and its upgrades) now no longer require 1 AP to be used, allowing them to be used as the last action in a round.
• Warrior's Command skill (upgrade of Warcry), now properly adds the Powerful buff to allies, as stated in the description.
• The "Expurger" status effect, associated with the Expurging Totem upgrade of Mystic's Raise Totem skill, now properly adds poison to attacks, and carries a combat message for clarification.
• Fixed a bug where card tooltips would sometimes be set to the wrong position.
• Clarified several ability tooltips, and fixed several typos across tooltips and hints.

Quality-of-Life improvements:
• Added tooltips to the gameplay legend shown on the world map, which lists the types of map nodes, possible rewards, etc.
• The "Options" menu now has a new and improved layout, and now also works directly with gamepads, rather than relying on a virtual cursor.
• Sped up the world map notifications if the player is trying to move to the next node while they are on the screen.
• When using a gamepad, the default window mouse cursor is now hidden.
• Renamed Pylons' Ethereal status effect to Immortal, for clarity.

Optimizations:
• Reduced texture sizes for several heroes, without loss in visual quality.

Gameplay balancing:
• The healer in the city of Toledo no longer accepts gold but has the option to reject waiting for free healing.

This post is written by Mat, our gameplay designer.

Now that the Enemy Update has been out for a week, let me tell you about what our next plans are!

Even before we entered Early Access, we knew that the game had an “upper-bound”, that is, a limit of how many things you could do before you mastered all of its challenges. We introduced some side tasks, like the Prowess unlocks and some specific achievements, but we really needed more time and feedback to design a true metaprogression system.

Hell, you can note some discussions in the Steam forums or our Discord servers on the topic of “now what?”, and those did not go unheard. We started working on it!

It’ll be implemented in a few steps. First of all, we need a Hard Mode. A nastier challenge with more complex resource management and tougher beasties will be a great starting point. Then, we’ll leverage our persistent currency, Essences, into a “modifier” system, with positive ones that result in a power increase (More gold? More mana? Start with a more powerful grail?) and negative ones that will increase your essence gain, but bring an extra challenge (Harder enemies? More expensive healing?).

We hope that the end result is that you have a fine control over the intended difficulty of a run, and can slowly progress your warband’s power across multiple runs. Challenging yourself will reward you with more essence, which in turn allows you to purchase more positive modifiers… a full-fledged economy for you to participate in, and a final goal. Can you do a full negative modifier run in Hardmode?

I hope you are excited about the new additions to the game and the challenges we are going to present you with. Hit us up in our Discord server if you have any questions or feedback to offer in this design stage!

Mat

General fixes:
• Fixed a bug where unrevealed enemies could remain in their turn indefinitely.
• Added missing entry for the new Basilisk abomination into the Bestiary.