Major Update for Act I – more like re-build

A lot has been going on behind the scenes here at Soma Games. Act II is now in full beta, and Act III is closing in on Alpha. But here in Act I, we decided to make an additional big investment in getting it right. We’ve read your comments, heard your thoughts, and spent a lot of time reworking this episode to be the polished experience you’re looking for.

Major changes include:

• Major improvements to scent system, including all-new visuals.
• Huge improvements to environmental visuals across the whole game (see difference below)
• More depth and operation in the dialog system.
• Major rework of overall flow and goal progression.
• On-screen objective markers. (example in image)
• New interaction system for spatial positioning, facing sensitivity, and clarity.
• Big performance improvements.
• Reworked all trees and underbrush, improving both visuals and performance.
• Smoothed and improved player control overall.
• Global geometry polish and improvements.
• Checkpoint and save system overhaul.
• Plus hundreds more updates, improvements and bug fixes!

 

The new and improved scent system is the most obvious. We always felt this system had a lot of legs but until this build, it really wasn’t matching up with the original design goals. Now, for the first time, it looks the way we intended, it plays the way we intended, and we’re really starting to play with this feature in a fun way.

Also in this build is a huge update to the game’s environmental visuals. Everything from the trees, to the rocks and the water — we’ve really doubled down on making the world of Redwall come alive. We will continue down this path as we go into the next episodes, but the improvements here over the last 6 months are huge.

The two largest complaints we had in the last build were around player direction and avatar controls. People were getting lost, unsure how to proceed, and feeling like Liam and Sophia

 were sluggish and unresponsive. With that in mind, we’ve reworked almost all of the control systems to be much tighter and added several new systems to make next steps more clear. The biggest addition is a new on-screen objective system marker, as well as “Martin’s Marks,” a hinting layer to make sure players always have the clues they need to proceed.

Your scout tools have been given some TLC, too, with an improved wayglass for rooting out those geocaches and more power and precision from your slingshot. We hope they will treat you well on your upcoming adventures, and look forward to even more from these tools in Acts II and III.

It was a tricky decision on whether or not to go back to Act I and update it, or just continue forward with these updates in Act II and beyond. But we realized that we have so much support and input from our earliest adopters — support we deeply appreciate — that upgrading Act I was the only honorable thing to do. We hope you like what we’ve done.

Happy gaming and please enjoy.

Thank you, everyone, for your support and wishing you only the best,

-Soma Games