RoA: Blade of Destiny HD - Patch 1.33 Released

The developers of Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny HD have a new forum post with news that a new patch is now available. Here are some of the changes.

New Intro
Extensive rebalancing of all weapon values
7 new weapons (e.g. Thrust Spear, Andergaster, Battle Bow)
“Good” and “Masterwork” Weapon variants introduced
Weapon trader sortiments reworked and spread hints to them
Extensive rebalancing of NPC values
Some NPCs now have 2 attacks per turn (e.g. sabretooth tiger)
Every combat spell now has a unique visual effect
Unlocked spells Nekropathia and Abvenenum
Many inside house views reworked
Individual temple views per god
Temple distribution reworked according to world background
Improved modability (new Functions, hook for Tavern activities)
Battle stances
Necrophobia checks when battling undead
Better marking of “Points of Interest” in every town, not only Thorwal
New Quest marker on the travelmap
New Druid rituals (using Obsidian Dagger)
Improved item tooltips
Extended trader item tooltips
Groenvelden redone (Groups of People you can talk to)
Real loading screen for battles
Evade in battles now uses up a parry attempt
You can now only either evade or parry once per turn

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More information.

so this makes it gold?

They call it gold, I'm about to finally start playing it and see what the fuss was about all these months and why the hate.

Be sure to tell us when it's at a state really worth picking up

The intro is much better now at least.
And when I criticized the (German) writing it was literally changed overnight.

Now the Game finally is in my queue of games to be played...after Shadowrun and Blackguards that is....

Kordanor said:

The intro is much better now at least.
And when I criticized the (German) writing it was literally changed overnight.

Now the Game finally is in my queue of games to be played…after Shadowrun and Blackguards that is….

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That's excactly where it is in my queue too. I bought it a couple of months ago but couldn't get into it at all. Right now The Banner Saga has to be completed, and when it is Dragonfall will probably have arrived, so that's the next one up. Then Blackguards after that if the opinion on the new patch is positive. If I don't have anything new to play after that I'll give RoA another spin and see if it catches my fancy.

Please can you tell if they increased the font size?
Compared to 1.32 and older.

Dunno how big the font size was previously, but I just tried on 1650x1050 with gfx setting "fantastic" and the font is a bit small and almost forcing me to use glasses. Almost.
And I don't see anything graphically fantastic.
Also who do I need to kill to get some proper tooltips in this game? There is a hint to use F1 - I press it but nothing happens. Maybe it's ESC… No, using ESC does nothing, to close a window you have to pixelhunt a way too small X. Now the glasses usage is not almost anymore, seems it's a necessity here.
Quicksave key is?
I quit to see that later because key definitions are in the pre-run splashscreen.

My initial impression? NOT impressed. And practically I didn't even start playing.
Okay, won't be posting about it for a while till I really play it some more, it's a bit unfair to the game.

I know everyone piles hate on the devs, but their dedication to patching this game and even adding new elements is commendable. I love how people have switched from hating publishers to hating developers. Esp. poor, underfinanced devs that how genuine dedication to their game. Unlike the big publishers that outright stop patching their games, these poor, small time devs keep trying to make it better.

Their reputation is their own fault. The decision to release the game early was theirs and not the one of a big publisher.
They could have released the game on early access first and everything would have been fine.

Wether or not you give the game another chance is up to you of course.

Kordanor said:

The decision to release the game early was theirs and not the one of a big publisher.

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Do you have any more detailed information on that?

The publisher in this case was UIG. But the project itself started out as a hobby project from what I know.

UIG is a rather small publisher: http://www.uieg.de/
While it seems like they were pushed by the publisher, going this path was their decision unless they received the license via UIG.
I mean - Crafty Studios is a tiny company. They don't need tons of money for financing such a project.
Kickstarter was already established at that point. And even if they went early access half a year before the initial release nobody would have blamed them.

It's not the same situation like with Aliens Colonial Marines for example where the Aliens license is worth tons of money and dozens if not hundreds of people are involved in the project.

Or check this statement:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/237550/discussions/0/846960481981291570/#c846963165446097567

There is no time for and no sense in blameshifting, so I can only tell you the truth. We ran during the work on the Day1 patch into unexpected troubles. Severe unexpected troubles that costed many days of otherwise productive bugfixing and optimization work. I know that the release should have been delayed by the lost time (+ an additional security timeframe), but that is not the developers decision.

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So they were fully aware that the version in the box is bugged as hell and they initially planned to fix everything with a day one patch which is ridiculous. Now as a publisher the deals and dates are all in place at that date and there is nothing which can be adjusted anymore.

Guys can I pop in again, although I promised to play the game some more before giving any new thougths?

I can't know the extensiveness of bugs in the initial release as I didn't play the game before patch 1.33.
But so far I can't say, with the "gold" version, I'm having fun. I'm not.
The point of a game is to have fun with it. With this one, I feel like I'm working on a job, not having fun.

Because of that, I didn't play it much as I usually do with freshly started games - I simply don't like it. What is my problem? I'm not sure yet.
Not saying the game sux. Can't. Didn't play it enough to really know if it does.

Maybe I started wrong (took the default party) where not a single character has a decent pickpocket value. So if I try that, I get caught and kicked out of a tavern. Yes, tavern. You can't, for whatever reason, pickpocket those who walk on streets. That's just an example.
Thus I'll be restarting the game but will make my own characters. I did want to do it at first, but their character creation option is… Excuse me for saying it… RETARDED.

I really encourage you to make your own party. That adds a lot to the game. (Speaking of experience from the original games, but it's the same with the remake.)

I just gave it a try and started to create my party. After having created my first two party members, I saved the game and quit. Some time later I wanted to load, but my savegame seems couurupt. Id doesn't load anymore.

Please post that on Steam - seems game devs are checking often what people say there and fix issues.

I really wouldn't want that happen to me as because of the character creation gambling with high chance to fail idiocy, I can't possibly make a draft for a character that could be rebuilt any time.
As I've said above, this is not fun!

[EDIT]
Okay this does it - I'm not getting anywhere.
I'm aware this is a remake and they wanted to keep things as much as close to original games by making only graphics better.
The character creation is very bad and by miles inferior to other TDE games (Drakensang, Blackguards, Demonicon). I simply can't make a bloody thief I like with this system. No I'm not trying to make 18 dexterity rogue who has no phobia, I'm trying to make 8 strength and 8-9 charisma one with 12-13 DE/AG/CO and random negatives, but because of insisting on stupid dice I just can't!

I'm putting this game back on the shelf. Will watch if they decide to make the character creation friendlier. If not, well, won't be the first game I've abandoned.

As said above, I can't say that the game sucks as I didn't actually play it. I can only say that the game start which includes character creation is not fun at all. It could have been fun 20 years ago so we could see how PC can be great in emulating dicebased character creation. Today, insisting on dice rolls not just in combat and skillchecks, but plain everywhere… It's less fun then grinding on endless respawns.

Personally, I prefer a point-spending system, but I don't find a die-roll system to be a show stopper.

Like Pegasus, I think the devs deserve some credit for trying to make things right. They really have been trying hard. And there was plenty of work to be done. I tried it on release, when it was a complete mess. But I can't speak to its current state. Haven't given it a real try lately.

I agree that rolling dice for character attributes sucks. But I guess they were stuck with the old TDE System. Would also have prefered the implementation of a newer system like the one in Drakensang.

Wut? But die-rolling is the only sensible way of generating a character! I loath having a fixed limit of points to allocate - that way, all characters are boringly equal, heroes by committee, so to speak...

Actually characters cannot be equal, and not even boring. I've posted in Drakensang subforum what monstrosities I did to my character during the creation all without using dice. As you may see there, I've deliberatley gone with utterly negative values on some skills.
I knew what I want and with their character creation option I've made it. You can of course use the default attributes/skills set on characters, but… That's getting the samey characters which are no fun.

In RoA remake character creation, with dice, I can't come even close to what I want - with just one character. If you read, and I hope you did, I tried to make a rogue with minimum 12-13 on his three significant skills and with 8-9 on strength and charisma, leaving dice to determine randomly values on initiative, constitution (um… or something) and negative traits where I don't care for outcome at all for this NPC.

And it's impossible. Instead of a rogue I want to have, dice makes me rolls good enough for sometimes a mage or sometimes a warrior or sometimes for nothing I could think of, but not for my weak, squishy and somewhat ugly pickpocket/picklocks/cheat expert rogue.

And that's just one character. If I couldn't make just one I want, how can I make 6 of them?