Ancient Kingdoms v0.10.3.0 - Forging Eratiath

Greetings, adventurers!

As we continue our journey toward the full release of Ancient Kingdoms, we're focusing on refining existing systems, improving balance, fixing issues, and polishing the overall experience.

This update brings further improvements to the Virtues system, smarter mercenary behavior, new armor set bonuses, class adjustments, and numerous quality-of-life improvements.

Let's take a look at what's new!

Virtues Improvements

We've made several adjustments to the Virtues system based on community feedback, making progression more enjoyable and rewarding.

Honor

• Debuffs and crowd-control abilities are now allowed during Honor challenges. All other requirements remain unchanged.
• Fixed an issue where buffs from your own familiar could prevent Honor gains.

Valor

• You now have one hour to defeat each assigned target. The remaining time is displayed in the blessing tooltip.
• Defeating your target now awards Valor points and automatically assigns a new target, allowing you to continue progressing without returning to the shrine.
• Targets must now have a guaranteed spawn chance and be within 10 levels below or 5 levels above your character's level.

Honesty

• Honesty now also reduces damage taken from enemy damage-over-time effects, reaching up to 20% damage reduction at maximum rank.

Class Balance

• Ranger: Increased Wild Strike damage.
• Rogue: Evasion now allows the Rogue to avoid one AoE or frontal attack while the effect is active.

Mercenary AI Improvements

We've continued refining mercenary behavior to make companions more reliable during combat.

• Fixed mercenaries sometimes positioning themselves too far to the side of enemies, preventing them from benefiting from back-attack bonuses.
• Fixed mercenaries occasionally stopping within AoE range despite attempting to dodge incoming attacks.
• Mercenaries now always receive the same Virtue buffs as the player.

Equipment, Loot & Rewards

• Added new 3-piece set bonuses to all Old Valorath armor sets.
• Fixed loot tables for Earth Elementals in Old Valorath.
• Fixed loot tables for Skeleton Archers in Northern Wastes.
• Lizardman Magus can now drop the Supreme Potion of Mana recipe.
• Adjusted Giant Spider loot tables inside Scaled Sanctum.
• Dragonbait Stew now stacks up to 999.
• Upgraded the healing potion reward given by Sentinel of the Rift.

Quality of Life & UI Improvements

• Extra Skillbar and DPS Meter now scale correctly according to UI settings.
• Ultrawide resolutions now automatically adjust UI scaling based on screen resolution.
• The selling price of a house is now displayed before confirming the sale.
• Fixed the Steadfast Guard tooltip.
• Fixed the Heartstone of Balance tooltip.
• Updated the in-game help system.
• More translations have been completed.

Stability & Technical Improvements

• Added an automatic save recovery mechanism. In the rare event that a save file becomes damaged, the game will now attempt to recover its contents when loading.
• Fixed a minor issue related to mining sounds.
• Updated to the latest game engine version.

Winter Is Coming to Eratiath!

While the Winter Festival event is active, snowfall will now occur more frequently throughout Eratiath, bringing an even stronger winter atmosphere to the world!

The Road to 1.0 Continues

With every update, we're getting closer to the full release of Ancient Kingdoms. Our focus remains on refining gameplay systems, improving balance, enhancing stability, and ensuring that Eratiath offers the best possible experience when version 1.0 arrives.

But the full release is just the beginning of our journey! We have no intention of slowing down after launch. Free updates will continue to arrive, bringing further improvements and new additions to the game.

We're also planning several DLCs to expand the world of Eratiath even further, with Outer Planes being the first of these upcoming expansions. There's still so much more of Eratiath to discover!

As always, your feedback plays an important role in shaping the future of Ancient Kingdoms, and we'll continue listening to the community every step of the way.

Thank you all for your continued support, and see you in Eratiath!