October 22: Halloween Update Patch Notes

New Content

Combat & Blood Drain

Combat has been reworked to feel faster, more responsive and more skill-based. Inputs are buffered better, counter and parry animations are shorter and more impactful, attack snapping has been reduced, attacks now play their full animation even when they miss, and enemy attacks are designed to punish easy exploits.

Blood Feeding has been rebuilt into an active Blood Drain system that you can use both in and outside of combat. Grab a victim with RMB and drain their Blood over time. You can interrupt the drain, throw your victim or follow up with a strike, while staggered and stunned enemies stay vulnerable for longer. Other enemies can still attack you while you feed.

Counterattacks share the same input as Blood Drain and always take priority over it. Elite enemies cannot be drained. Kiss of Eternity is now part of Blood Drain, letting you turn a grabbed victim into a vampire at the cost of Existence.

Features

- Combo-based melee combat.

- Charged attacks with increased range and area damage based on charge time.

- Counterattacks timed to enemy attack cues.

- Dash-to-target Blood Drain.

- Blood Drain on villagers, Inquisitors and animals, with dedicated animations.

- Attack and throw enemies while draining their Blood, with a chance for them to break free.

- Kiss of Eternity integrated into Blood Drain.

- Rage now builds up through successful combat hits.

- New combat music and updated combat and Blood Drain sound effects.

- Improved visual feedback for charged attacks and Blood Drain.

- Hotbar for consumables and Arcana skills, including gamepad support.

- Updated combat and Blood Drain tutorials.

New Enemy: Evil Spirit

Evil Spirits attack in groups with unblockable strikes that apply the Cursed debuff. They can charge straight through their victims, leaving a cursed cloud at the point of impact, and crumble into a pile of ashes when they die. They only appear during specific encounters, triggered by entering certain areas, picking up certain items or closing a chest.

Hotbar

A new Hotbar replaces the skill slots and is displayed from the start of the game. It has 4 slots, with separate Hotbars for Aristocrat Mode and Hunter Mode, and switching modes also switches the active Hotbar. You can assign active Arcana and consumables to Hotbar slots from the Inventory and Arcana panels.

New Buildables: Trophies

Added Trophies, which unlock as you gather the relevant resources.

Optimization

We implemented further environment optimization improvements, enhancing overall performance, memory usage, and world stability.

Other Additions

- Added a new face preset to the Character Creator.

- Added Existence Vials, which can be found in restocked chests and from traders.

Patch Notes

Character Creator

- Added a new face preset to the Character Creator.

- Improved the positioning of selected hairstyles to better fit the head.

World & Gameplay

- Added a chance to find Existence Vials in chests and in trader offers.

- Added combat idle animations for Inquisition enemies.

- Added new visual effects for the Inquisitors' Silver Veil area-of-effect attack.

- Fixed Moonweaver's Robe decreasing Existence Regen instead of increasing it.

- Fixed Artisan skill upgrades not applying their bonuses.

- Fixed the Hunter, Guardian, and Artisan passive skills not applying their level 5 and 10 perks.

- Fixed the small Silver Veil near the Chapel in Hell's Chasm dealing no damage.

- Fixed Inquisitors spawning beneath altars in large camps.

- Improved the materials on construction elements and stairs.

- Optimized the effects used when transforming into a bat, switching forms and teleporting vampire servants.

- Reduced stuttering during auto-saves with large save files.

Characters & Appearance

- Fixed an issue where custom skin tones were not applied correctly when partially unequipped.

- Fixed the portrait disappearing when a quest-related villager is turned into a vampire.

UI & Menus

- Added an option to disable camera shake.

- Added customizable Building Mode keybinds, including support for AZERTY keyboards.

- Added rarity feedback for crafted items.

- Player statuses (buffs and debuffs) are now also visible in the Inventory.

- Moved objective progress counters before the objective text for easier reading.

- The Journal now remembers your position when navigating between Quests and the Compendium.

- Updated the in-game logo.

- Fixed the crosshair appearing outside Building Mode when set to "Building Mode Only".

- Fixed the Required Resources list constantly refreshing in the Stronghold menu.

- Fixed the map remaining attached to the cursor after dragging it.

- Fixed inconsistent highlighting of hovered and marked rumors in the Journal.

- Fixed mouse movement being assigned as a keybind in the Controls settings.

- Fixed overflowing text in the keyboard and gamepad settings across multiple languages.

Audio & Voice

- Updated the female voice-over for the Simple Gestures side quest.

- Fixed dashing on Castle Hill restarting the background music.

- Fixed missing environmental sound effects from torches, campfires and mills while in bat form.

Localization

- Corrected Russian and Ukrainian translations on the Castle Hill Ruins management card.

- Corrected gender-dependent Journal text in Russian and Ukrainian.

- Corrected Russian intro text referring to female characters as male.

- Updated Russian and Ukrainian item rarity translations to fix text overflowing item previews.

Multiplayer

- Fixed incorrect character and camera rotation for Clients after multiplayer dialogue sequences.

- Fixed dashing on Castle Hill duplicating the music for the Host.

- Fixed multiple music tracks playing at the same time after loading a save or rejoining a multiplayer session.

- Fixed the Host's music stopping when a Client leaves the game.

- Fixed missing combat music for Clients.

Gamepad

- Added gamepad keybind conflict detection to prevent overlapping input assignments.

- Fixed the mouse cursor appearing in the multiplayer lobby when using a gamepad.

- Fixed the mouse cursor appearing unexpectedly and disabling camera controls.

- Fixed being unable to exit the Credits menu using a gamepad.

- Fixed being unable to unequip items using a gamepad.

- Fixed items remaining selected after using or switching them with a gamepad.

- Fixed being unable to return to Castle Hill with a gamepad after unlocking Beast Vision.

- Fixed gamepad focus being lost after changing the maximum FPS setting.

- Fixed gamepad navigation getting stuck on the Close button in The Core menu.

- Fixed cyclic gamepad navigation on the Hunter tab in the Character Editor.

- Fixed gamepad navigation losing focus after deleting a character.

- Fixed gamepad navigation losing focus when moving between columns in the Journal.

- Updated the axis inversion labels to clarify that they apply to both mouse and gamepad controls.

Known Issues

- In rare cases, Evil Spirits may spawn underground.

- Killing Evil Spirits currently affects the Inquisition threat level, even though it should have no effect.

- Beast Vision highlights veins on Evil Spirits, even though their Blood cannot be drained.

- NPCs in Fey Marshes village may get stuck, appear in unintended places or perform interactions misaligned with nearby objects.

- After using Beast Vision, interactable objects may stop highlighting when hovered over with the mouse.