Upgrades that follow your journey
Weapons still go up to +10, and armour can now be upgraded too, up to +5. Each step needs a shard, and the better shards only turn up in later lands, so you cannot max out a weapon early however hard you grind. The final step needs the rarest shard of all, so only a few pieces of your gear will ever reach the top. The blacksmith sells a few of the common shards, never the rare ones.
That exposed a hole. The Forbidden Woods rebuilds itself every time you enter, which made it an endless source of shards. Each spot and each named beast there now gives its shard only once per playthrough.
A bug every player would have hit
Some memories are meant to play the moment you step on them. They never did. A setting meant to stop the hero bumping into objects also stopped the game noticing that you had arrived. They work now.
Razor and Blade grow the way the design asked
Their spells now open a new rank every five levels, and using a spell is what earns it. Their basic attacks grow by use too: at rank 3 Razor's claws start fires and Blade's tail freezes, and at rank 6 every third swing adds a follow up. Each of them also gets a favourite spell you pick on the party screen. They lean on it whenever it makes sense, so you steer what grows. The party screen now pages through long spell lists instead of letting the later spells fall off the bottom.
Items that did not exist
Martha hands you a tally stone and Boris his tempering notes when you first meet them, but neither item had ever been defined, so they turned up in your bag with no name or picture. A new check now walks every conversation, quest and readable and confirms every item they hand over is real. It found a third, a document in a strongbox. All three exist now.
The same kind of check caught a shop problem: a potion on sale in two shops at a price of 0, and shops refuse to sell anything for 0. The game now warns about any line like that. Of 75 shop lines, 2 could not be bought.
Tuning and smaller fixes
- Named elite monsters no longer hit half again harder than they should, and no longer pay out almost as much as a boss.
- A shop that was "selling" a healing flask it could not hand over now sells chocolate.
- Arriving back in the home valley spent about a second on one slow drawing job every time. That is fixed.
- Some sprites had no drawing layer, so they were drawn under the ground, among them an arrow style projectile, the thrown flask and the item use icon and its bar. A test now stops new ones slipping through.
- In one tower, the way ahead could stay marked as blocked after it had opened. Gates, fog walls and breakable walls now update the map when they open.
Numbers
- 1,815 automated tests pass, none fail.
- Three full automated play sessions ran with 0 errors and 0 crashes.