The whole premise of this game is: You have one life to live? What will you do with it? I love sandbox games. But I also want to feel clear progress towards a goal.
Mini-update 2a
What is a mini update? Well it's a significant update that I kinda didn't plan to do. I thought we could wait on some of these features, but it turns out we need to do it now to prepare for future features. Plus, it enhances the play experience right now.
New Major Quest: Mabren's Tower
We have enhanced our quest tools and technology and so are proud to announce the culmination of what Nolan and team can do with a new major quest: Mabren's Tower.
The quest is a race against a rival to make a major discovery. We think it will show off some of the power of our tech and we hope you enjoy it!
Legacy: One New Stat to Rule Them All!
“All that matters are the things that remain.”
The simulator tracks a lot of things about the player and the world. We're distilling all this data into one stat easily compared against rivals and historical mages in the world.
The core design of the game is along three core paths: Renown, Wealth, and Power. We are now displaying these as stats in game and on your save files. Legacy is derived from how well you perform in the three paths. Each is weighted differently and we will likely change the weighting as we go along. The design allows you to pursue all three, or just focus on one. It's your choice how you spend your life.
You can directly increase your Legacy with new items and actions. These are in addition to the 3 new stats. Things like:
Purchasing property for a Mage Tower
Displaying rare items like Art or Books in your mage tower
Clearing out a Monster Lair
Eradicating a Monster Race
New Stat: Renown
Renown represents your popularity and respect in the world. Renown is based on a new Town stat Esteem. Esteem measures citizen's thoughts towards you. It currently doesn't affect NPC dialogue text, but it will in the future.
Completing quests for townsfolk will build your reptuation the fastest, but establishing long term relationships will as well. It takes a lot more deeds to get noticed in a city than in a hamlet.
Esteem can and will gate certain features in a town. What people think of you matters.
New Stat: Wealth
Wealth is made up of two stats:
Prestige - Prestige is wealth people can see. It's on display for all to see.
Net Worth - the more you invest in the world, the higher your net worth and so your Wealth stat will grow. Grow your legacy by hording and investing every gold coin like Scrooge McDuck!
New Stat: Power
Power is how learned you are at life, magic, and manipulating the forces of the universe. Every point of Spell School XP earned contributes to your Power stat. Every point in skills (like Athletics, Persuasion, Scholarship) contributes to your power.
XP spent learning new spells and upgrades still counts, don't save em!
Rivals
These are NPCs competing with you in the world in Renown, Wealth, and Power.
You meet three NPCs in school during character creation and they are set loose in the world along with you at the same time, becoming your Rivals.
We are starting with the basics with them for now, they are not fully featured yet, but we will continue to build from here.
We simulate rivals in the background. Every month you will get an updated notification of how your rivals are doing.
If you don't care for this, there is an option to turn off the notification. Happily ignore them.
You can also view the last information you got about rivals on the new character sheet tab:
Eventually we’ll add a way to get more frequent updates by talking to NPCs or having spies watch them, etc.
You can find and meet your Rivals in game, just like any other NPC.
You cannot kill them yet. We're working on that.
Greatest of All Time (GOAT)
The world of Vaelun has many historically significant mages spread across different eras. We've assembled a list of the top 20 famous (or infamous) mages from which to compare yourself. Each one of these mages has a back story and in future updates you will be able to hunt down their unique artifacts. Again, this is stubbing in something that will be filled out more.
A new tab on the character sheet shows the rank of the mages and where you stand:
Backwards Compatibility
The new features will just start working on an old save file. It's a little better from a new fresh start, but you are not forced to do so.
The new major quest will begin immediately in a preexisting world. You can ignore it if you'd like.
Items which now bestow prestige or legacy stats, previously collected ones won't have it but new ones that are supposed to will.
An old save won't have rivals from school, but we will generate you 3 new ones and the system will start from there.
I hope you enjoy playing as much as we have enjoyed making this for you. Thank you for spending your time in Vaelun with us!