It is getting hot in here!

April 20, 2023

We are introducing new player sprites, weapon combat overhaul, selection system, camp NPCs, beginners experience, mining and other features.

Finally the waiting is over

The latest release of Tales of Landor, version alpha 4, brings a number of exciting changes to the game. To all players so far, if you played 1 minute or several weeks already: We want to thank you guys for giving our ambitious game project a chance. Every new player is giving us a big push of motivation to make this game become reality with all it's planned maps, spells, mobs, items and content.
Most of you waited long enough for Alpha 4 and with these words we are annoucing the official release date of version Alpha 4:

28.04.2023 - 6pm UTC

Here you can check the release time for your local time zone: Dateful Event Link

Your Support

As you may already noticed we soft started our Patreon page to give you the possibility to support us financially in exchange for some exclusive benefits. Shoutout to our supporters that are already helping us to make this game project become truth:

Master Supporter

Zelleck

Gold Supporter

Höllenbär

Silver Supporter

André Wolfsdorff

Bronze Supporter

Rook
Tim Anders

New Player Sprite

Our old player texture was a bought asset as base which has been modified by us so that it works with our armor system. Creating new animations, hair styles, armor sets etc, was a pain in the ass. Therefore we completely reworked the player sprite including re-designing the haircuts, eye styles and so on. Let us know how you like it and if we should add another new hair style that you think is missing.
Additionally we added some new animations for spell casting and reworked the old animations like idle, melee combat and ranged combat so that fights feel more dynamic and less rigid.

Weapon Combat Overhaul

Another big change is that we reworked melee as well as ranged combat. The bows animation feels way more fluent and when drawing the bow the used ammo is already visible within the animation.
Melee weapons now all have individual hit boxes and also different hit delays. The obsidian blade is almost hitting instantly because it is designed to be a very fast weapon and the axe e.g. has to be well timed because its heavy weighted and needs time until it swings and therefore does delayed damage. We are looking forward to hear your feedback and of course find out aspects that still need to be improved.

New Selection System

We unified the way the player interacts with the world and also other players. The former way was pressing P with a player selected and pressing F for other things like the anvil or loot. Pretty inconsistent and not really intuitive.
Now you can hover the mouse over monsters, players and other interesting things and right click to select them. When you get close to the interactable you can press F to interact (trade for players, upgrade for anvil, and so on). The interactable will then automatically be selected.
Therefore we also removed the P key.
Additionally when casting a spell that required a target and the current selection is invalid (e.g. due to hostility), any possible target close to the mouse is casted at automatically. For instance you have selected a Bat and want to quickly heal a friend you can now just move the mouse over your friend and heal him with e.g. Healing Wave without right clicking again.

New Camp NPCs

To give you the option to not trash your looted equipment if you don't need it, you can now go to our freshly implemented Scrap Dealer NPC. You can find her at the camp and she will give you materials in exchange for equipment pieces.
Also you can now also create and disband your own guild via the Guild Manager NPC. Also the anvil has be come just a decoration for our Blacksmith NPC.

Beginners Experience

First of all: We have noticed that a lot of new players tried to get their way into the game and already had a hard time beating the first monster type: The Bat. And we admit that the mini dash that the Bats did was very hard to read and to dodge. So we decided to nerf the Bat and improve the new player experience:

Bats have no dash attack anymore
Bats have ~30% less HP
We flattened the curve for required experience points for the first few levels

Mining

To test-drive our gathering system in it's first draft we are introducing three ore types (iron, obsidian and energy crystal) that spawn in certain locations. You will encounter them in different tiers. The higher the tier the bigger the reward for mining them. We hope that some very rare resources become a bit more common also for players that are maybe not strong enough to fight the strongest monsters yet.

Other New Features

Added health potions to heal yourself (2 minutes cooldown)
You can now split item stacks in your bag with the middle mouse button
Settings to change the key bindings
Far Sight: When pressing the left Alt key while moving the mouse the camera will move a bit into this direction. You can therefore see a bit further.
High score list on the website: Top 25 players
Added a new bow: Crystal Bow
Added a new window that shows all players that are online in the map
New enemy: The Bull
Another two new secret enemies
New weapon: The Spear
New armor: Obsidian Armor
Magical damage now bypasses defense points
A guard fire mage for the camp that attacks players that enable pvp in camp (by casting a level 26 Fire Rune)
The guild tag is now shown in high score list and in several chat messages
Players now start new characters with no spells and can learn them via Spell Books
Added a target dummy that can't die to test your damage at the camp
The dash spell now uses the walking direction instead of the mouse aim direction which should make it more beginner friendly

Improvements / Changes

Bats have a drop shadow now
Increased the XP gain for low level mobs
Updated all weapon damage numbers
Added background singing to the login menu music (Thanks to Nada Farid)
Settings menu look a bit better now and there is no "Apply" button anymore (changes apply immediately)
The game starts in the right window / fullscreen mode right away instead of flickering between window and fullscreen for a while
Improved selection of screen refresh rate to increase usability
Improve appearance and visibility of the crosshair
Improved visibility of Discord button and added it to ingame menu
Added a button to the ingame UI to open the system window (to e.g. access the settings)
Updated Crystal Sword sprite
Increased transmission range of monsters and players by about 20%
Guild Tag and level are now also shown in trade window
Scroll of Forgetting is now stackable
Healing Wave can now only be cast on other players
Added a Potion that you can consume to heal yourself
More precise message when trying to cast spells on invalid target
Made the night a bit brighter to prevent eye cancer
Added logo and alpha version more prominent to login menu
Added alpha version disclaimer popup
Increased light radius of torches and the camp fire
Increased tick time for self regeneration from 1 second to 2 seconds (so basically auto regenration is half as efficient as before)
Re-structured windows: Character (XP, attributes, combat stats), Equipment (including bag) and Spell Book
When connecting and disconnecting the system messages now also show the guild tags
Updated spell icons
When installing important dependencies while patching, you don't have to manually confirm the installing anymore.
Nerfed Endurance attribute (resistances increases now by 0.1% per stat instead of 0.3% and regeneration is halfed)
The old place of the guild name is now responsible for showing the characters special title (e.g. for Patrons)
The guild tag is now shown in front of the player name
When monsters freshly spawn they will now wait for some seconds until they detect aggro (to not get ambushed by spawned ones anymore)
Players, monsters and NPCs now have a fade-in animation when they spawn
Settings menu is now closable with ESC key
The installer of the game, the patcher and the game itself are now digitally signed under windows which should slowly reduce false-positive SmartScreen messages under Windows
It is not possible anymore to change items in the trade window when one of the players already accepted (reduces scam possibilities)
When you have undistributed attribute points left due to a level up, you can now see an animated notification badge in the UI. This should help new players understand the attribute system.
Made chat bubbles more readable
Added colored titles and frames for Patreon supporters
Steel armor now only needs iron bars to upgrade
Increased spawn rates of most monsters (not the Soul Eater)
The most important server messages are now translated to your locally set language

Fixes

Fixed that NPCs can go brain dead after being pulled around
Fixed guild pvp mode to work properly
Showing digits in character combat stats overview
Fullscreen mode on MacOS should now work
Quick loot by double pressing the "interact" key did not work sometimes
Pressing space after opening settings creates a second settings menu on top
Made the broken camp fire not block projectiles anymore
Fixed occasionally delayed or missing HP update after changing equipment or leveling up
Fixed the description of Healing Wave to show correct amount of heal pulses
Fixed wrong damage calculation of Fire Ball and Fire Rune (they will now consider the correct base damage)
Fixed a bug which made it possible to skip the waiting time when changing attitude
Fixed lag spikes when players entering sight and when changing equipment due to performance increase of more than 1000% for player texture generation
Fixed radius calculation for Fire Rune (which makes it 20% bigger for level 1)
Fixed missing upgrade information for weapon
Sometimes the patcher did not properly start the game client after patching. To fix this it automatically requests administrator permissions.
Fixed random triggers of spells without pressing the key
Fixed that after respawning the character started walking without pressing a key
Sometimes keyboard input got stuck on death or when tabbing out of the game window. We fixed that all game relevant keys are now released automatically when the game window looses focus (for most players it happened with a Alt+Tab window change in combination with the Far Sight)
Fixed a visual bug in which the dash shadow stayed when dying while dashing
Fixed that name plates have a wrong position sometimes (especially on MacOS)
Fixed that some players could not run the patcher due to the error message "Could not load update information"

Final words

We want to especially thank everyone that is already playing our game even when it is still in an early alpha phase. Especially bug reports and your suggestions help us to improve the quality of Tales of Landor.
Especially we also want to thank our 5 Patrons that are already supporting us! Unfortunately we also have pretty high costs for development, licences, hardware, servers and administration. Thanks to our first Patreons we could start the game studio that is responsible for developing this game project and found it officially as a company. Thank you guys a lot! All money pledged is 100% invested into the development of Tales of Landor.
If you are also interested in funding us you can check out our Patreon page: