Expeditions: Viking Upcoming Fixes
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Category: News ArchiveHits: 1394
A developer post on the Expeditions: Viking Steam page outlines the current plans for the upcoming patch 1.0.3. The team is busy trying to fix quest logic and game crashes, and when they're not doing that, they're squashing minor bugs and implementing quality of life improvements. Have a look:
Due to our test process, patch 1.0.3 has been in the works since a few days before 1.0.2 went live. Our main focus has been to iron out the rest of the crashes. The fire crash of course was the most common one people experienced. We finally tracked it down and fixed it yesterday. The second-most common crash now appears to be related to campsites. We've been unable to reproduce this bug on our own machines, but we've been asking those of you who reported experiencing it for your savegames, so hopefully we'll find a way to make it crash for us as well, so we can find it and fix it.
Nova and I have been busy hunting quest logic bugs. The most common bug of that nature is the Play Only Once bug which is an annoyingly common mistake where some conversations were set to only trigger once, but also had the ability to not play if certain conditions weren't met. In these cases, if you triggered the conversation before the conditions were met, for example by clicking on a character who did not yet have a nameplate or walking into a proximity trigger that was not yet active, it would still set the conversation as having played and never trigger it again. It's an extremely easy bug to fix, but finding every occurrence of it has proven tricky. Your reports have been invaluable in that respect.
We also found the cause of the negative status effects that never go away. It was caused by adding combat-status effects outside of combat, which were then never cleaned up. That too will be fixed for 1.0.3.
A major focus area for us has been the end of the game. Since this part of the game wasn't available in the closed betas for fear of spoilers, it wasn't tested nearly as well as the rest of the game. The result has been that you've found some pretty severe bugs there, including broken reinforcements in the Homestead defence fight, and the fact that loading a savegame during that sequence would completely break the game.
The upshot is that those bugs have been fixed for 1.0.3.
Right now we're working on getting three more things into the game before we make the 1.0.3 build and upload it to the beta branch:
1) It needs to be a lot easier to see which status effects affect your characters outside of combat.
2) Character animations are not being played correctly when camping. I've tracked down the cause and am doing a quick pass of all campsites now to make sure all the animations will play correctly after 1.0.3.
3) We have added a config flag to disable timeline-related game over. This is as far as we'll go. It's not going to be part of the in-game options menu because it really messes up the logic of the narrative, but you've made your dissatisfaction with the very concept of a time limit pretty clear, and we can't ignore that.
We have however also made some effort to make the timeline more clear - it's now a menacing red towards the end, and we've implemented a tutorial pop-up that will call attention to it the first time you visit the campaign map after the prologue.
All this in addition to a ton of fixes for smaller bugs reported by you all.
