Early Access Update 1 is upon us, and just in case you thought we had been slacking since release, here's 10 pages of patch notes for your perusal! This update was always intended to react to initial player feedback, but we got so much more than we had even hoped for, and have ended up making Update 1 even more of a player-driven patch than we expected.

Massive thanks to all of you who have given us your feedback and chatted with us on our Discord, or reported issues or requests in our Redmine. It's thanks to your input that this first update is so comprehensive, and you've all proven to us how valuable the Early Access model can be even for a story-driven RPG like ours.

Let's start by taking you through some of the new things we've added, before we delve into the plethora of improvements and fixes we've made over the past 2 months.

One of the most exciting additions in this update are some new character assets for greater visual variation, including a few more character creation options:

• 2 new European heads for each gender (available in character creation).

• 2 new European hair styles for either gender (available in character creation).

• New heads for older Japanese male and female NPCs.

• New Japanese hairstyle for NPCs.

• New "Ronin" outfit which is used by Kage as well as ronin-type enemies.

Our technical designer has been busy adding lots of new items for you to discover and play with as well:

• 5 new unique items spread across Act 1.

• 6 additional armors/helmets added to the loot drop tables.

• 10 additional weapon variations added to the loot drop tables.

One of our favorite new features is that you can now carry barrels! This makes the naval battle preparation sequence in Perils on the Sea way more intuitive and cool, but it also lets you pick up any gunpowder barrel you might happen across and place it right in the path of a patrolling enemy to blow them sky high when they walk past. We hope you'll have lots of fun experimenting with this new feature and that you find tons of fun ways to break the game.

Thanks to the work of our intrepid narrative designer, you can now use companions for most dialogue skill checks. If a companion is currently part of the conversation, the option will show up, and you can select it if the companion has the necessary skill level.

She's also added roleplaying options for players that want more middle-of-the-road options.

Enemies will now change their behavior when they enter high alert, such as if they spot a dead body. Depending on the situation, they will either fan out after clearing the area and enter more aggressive patrols, or group up at tactical chokepoints to defend against an impending attack.

Greatly improved intro cinematic and a little new cutscene when the crew spots the São Gabriel during Perils on the Sea. More cutscenes to come in future updates.

If you let Cabral kill you in Perils on the Sea, you now unlock a new dialogue option after loading a save.

You can now give Captain van Renesse's letters to Johan in camp or in the House of Whispers. Previously this option would not appear until act 3, but that felt arbitrary, so we've enabled it in act 1 now.

Alessandro will now appear in the church in Nagasaki even outside of Incensed Against Us and Etienne's companion quest. This permits you to revisit and talk to him whenever you like… for example if you find anything you might like to show him?

A few new status effects have been added to make "mini-boss" characters more unique.

Added new music variations for existing Japanese and European soundtracks.

New contextual drop-down menu for interactions. We still have shortcuts for the interactions for those who prefer the previous scheme: If you hold Shift it will automatically interact with the first option, and if you hold Ctrl it will interact with the 2nd. Both of these modifier keys can now also be rebound.

Some levels now have broken wagons that can be scavenged for parts with the Tinkering skill and bone piles (animal bones! This isn't a Warhammer game) that can be searched with Survival, and Nagasaki Harbour's sake houses now have a few coin piles you can pickpocket if you have enough Skulduggery.

Added an option to toggle between walk and run permanently. Currently, this is bound to Cross/A on Gamepad. On Keyboard, it is unbound by default but players have the option to bind it in the options menu. The stealth tutorial was also updated to use the new input binding for Hold To Walk.

Created new animation poses for many of the character expressions in dialogue. Further refinements will happen in the future.

Improved stealth takedowns in several ways, most notably in how the AI reacts to them:

• When an enemy witnesses an ally being killed, they will now immediately escalate to combat.

• The sneak attack can no longer be spammed to essentially stun-lock enemies.

• Stealth takedowns now use walk/sneak speed instead of making the character run.

• Surprise Attack skill bonus no longer applies to aware enemies, and has reduced effect on ranged stealth attacks.

The following levels now allow a follower group size of 6: Nagasaki Market, Nagasaki Harbour, Spaniard's Hacienda, Kanseidо̄ Village, Kanseidо̄ Shrine, Kurokawa Village, Kurokawa Forest, Ikigai, Roadside Ambush, and Derelict Carrack. Enemy numbers have also been increased accordingly.

Stat changes across the board:

• Nerfs to ranged weapons.

• Better thematic stat spread on certain weapon types.

• Fixes to some weapon types having wrong stats.

• Adjustment to takedown damage to account for balance changes mentioned above.

• Stats adjustments to enemies' base stat setups. All enemy health has been increased.

• Stats adjustments to specific enemy classes.

• Piet's Passata Soto ability has been nerfed.

• The Effective and Ineffective status effects have been nerfed.

Loot tables now drop more mon, to keep your party out of the pauper's house.

Carrying a bleeding-out character will now temporarily disable the bleeding-out.

Breaking a door using the Break skill is now much quieter so it doesn't attract the AI's attention, unlike just smashing it with a weapon attack.

The "trade value" is now shown in the UI to make it easier to set up a fair trade with merchants, and we have added an "auto balance" button when selecting how many of a certain item stack to trade.

Added stack visuals for multiple items in trade.

Did a pass on the light menu textures to darken them a bit based on player feedback.

There is now an offset on the camera in the vertical axis when in dialogue, so the dialogue UI will no longer sit right on top of the characters who are talking.

Kage's and Piet's beards have been remodeled to fit the player character beards better.

All companion facial expressions have been tweaked in a more subtle direction.

Restructured the filtering of the Perks page by popular demand.

Perk tooltips now show their associated status effects so it's easier to understand what a perk does before you buy it.

The game is no longer rendered when a full-screen UI is open, significantly improving performance in those cases.

There is now a shortcut to trigger stealth attacks on mouse/keyboard similar to the one on controllers. It automatically detects the closest enemy to attack. Default option for stealth takedown is R, and it is rebindable in the options menu - the previous R binding, "Reset Camera", is now unbound by default.

Skip dialogue and select dialogue are now bound to different inputs.

Several inputs that were implemented as "Hold" have been changed to "Press" as designed.

Various fixes and improvements to the way morale works:

• Fixed blocker that could cause the combat system to get stuck due to Morale attacks picking "multi-target" skills.

• Added various checks to Morale effects so they don't get applied to Incapacitated/dead characters and they are removed if the character is incapacitated/dead.

• Tweaked the one-liner behavior to be consistent with the actions taken during morale effects.

• Dual wielding enemies no longer get stuck doing nothing when affected by Morale conditions.

• Fixed issue where the "MoraleTracker" got removed after combat when it was never supposed to be removed.

Moved the chest in Derelict Carrack with the rutter up to the aft deck next to Jiro and removed the ladder into the hole to the workshop.

Added another door to the player's room in the House of Whispers and spread out the assailants in Incensed Against Us more. This makes it easier to maneuver and gives Kage more options so he doesn't get stuck and skip his turn.

Enemies can now use bandages.

Poison/Burning arrow no longer uses placeholder arrows. Setup so Yumi and Hunting Bow are using arrows corresponding to the weapon, setup arrow projectiles to inherit the color of the accessory fired from, and gave arrows simple collision so they can stick in targets.

Some updates to the presentation of dialogue:

• The dialogue UI will now always show the speaker and the listener, even if neither of them is Flynn.

• The game will prioritize placing Flynn on the left if they are either speaker or listener. If not, a companion will be placed on the left. If neither speaker nor listener is Flynn or a companion, whoever is speaker first will be on the left side.

• Updated dialogue UI portrait animations to be snappier and work better when updating the characters that are portrayed.

Tweaked approval to skew slightly more negative.

Improved level-of-detail settings on animal models.

Fixed character shadow casting on the High setting and lower.

Improved distance culling for foliage shadows.

Added a few new loading screen hints.

Added missing expressions for several player choices in da Silva's dialogue.

Scaled down the pistol and dagger weapons.

Added autosaves when entering Dom Sancho's manor at the end of License to do Nothing and for the stealth sequence in Procuring Friends.

Rejigged the approval change size terminology to make it more intuitive and consistent.

Significant optimizations to the pathfinding performance of background characters and animals.

New smoke particles for the guns of De Albatros.

New smoke particles for pistol and arquebus weapons.

Changed a dialogue condition in Father Alessandro's conversation to ensure Etienne is present, for narrative consistency.

Tweaked the game over message when getting executed by Alessandro so it doesn't sound like Alessandro has the player crucified.

Improved lighting on lower quality settings (it was too dark previously).

Changed the logic whereby Tanaka would be considered dead if the player left the Derelict Carrack level before talking to him after clearing out the bandits. Tanaka is now only considered dead if you leave the level before killing Jiro.

Added a bramble in Derelict Carrack with a shortcut to bypass climbing on the ship.

The conversation between Johan, Antje, and Raina after the attack in Incensed Against Us is now an overhead conversation.

Inspecting the cart in Thievery and Some Other Crimes now requires Examine instead of Awareness.

Etienne's injury that he sustains during his companion quest now shows up in the injury UI, and displays a notification.

Swapped the icons for two of the weapon specialization perks for Japanese and European weapons, as they made more sense the other way around.

Did a pass to remove all double spaces from dialogue.

Renamed the "Alcoholic" perk to "Iron Liver".

Pass on all weapons' "sheathed" sockets to improve weapon alignment.

Several instances of selecting "\[Bow.]" in dialogue now makes your character play a bow animation.

Dialogue now ducks music and ambience more.

Tweaked the cutout to have a small radius and slightly harder edges so it doesn't call so much attention to itself. Also halved the animation speed on the noise.

Enabled sharpening in the tonemapper, making the game's overall visuals a bit sharper.

Added additional status effect feedback to certain abilities - in particular the stance abilities.

Massive optimization pass on UI character rendering. The details are too techy to get into; suffice to say we've overhauled how we apply transparency to the image, changed the texture format, tweaked resolutions, and so on and so forth. Overall performance difference is over 50% for real-time characters (e.g. the inventory) and memory usage has been reduced by over 85%.

Fixed merchants' weapon stats not being consistent each time you open the trade UI. Now all the stats are based on static seeds so there is no incentive to save scum.

Fixed a progression blocker that could occur when joining a multiplayer session during character creation.

Fixed the loot window showing up empty for the client player in co-op if the client interacts with eg. a chest just as the host takes all the contents.

Fix for Class Abilities UI sometimes not refreshing.

Fixed Quest Notifications only displaying the "Quest XP" and not the actual awarded XP including bonus objectives XP.

Fixed incorrect bonus XP values in Ikigai side quest.

Fixed the "Street Fight" world map event not triggering if you were missing a certain character in your party.

Fixed a certain player choice in Etienne's dialogue being connected directly to another choice node, which blocked progress.

Fixed the world map event A Scavenger's Reward leading to a soft lock if you succeeded the skill check with Johan. Same event would also get stuck if you cancelled out of follower selection, which has also been fixed.

Fixed a blocker that could occur in co-op if one player moved to a different deck of De Albatros while the other player was talking to Johan and Antje.

Fixed long weapons being improperly displayed in the characters' hands during combat after switching between weapons.

Fixed dialogue portraits occasionally breaking in multiplayer.

Fixed the setting to hide helmets or hats getting reset across level transitions.

Fixed Tora not appearing in the House of Whispers if you visit it between recruiting her and triggering Procuring Friends.

Fixed that fire could restart at the source location when loading a save file.

Fixed that the "destination hex" marker in combat was rotated the wrong way compared to the rest of the hex grid. Does this really qualify as a "major" fix? Yes, considering how much and for how long this bug has annoyed me, it does.

Fixed that incapacitated enemies could still display detection indicators to the player characters, and that dead bodies could still turn to look towards the party.

Fixed an issue where you could keep entering dialogue with Jiro during Thievery and Some Other Crimes if you knocked down all enemies including Jiro using stealth.

Fixed a bug where the Bonebreaker and Shieldbreak abilities would not show correctly when view the abilities on a weapon in the inventory.

Fixed gamepad navigation breaking when coming back from the New Game / Difficulty screen to the main menu.

Fixed the host not being able to select world map nodes when a client is connected.

Enemies are now lootable in combat again (combat looting of bodies was disabled in a previous patch as a hotfix for another problem).

Fixed controllers not highlighting and showing disabled interactions.

Fixed that the head priest of Kanseidо̄ shrine could be killed when he shows up at the Spaniard's Hacienda, breaking the quest.

Fixed a bug that was preventing the player from talking to Johan in camp or in the House of Whispers.

Changed Masayuki's appearance to match his age and voice.

Various fixes on Perils on the Sea:

• Fixed that you could run over and attack "neutral" crew members during Piet/Claeszoon fight.

• Fixed that when you got caught by Lopes, he had time to attack you during the fade.

• Fixed that looting the Rutter/Lopes objective waits for the loot window to be closed.

• Fixed such that Helmsman Brouwer runs and joins the Piet conversation (he didn't in certain cases).

• Gave Jose a different helmet with an open face, tweaked some positions of objects, and added Johan as controlled character in end fight now that we've increased the group size to 6 anyway.

Fixed a crash related to releasing skeletal mesh morph data.

Fixed a crash related to AI disturbance stimulus.

Fixed a crash that could happen if a DualSense controller was unplugged while it was listening for audio feedback.

Fixed a crash in the system that fades roofs when you enter buildings.

Fixed an occasional crash when updating settings.

Fixed a bug whereby if combat finished on a turn that isn't the player's, it advanced to player turn for few seconds before ending.

Changed Foliage Density scalability settings to fix too much foliage disappearing on lower settings.

Fixed traps not providing a "Danger Hex" indicator when pathing through discovered/known traps.

Fixed Antje's lip texture being the wrong color.

Fixed the Bodyguard character using an old hand model.

Fixed the Headwrap item not correctly displaying the hair under the hat.

Fixed the icon of the Gunpowder crafting component.

Fixed a slight misalignment of buttons on the world map UI.

Fixed bodies sometimes only being lootable after being downed or killed.

Fixed a placeholder player character showing up in co-op if client player left the game before finishing their character.

Fixed that the "morning after" dialogue in Incensed Against Us would still play if the player rejected Kage's offer to stay up and watch over the party.

Fixed Attribute tooltips being wrong, and "Ranged Damage" in the stats screen stating the source was Finesse when it's actually Perception.

Fix pause menu not giving the option to Load Latest if there is no quick save.

Fixed an issue where you could not progress through dialogue on gamepad if a multi-page tutorial was opened in the background.

Fixed a memory leak in the quest system.

Fixed a soft lock that could be encountered if entering combat on the enemy turn in Thievery and Some Other Crimes, which was also related to using traversal objects (eg. ladders) in combat.

Fixed the gong in Ikigai not working after loading a savegame.

Suppressed (formerly Exposed) status is now correctly showing up as a debuff, and the descriptions of the Passata Soto ability and associated status effects have been edited as they were referring to Suppressed by the name Exposed and to Passata Soto by the name Passing Under, respectively.

Fix javelin mesh not updating correctly to remove the last visible javelin.

Three instances of "Skullduggery" corrected to the UK spelling "Skulduggery".

Removed double "mobility" from the description of a certain Japanese basic armour.

Fixed that the "Guard Bypass" ability was erroneously displaying that it would apply "Deflecting", which it does not.

Fixed that the "Designate" ability claimed to affect "Self" instead of the correct "Enemies".

Fixed the missing trade value on Japanese Light Helmets.

Solved an issue where the gamepad's hex tooltip would remain visible when switching from Gamepad to Mouse mid combat.

Removed the obsolete anti-aliasing settings. The AA setting works the same as before, it just doesn't have those names anymore since they were wrong.

Fixed that dropping bodies mid-combat would cause an attack of opportunity.

Fixed an issue where damage overrides were not correctly checked when determining whether an attack would apply Armour Pierce or Armour Shred.

Fixed that the Exposed status was not correctly affecting Coordination, Superiority, and Focus - it was only correctly affecting Guard.

Fixed Julia Ota's attractor dialogue retriggering even while Ikigai was ongoing or after it had been succeeded or failed.

Added Antje as the listener of one of Raina's lines in the "Found Water" dialogue during Perils on the Sea, so that the conversation will only start if Antje can join it, and she will run in to join it as soon as it does.

Fixed a bug where Antje would disapprove of an action she should approve of.

Fixed the Iron Skin armour not appearing properly on female characters.

Fixed the unique item "Deckhand's Defiance" using the sailor outfit visuals instead of the deck hand outfit.

Fixed the journal not opening when you manually click the button in the world map HUD.

Fixed the loading screen occasionally getting stuck on a gray screen.

Fixed the End Turn input overlapping with the close tutorial button.

Fixed climbing prompt saying "Jump" instead of "Climb".

Fixed the prompts for Raina's medicine chest and the first aid chest to be more informative.

Fixed that some characters had non-uniform scaling applied to them, which was messing up hand and arm positioning in dialogue poses.

Fixed some helmets/hats not hiding beards when they should (eg. the ninja mask).

Fixed that NPCs were not casting shadows from the directional light.

Fixed skill points being assigned to the last hovered stat even when clicking outside the boxes with mouse.

Added logic to reduce the volume of all other voice over lines that don't belong to the player's current interactive dialogue.

Fixed characters getting unassigned from their patrol points when loading a save file when the character is travelling halfway through a traversal such as ladders.

Fixed Walsingham's and Cabral's VO overlapping when skipping through the dialogue.

Changed the "Action Point regained" VFX back into the "Level Up" VFX.

Fixed decorative characters' weapons staying behind when they were disabled, causing disembodied floating items.

Fixed ranged projectiles aiming too high on ducking targets.

Fixed a real doozy where combat could fail to end if Tanaka was left alive at the end of Thievery and Some Other Crimes, which would lead to a progression blocker. There is no way to exaggerate what a perfect storm of issues with our "start combat" logic this was caused by. Seriously, the programmer responsible for fixing it wrote whole page of notes in his submit message.

We also have a few outstanding issues that we didn't want to hold up the update for, which will be addressed in future updates:

• You cannot currently access the tooltips of the abilities of items in the trading window.

• The ability hotbar sometimes displays abilities out of order.

• Some UI sound effects are unaffected by the master volume setting.

• A specific door can be clipped through with some effort, allowing you to enter an area that should not become accessible until act 3.

• When dialogue choices have more than one condition on them, only one condition can be displayed in the UI at a time, and the game may not display the most relevant one.

• The game can crash after loading a save file in Nagasaki Harbour after trading.

• "Restore to Default" only works in the Controls tab.

• If you alt-tab out of the game during a loading screen, gamepad input will stop working.

• Very rarely, the scroll wheel fails to scroll all the way to the bottom of the inventory. In general, scroll bars are a bit buggy right now, and that will be addressed in the future.

• Co-op: The game can crash for the client when trying to rejoin the host after losing connection.

• Co-op: When the client joins a co-op session while the host is on the world map, the client character may not be added to world map events.

• Co-op: Background characters are not visible for the client player in the new intro cinematic.

Update 2, slated for release in November, will be the big one that unlocks the 2nd act of our story. Here, you will embark on an eventful journey to Osaka with the grizzled warlord "Oni" Shimazu, where you will meet several big players of Japan's sengoku era, and become a pawn in their political maneuvering and scheming. While in Osaka, you will also get a chance to go out drinking with Piet and have dinner with Captain Fernão Dias Cabral - keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

Although Update 2 is most importantly going to be the big one that adds Act 2, we do have more exciting features planned for it as well.

The most significant new feature of act 2 is that you'll be able to start using social stealth to gain access to restricted areas. This involves a new character state called "Tolerated", where enemies will not attack you on sight inside a restricted area, as long as you don't get caught lockpicking, attacking anyone, or performing other such criminal acts.

Usually you become tolerated by bluffing or persuading your way past an entrance guard, but update 2 will also introduce disguises, which are outfits you can find and equip to become tolerated in a specific restricted area. Only the character wearing the right disguise will become tolerated, but some missions can be completed entirely by yourself if you are disguised. Just beware that crime will still blow your cover, and that any enemy in high alert will see through your disguise.

Another big feature in development for update 2 is what we call "Target Mode", which is a major overhaul to the gamepad control scheme. The current gamepad controls pretty much just emulate mouse/keyboard input, but with the introduction of Target Mode, you will get a more convenient way to select targets for abilities both in and out of combat. This change also frees up some gamepad inputs, allowing us to reshuffle the whole control scheme slightly to make it more smooth and intuitive to play with a gamepad.

• The character creation flow will change slightly: instead of defaulting to a recommended skill and weapon selection, it will ask you to customize your choices by default, with an option to pick a recommended preset.

• Further updates on characters, including some fancy new beards for Ambassador Walsingham and Captain van Renesse.

• Children will be added to the game.

• Lots of new items, including unique items and some new tactical items to play with.

• Better gameplay logic and AI behavior surrounding theft, to go with the tolerated state.

• Better rain effects and improved lighting during overcast weather.

We will of course keep you updated with more news posts, dev diaries, and so on as we continue towards update 2, and as always, we encourage you to join our Discord[discord.com] to discuss the new features, upcoming content, and ask any questions of us that might be on your mind.

Have fun!

Campfire Cabal