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We hoped to wrap up everything in December and start the beta in mid-Jan, but we're still 3-4 weeks of work away from the finish line. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time we get there, another month of work would pop up out of nowhere, but let's stay positive and hope it's the final stretch.

On the programming side, the last hurdle is the non-human enemies. They have properties such creatures never had in our previous games, which required more work and changes than anticipated. They can be placed on walls (see the old wasteland concept), have abilities humans don't, different THC formulas that doesn't factor in stats and skills, different movement (a frog jumps over several tiles), etc.

The other task is relatively minor. When you enter a stealth mode, the designated infiltrator is removed from the party (provided you have one), which waits outside. If combat starts (if you're spotted by guards or fail to kill a guard from behind, we need to switch to the party mode and teleport the party inside the building (at the entrance point, not next to you).

On the scripting side, the framework is done. What's left to script are the journal entries, quest rewards, and reputation modifiers. Overall, the game is shaping up well and we hope you'll enjoy it. The first chapter has 3 locations (the Pit, Armory, Hydroponics), 22 quests with multiple solutions, and 30+ fights.

Speaking of Hydroponics:

The Hydroponic Division was originally conceived to adapt Terran plants to the anticipated environment of Proxima Centauri. Extensive gene-editing was employed to develop resistance to alien fungi and pests, and accelerated adaptation hacked into the plants' genetic code.

Like many other critical systems, Hydroponics was abandoned during the Mutiny. The carefully cultivated flora and fauna was left on its own in harsh environs designed to propagate rapid and brutal evolutionary cycles. When men returned to reclaim Hydroponics, they discovered an environment as wild and hostile as any Earth jungle...

That's all for now. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you and your families!
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When the alien craft entered Earth’s solar system, the human race was alive with excitement. However, when it was accidentally fired upon, the consequences were dire. In a burst of electromagnetic energy, the entire planet Earth disappeared, leaving its gravity well and the moon behind.

In this open world, sci-fi role-playing game, you are part of the Moonbase team on a desperate mission to bring Earth back. You must assemble and equip your crew, customize your ship and set out in search of unique parts to create the Centauri Drive, a device your team hopes will reverse the electromagnetic phenomenon that swallowed Earth.

Travel between dozens of stars, harvest resources to repair and upgrade your equipment, meet and negotiate with friendly (and hostile) aliens, and do whatever it takes to stay alive and bring Earth back.

Planet’s Edge features:

• An open-ended story driven by the player
• Dynamic, real-time spaceship combat
• Mining, trading and puzzle solving
• Turn-based ground combat
• Customize and upgrade your ship for any situation
• Select your crew (or clone a new one) and equip them for success

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Larkspur, Calif. (Dec. 18, 2020) – Koch Media and Dark Crystal Games today announced their future cooperation for the upcoming sci-fi RPG Encased. The Koch Media Group will support the global launch of the game on PlayStation®4, Xbox One, as well as PC within one of its publishing labels. Future details on the publishing and release date will follow at a later point. Encased will be fully released 2021.

“From the very first day of development, Encased has evolved as an independent project, created with our own resources and the support of the amazing Kickstarter community. The partnership with Koch Media will maintain our creative freedom and help us showcase the game to a huge global audience," said Vyacheslav Kozikhin, creative director at Dark Crystal Games. "Encased will now feature full voice acting, additional language localization, and will be released for PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 at the same time. We’re excited to bring this adventure to a much larger global audience.”

“Encased fits perfectly into our portfolio and within our global expertise on publishing RPGs," said Mario Gerhold, International Marketing Director at Koch Media. "Our team here in Munich is already working hard behind the scenes and we look forward to sharing more information about the game and how Encased fits into our multi-label strategy very soon.”

Encased is a tribute to classic turn-based post-apocalyptic RPGs. Fighting enemies, exploring an anomalous wasteland, and leveling up a character while joining one of the forces ruling a ruined world. Encased inspires nostalgia for classic PC gamers and layers in fresh takes on the classic genre to welcome new players.
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A lucrative offer. A simple job. Infiltrate Chimera.

The Client wants you to enter the Chimera BioPharma complex and find Dr. Cerberus.
Being a morally-ambiguous mercenary type with a unique skill set and a need for credits, this seems like a good idea.

Build your character from a variety of skill trees inspired by the StarCrawlers universe, grab some gear, and jump in. Grow your power and level up to unlock new abilities, gear, and secrets as you fight your way into the Chimera building.

Key Features

• Wage tactical turn-based RPG battles against futuristic enemies.
  
• Procedurally-generated floors provide new challenges and rewards.
  
• Choose your own difficulty mode - with optional permadeath.
  
• 100+ abilities and 25+ skill trees to customize your play style with Muscle, Guile, and Intellect skills.
  
• 20+ different enemy types and rare spawns with unique abilities and loot.
  
• 20+ weapons of different rarities ranging from plasma rifles to carbonite blades to scintillating donuts.
  
• 30+ items of gear to stop your insides from becoming outsides.
  
• More features added with each new content patch!

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Dead are returning from their graves! If crash landing behind enemy lines was already a challenging experience for our squad of vagabonds, they sure as Hell didn’t sign up for this kind of insane, supernatural encounter, a three-sided fight for survival against both the living and the undead. Yet now it is upon them to discover the source of this occult magic in the war-ridden land that they find themselves in, and hopefully eliminate it before hordes of zombies spread all over the world. But how does one retain their sanity when facing enemies that have been spat out of hell?

Booze is the answer! With the steady supply of a highly flammable mix of questionable ingredients brought to you directly from Izkor, our heroes will have no problem marching all the way to Hell and back, so long as there are plenty of enemies to kill. So, make sure that everyone is drunk and fully armed as they are going to have hordes of enemies to kill and a mind-bending occult mystery to solve!

Tactical action
The critically acclaimed gameplay formula is back - now with zombies! Scout the battlefield, lure undead hordes to fight your enemies, then once both sides are suitably weakened, charge in and mop up the weakened survivors in one fell swoop - or bring out the biggest guns in your arsenal and simply blast your sorrows away. Just make sure to watch your back as the undead will come from all directions.

Occult mysteries
The biggest mystery here is the amount of booze in your keg. How come it’s never empty, even though everyone is constantly drinking from it? Well, not just that, all those reanimated corpses, pagan altars, and constant fog that blankets the area are worth investigating too, but not until everyone has quenched their thirst!

Inhuman bosses
Death comes in many forms, and the undead will return in just as many, so be prepared to adapt your fighting style to whatever unique zombie is in front of you, beware, some of them are truly monstrous, so your squad will need all of the combat experience and newly found Dutch courage to survive the encounter!

Booze and guns
Being an alcoholic has its perks. Literally. The more your soldiers drink, the more perks and abilities they get. Combine it with the vast arsenal left behind by those cowards who ran for their lives when they first saw the undead and you end up having a surprisingly diverse armament and abilities, perfect in your fight against the zombie apocalypse!
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Unlike a horror movie from the 80s, being a Werewolf isn’t a curse. It offers great power, granting the ability to shapeshift into 3 different forms.

The Human or “Homid” Form
This is the main form you will make use of for anything related to social interaction, hacking computers, and stealth kills. You can quietly get the jump on enemies, perform silent takedowns, or pick off an enemy from afar with your crossbow. With some handy upgrades, you can also use the crossbow to disable electrical systems.

The Wolf or “Lupus” Form
As a human, sometimes there are places you just can’t get into. It’s these times where you’ll be grateful for the speed and agility of the wolf. The Wolf form will help you navigate through vents and move rapidly between cover to avoid being detected by the guards. Speed and agility are the name of the game, and it’s just as valuable when you’re trying to take a stealthy approach.

The Werewolf or “Crinos” Form
This is the form that everyone immediately thinks about when you hear the word “Werewolf”. These towering beasts are powerful creatures, capable of devastating acts of carnage. A Crinos is the ultimate combat machine, and if infiltration fails, it’s time to go big or go home.

Brutal, fast-paced combat
Werewolves are not known for their patience, and your inner Rage will raise as you silently take down enemies. Sooner or later, you will have to fight your way through.

For our first foray into the action genre, we really wanted to design impactful, brutal fighting systems. Something that would bring these powerful creatures to life. We went through lots of iterations, balancing the different moves and enemies, with a focus on strength, power, and aggression. Every move, every animation needed that “snap” and “crunch” to ensure each strike feels heavy and satisfying.

Rage is at the heart of combat: it builds up as you damage enemies and allows you to perform a range of special moves, from unleashing a big area-of-effect attack to rushing towards an enemy.

The Crinos also has two different combat stances, each suitable for different situations.

• In Agile Stance, you can perform fast attacks and move quickly between enemies. This comes especially handy when you need to get closer to ranged enemies, or when cornered.
• Heavy Stance sacrifices agility for better strength and resistance, but it’s a chance worth taking to quickly dispose of basic foes and break the guard of tougher enemies.

As the fight goes on, your Frenzy meter will also fill up, and once it boils over Cahal can unleash his fury. Frenzy is a double-edged sword: while active, it increases the speed and power of your attacks and allows you to unleash spectacular, dedicated combat moves. But in return, you can’t block, heal or use any other special move until the Fury gauge empties.​

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The bullshit in this game’s encounter design is all-encompassing and ever-present. I already mentioned the enemy equipment. Now consider that you are always outnumbered and out-levelled, often even very significantly. Then you have the monster spawns out of nowhere, which can include cannon fodder as much as horrible abominations of terrible doom. Then there are the hundred million billion weird-ass abilities like breath weapons, death explosions, arbitrary critical hit immunities (hello, evil cultist fighters) and “spell-like abilities” that everyone packs in large numbers and which are all nothing but bullshit – bonus points if they are spells from spellbooks unavailable to a given caster class, and which just so happen to benefit the owner’s loadout and traits. Of course, there are also plenty of “surprise” encounters where you can’t even avoid the surprise because, to quote, “suddenly enemies appear all around you.”

But that is not all. One of the more insulting aspects of this game and its encounters are the enemy casters. For starters, they always know all the spells that are available at their level, so most of them act in the exact same way (unless scripted to do something specific on their first turn), and they are always ready for everything you can throw at them thanks to this. For reasons more than one, too, because they also always come pre-buffed with every single buff spell there is, even if they materialise out of nowhere. And believe me, the end-game becomes absolute nightmare fuel because of this. In the final chapter, every encounter has at least 4 supercharged mages, sometimes even more, sometimes it even keeps spawning more, all of them are pre-buffed to the point of stupidity, and if you don’t manage to somehow shut them down immediately, you just get nuked to oblivion.

What has to be said about the above is that this is not even particularly “difficult.” It's just depressing. The way all those enemy mages come pre-buffed with a mix of blur, mirror image, mind blank, foresight, good fortune, dispelling buffer, stoneskin and contingent break enchantment is depressing. The way they all know ALL the spells their class has to offer is depressing. The way they just keep spawning new ones is depressing. The way they always open up with accelerated spell into double instakill nuke cast is depressing. Their up-the-ass spell resistance is depressing. The fact they stand on freaking towers and can’t be reached by melee characters is depressing.

It’s like peeling a gigantic rotten onion. You keep stripping the layers one by one, you cry all the way through, your fingers stink, and ultimately it doesn’t do you any good. This is simply not how you make RPG encounters. Though fortunately, it has to be stressed that this madness is nearly exclusive to the endgame. Prior to chapter 4, the enemy casters are not yet high level enough to have access to all those spells, and they aren’t as numerous and omni-present in every fight.

Still, if only the nonsense were contained to the casters. Some of the fights in this game are just beyond the pale when it comes to the numbers, levels and types of enemies thrown against you, as well as the “battlefield conditions.” There’s a sequence of fights that first disables all the magical effects on your equipment. Your reward for defeating the boss in chapter 1 is getting stripped of all your stuff. The final fight has a “damage each turn” effect, which Pierre clearly wasn’t able to implement as a regular “environmental hazard,” so it’s instead a bunch of invisible fire tiles all over the place – which means you can’t use area spells like grease and quicksand and every single enemy (including mummies) is fire immune to mask this… and that’s STILL not all.

The worst thing still is that after some point, Augury of Chaos turns into a quick draw contest. Either you win initiative and can obliterate the enemy first (or at least shut down his most important characters), or you get blown up to hell. You will start noticing this around the middle of chapter 3, and the final chapter 4 has that in every single encounter, and I’m not exaggerating. If there is even a single mage who gets to act before you, he will open with a double cast of Prismatic Void (a cute mass-AoE version of Prismatic Spray, courtesy of Pierre’s unhinged homebrew experiments), and remove at least 75% of your party from the game.

Honestly, the campaign feels like Pierre thought that since everyone liked the optional final battle in KotC1 so much, every single battle here ought to be like that too. It’s a neverending slaughterfest established by a sadistic gamemaster, who would have otherwise been quickly abandoned by his players in a real life situation. If you watched the cartoon Dexter’s Laboratory, you might remember the D&D spoof episode, where Dexter keeps fudging the dice against the players and throwing increasingly impossible odds at them. Augury of Chaos gives you the same experience. Eventually, one of your sole motivations for pushing on will be this morbid curiosity what kind of sadistic punishment the deranged gamemaster prepared for you around the next corner. Because beating those ridiculously overpowered encounters often isn't even satisfying when your only reward is just more forceful violation to come, without even as much as a broken penny in return.

And the funniest thing about this? I can bet my right butt cheek that Pierre never played through the campaign in a legit way, from start to finish, to test how it plays. You can tell by the Kickstarter gameplay preview videos, where he fails to beat each and every single encounter presented. This game was simply designed in a vacuum.​

Together with developer Team ADOM, we at Assemble Entertainment announced today the rogue-like dungeon crawler Ultimate ADOM - Caverns of Chaos, heading to Steam Early Access on February 11, 2021, for Windows PC, MacOS, and Linux.

Ultimate ADOM is a traditionally-inspired reimaging of the beloved genre and features endless procedurally generated dungeons, monsters, and crafting options, allowing for ultimate replayability.

Evil has been vanquished. Peace has returned to Ancardia, and the peasants dare to dream once more of prosperity. Seven very different factions vie for control over the cataclysmic aftermath left behind by Andor Drakon’s defeat. And somewhere, deep down in an inhospitable cave, chaos is stirring again. Pick up your blade, prepare your spells, check your daggers and ready your bow, for you are about to enter the ominous Caverns of Chaos. Choose your allegiance carefully, for you are nothing more than an expendable asset to the masters you choose.

Fight for a mercenary's glory and a hefty coin purse, for the justice of a community in decline, for the light of purity, or even for chaos itself. Every choice you make will determine how you approach the ever-changing Caverns of Chaos laid out before you.

“To be the person who originated a game with an active and dedicated community since 1994 makes me unbelievably proud," said Thomas Biskup, Creator of ADOM. "After 25 years we will continue the story of ADOM and bring that experience into the modern realm. Ultimate ADOM: Caverns of Chaos offers plenty of depth for seasoned vets of the genre but with all the tweaks, options, and quality of life adjustments that ensure a smooth and enjoyable experience for the contemporary player.”

Features of Ultimate ADOM Include:

• Depth for Days — Choose from a huge selection of classes, genders, races, and allegiances to mix and match the perfect build for your playstyle
  
• A Proper Roguelike — Procedurally generated levels, monsters, and items ensure no playthrough is the same
  
• More Spells Than a Hogwarts Textbook — With multiple specialized schools of magic and more than 100 spells to choose from, dungeon-diving wizards have plenty at their disposal to get them through the darkness
  
• That’s a Nice Arm You’ve Got There... — Take the severed limbs of your enemies and graft them to your own body, after all, more hands = more weapons to hold
  
• A Jack of All Trades — With more than 80 skill trees, aspiring dungeon delvers have plenty of choices when it comes to crafting the ultimate warrior, and then there are the dozens of secret skills waiting to be discovered!
  
• Go Modern or Keep it Classic — Modern graphics or traditional ASCII, the choice is yours! Players can also toggle between 3D mode and top-down view.

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Ars Technica
CNET
Digital Spy 5/5
Game Informer 9/10
GamesBeat 3/5
GameSpew 10/10
GameSpot 7/10
GamesRadar+ 5/5
GameWatcher 9/10
God is a Geek 10/10
IGN 9/10
PC Gamer 78/100
PCGamesN 9/10
Polygon
RPG Site 9/10
Screen Rant 4/5
Stevivor 9.5/10
The Digital Fix 10/10
The Verge
TheGamer 5/5
Trusted Reviews 4/5
VG247 5/5
VGC 5/5
Vice
Windows Central 5/5
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The road less travelled is now rewarding...
Our games have always been about rewarding creativity and exploration, but some people were disappointed with the lack of experience rewards for pacifism, and creative solutions that utilize the road less travelled. Patch 3 introduces rewards for avoiding combat situations, whether in dialogue or through exploration and environmental puzzle solving. Now, all you pacifists will be able to carve out a journey more true to your character’s identity. Or, it’ll just offer more options for specific circumstances.

Companions will now feel more… companionable
On the topic of behaviour, we’ve certainly noticed your companions were perhaps a little negative at times. We’ve taken steps to move away from frequent nitpicking, so that they’ll start focusing more on the bigger picture. Companions will now be more tolerant. Not nitpicking about every single little thing they don't like but rather focusing on the things they do like while still maintaining their personality and having strong beliefs about certain things. In short, they’ll feel a little more like companions.

Dialog skill checks will be less likely to ‘lock you out of content’
Dialogues with particularly harsh or dramatic skill checks have been rebalanced - instead of failing an entire situation based on one difficult roll, you'll have a higher chance of succeeding the roll. This is to stop dice from locking you out of content unless the situation really merits it. Ultimately, however, you’ll still have to flow with the will of the dice.

No more micromanaging party jumping
Micromanaging gymnastics probably wasn’t something you thought you’d be doing in the Forgotten Realms, so now when you jump across a gap, for example, your party will automatically jump across it to follow you. Hooray!

More adventuring, and less resting
You now get 2 short rests after your long rest. Previously, you only had a single short rest. That’s twice the rest, for the same price! This means you have more uninterrupted adventures, and all the perks of resting.

Rebalanced cantrips & fewer surfaces
This was a wildly popular community request. Spells that cost finite resources to cast will now feel much more impactful, as cantrips are now less impactful than ‘true’ spells. This’ll make the management a lot more meaningful, and the ‘true’ spells a lot more rewarding to use. What’s more, we’ve made changes to surfaces, reducing them dramatically to avoid accidents as well as to address other feedback about how combat felt to the community. Fire Bolt, Ray of Frost and Acid Splash no longer create surfaces on impact. Fire Bolt still ignites flammable surfaces, and Ray of Frost still freezes water and blood puddles.

UI improvements including spells & inspiration points
Inspiration points are now visible in the UI, so you can actually use them!

You’re now able to select upcasted versions of spells via a separate widget to declutter the hotbar UI, see today’s update video for how that looks. DnD allows a caster to cast the same spell at different ‘levels’, costing different resources and generally producing a stronger effect.

Previously, each level at which a spell could be cast had a separate icon. After a while, this led to tons of icons cluttering up the hotbar and players having to tediously rearrange it on level up. Now all the variations are neatly packed into a fly-out menu inside the single icon per spell.
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Set off on a perilous journey with a 2D retro-style RPG! Knights of the Chalice is now available on GOG.COM with a 20% discount lasting until 8th December 2020, 2 PM UTC. Create a party of four adventurers, explore the Crimson Coast of Mindrel and fight valiantly against the evil Council of the Slaver Lords, domineering Giants, fiendish Demons, and scheming Dragons.

Can’t wait to begin your quest? Check out the Knights of the Chalice Demo for free! Also, be on the lookout for Knights of the Chalice 2 that is coming soon to GOG.COM with even more fantastic adventures to take on.
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