Wartales is an open-world RPG where players lead a group of mercenaries in search of wealth across a massive medieval universe. Players can do whatever they want in it, whether it's exploring the world, recruiting companions, collecting bounties, or unraveling (or robbing, whatever's easier) the tombs of the ancients. To help facilitate that, a Wartales update has been released, one of its biggest since its release back in December. It's also hit 100k units sold, a great milestone for any indie title and a hopeful sign of things to come for the Shiro Unlimited's Early Access RPG.
What's in the Wartales update?
The Wartales update, titled Community Update #2, has added a region-locked mode. This will allow players to roam the world without auto-scaling of levels. How this works is that before the game only had auto-scaling, so the world would level with the player.
In my opinion, it's a super annoying feature that will never be figured out because it takes agency away from the player, so I'm glad there's an alternative. What's the point of becoming stronger in a world that also grows stronger? It's baffling that we still see developers trying to make this work, but I digress.
The regions will have an initial set difficulty and the level and size of enemies groups will be fixed. The further away from the towns you explore, the more powerful the enemies are. Moving from one area to another will mean that your troop will have to be strong enough to deal with the dangers the area provides, and your troops aren't powerful enough then you can go back and train them. Both the region-locked and free modes will be in the game, and will be built around them in future Wartales updates. So if you like free mode for some reason, that won't be going away.
Other cool features include a Quest log, Respecialisation, which is at a training grounds where you can optimize and reset your companions' specialisation tree (Shiro is based in Europe, so use UK spelling for it), and camping gear, which is a chest in your camp that can store items for you. Players will now also be able to sort their inventory by selling price, weight, or item types, and crafting an alchemy recipe will now grant more experience. The opposite will occur for crafting blacksmith recipes. More wood can also be gathered around the world, which is good, and trinkets' selling price has been reduced, which isn't good for anyone who likes gathering lots and lots of money.
If you'd like to check out the patch notes for the latest Wartales update, be sure to go here.
