Update 1.29.0

The biggest visual change since we opened. Every character body, every piece of armour, every cloak, shield and weapon you wear has been rebuilt in 3D and re-rendered at four times the old resolution — and animated at 32 frames per direction instead of 8. Your character no longer slides through a four-frame loop: it walks. On top of that, a large performance pass, a redesign of every dialog in the client, a talent overhaul that makes the tooltips finally tell the truth, and a new anti-duplication system that stamps every unique item in the game.

You must update your client to log in. Close the game and the launcher, then reopen the launcher and press PLAY. This update changes how the client and the server talk to each other, so an old client cannot connect at all.

New

• Characters are rendered from 3D now. The six bodies, the hair and the underwear were rebuilt as 3D models, posed on a real skeleton and re-rendered into the game's sprites at 4x resolution. 15 poses, 32 frames per direction.
• Your gear is rendered in 3D with you. 115 worn pieces — armour, robes, leggings, cloaks, hauberks, shields, helmets and weapons — were modelled, fitted to the body and cooked against the same skeleton, so what you equip actually sits on your character instead of being painted next to it.
• Cloaks fly. Capes now sweep and billow as you move, and they layer correctly against your armour, helmet and weapon from every one of the eight directions.
• Shields are carried on the forearm, the way a shield is actually held, instead of being gripped by an invisible handle.
• Weapons are held properly. Grips, angles and sizes were corrected weapon by weapon against the original art, so a battle axe is no longer held by the tip of its pommel and a Short Sword is no longer half its proper size.
• Character Selection and the Character Sheet animate. The selection screen plays the full stride instead of looping its first quarter, and the F5 doll is centred with its feet planted on the ground.
• Monsters and effects joined the HD pass too — 10 more monsters and a set of spell effects now ship at 4x.

Improved

• The client is measurably faster. The floor was being read from disk on the render thread — 21 reads per frame at worst, now zero. Four separate stutters were found and removed, and the fire effect that was running at 5 frames per second now runs smooth.
• Every dialog in the client was redesigned on one shared kit: 79 windows that used to each look slightly different now share the same frame, spacing and buttons.
• Footsteps match your feet. The sound was firing on frames calibrated for the old 8-frame art; it now fires where your character actually plants a foot, and it stops dropping roughly four steps in ten.
• Talents deliver what their tooltips promise. 46 magnitudes were rebalanced to keep each branch's identity without the outliers, nine tooltips that described the wrong mechanic were corrected, and seven bonuses that were quietly rounding down to zero now actually apply.
• Elemental Focus works on fire, which it previously did nothing for, and Xelima's branch B now delivers the bonus it advertises.
• The weapon base-damage talent bonus reaches one-handed weapons, not just two-handed ones.
• Levelling was re-paced. The climb to 140 is now a steadier journey rather than a wall, and each rebirth scales evenly up to 100. Rudolph is no longer the single most profitable monster on the server, and the Zemstone of Sacrifice gets rarer as monster tier rises.
• Object and building shadows have volume and lie down on the floor with the sun, instead of being flat patches.
• Quitting asks what you meant. Closing the game now offers to exit or to switch character, and nothing closes the client out from under you any more.
• The map edge now tells you when there is nothing there, instead of leaving you to guess.

Fixed

• Fixed the character briefly disappearing while moving.
• Fixed attacking with a two-handed weapon drawing the sprite of the item next to it.
• Fixed equipment drifting out of sync with the body during an attack.
• Fixed being unable to unequip by clicking the F5 doll (it unequips on double click).
• Fixed floor items leaving a ghost behind: picking up an item that no longer exists now clears it, and expiring items report the correct half-tile.
• Fixed the /rep- command charging the aggravated Kloness penalty when used on the enemy side.
• Fixed Archery's double hit repeating the poison tick, and the damage label tinting the weapon light blue.
• Closed four security holes: the PayPal webhook now rejects events it cannot verify the signature of, the Exchange no longer accepts a fifth item outside its array, character data can no longer be requested before login completes, and minting EVO Coin requires an Administrator and leaves an audit trail.
• Every unique item now carries a mark from the moment it is created, recording where it came from and every pair of hands it passed through — with a detector that flags two live items sharing the same mark.