Hello again heroes.

This update is kind of a devblog and patch notes in one as it’s time to go into detail about Episode 3’s overhauled Talents system – something we’re also porting back into Episodes 1 and 2 with today’s 2.0 patch.

So, as I just said, the Talents system has undergone a considerable overhaul in End of Days. This is to facilitate the emphasis on different quest solutions in Episode 3 (as detailed by last week’s devblog) and add a little more depth to character growth between levels 20-30, where skill trees are mostly already filled out and options for spending AP were previously lacking. The main change you’ll notice is that your character’s Talents now have multiple ranks:

In contrast to Episodes 1 and 2, where Talents were pretty much a binary flag (either a character has it, or they don’t) the game’s most used Talents now come in three consecutive rank: Basic, Advanced, and Master, representing increasing levels of aptitude. Speech, Subterfuge, Mercantilism, Herbalism and Alchemy have all been split into these three ranks (Knowledge, Medicine, Awareness and Scouting remain unchanged) and how they work has been drastically changed.

• Speech now gives your character a base 50% chance of successfully persuading an NPC (previously, you always succeeded no matter what), with the Advanced rank bringing this up to 75% and Master making it succeed all the time.
• Subterfuge now works similarly to Speech, giving you a base 50% chance of disabling traps or finding hidden passages (and it’s now possible to fail and permanently break the trap/passage mechanism), with Advanced and Master ranks increasing this chance to 75% and 100% respectively.
• Mercantilism now grants you a 25% discount when purchasing items from shops, with Advanced increasing this to 50% (the previous base game value). Where Mercantilism is really different, however, is with the Master rank, which expands the inventory of most shops in the game and unlocks rare, special items for sale.
• Herbalism works the same at its Basic level. However, the Advanced rank causes more harvest spots to appear in the game, and Master makes the rarer herbs (such as Harp Leaf and God’s Mint) much easier to find.
• Finally, Alchemy also works the same at its Basic level, but becomes much more useful at the Advanced and Master levels, which expand the number of mixable items and reduce their costs by 50%, respectively.

Needless to say, these changes allow for many more options during character creation and give your characters something to strive for outside of combat, which brings us to the 2.0 patch. In order to maintain consistency between all three episodes, we’re also implementing this system in End of Days and Resurrection, along with brand new and revised skill checks to make use of the new ranks. Your characters in the first two episodes can now access the Advanced and Master ranks of these talents, and they’ll actually unlock new content in the game.