RambOrc

It’s been many years in the making, but the final 1.0 release of Scattered Evil is now available on SourceForge.

Korax’ Heritage: Scattered Evil is the first game using the KoraxRPG engine based on Vavoom, extending the original Hexen gameplay through a slew of RPG elements:

• Character advancement through experience and leveling, allowing you to customize your character through the six abilities from classic D&D.
• A large world to explore, including over 40 dungeon maps and more than 30 towns inhabited by hundreds of unique NPCs. Travel around the world on foot, by boat or by stagecoach and learn about its geography, its history and its inhabitants.
• A main storyline with a three stage quest that leads you from forest to desert to barrens to the Underworld in an effort to save the world from a new peril. Over a dozen side quests that reward you not just with experience but also with bulging sacks of gold, new weapons and spells. Explore ancient ruins, find legendary artifacts, rescue captives or fight alongside guards – or just go on a treasure hunt to get rich quick. Sometimes you can even take revenge on people who wronged you…
• A complex conversation engine that can react to the player’s class, what quests you are on or have completed, what happens nearby, whether you are rich or poor. Buying limited availability items from a vendor will result in the items disappearing from the shop’s shelves before your eyes.
• A journal tracking your progress on quests, annotations on detailed local maps, descriptions on weapons and spells you own and hints how to obtain the ones you haven’t acquired yet, a bestiary and a codex you fill by finding experts around the world who will part with valuable information if you ask them nicely.
• All the original weapons and spells of Hexen plus 20 new ones, including berserking, shrinking monsters, exorcizing the spirits of the dead, as well as spells that can wipe out whole monster populations in the blink of an eye.
• Over a dozen new monsters, not just variations of existing ones but also completely new ones, brandishing our custom AI allowing them to launch predictive projectile attacks, leap towards you to stop you from evading, jump up or down significant height differences to close or increase the distance from you, enrage and go berserk when severely wounded, or run away when they feel overwhelmed. Some new foes can even resurrect on death or summon clones of themselves to confuse you.
• Even the terrain can become threatening as many of the spells/projectiles you or certain monsters cast or hurl have enough force to push someone off a bridge or into a pool of magma.
• Lots of unique new artwork, not just textures and sprites but highly detailed custom portraits for important NPCs and a full score comprised of hours of music.

To accompany this release, over an hour of uncut playthrough has been recorded and published on YouTube in Full HD:

The latest beta release of Scattered Evil is available here. For more information on how to play, see this page. Please report any bugs you find to our Bug Tracker.

This is the last beta before the final release, which is planned for the second half of next week. The following new additions need to be primarily tested for issues:

• The quest tracking system has been redesigned and now journal entries and NPC conversations can interact more closely with the quest progress and the game world. Especially in the case of more complicated quests, the quest journal entry now updates more frequenty, providing you with more information on where you are supposed to go and what you are supposed to do.
  Every quest has been completely rewritten, so new bugs might have been introduced.
• Quest areas are now gated: Until you pick up a quest from the NPC, you are physically unable to access parts or all of a quest location.
• Weapon and spell journal entries will now offer a series of updated hints as you progress through the requisites, all the way up the point when you learn the spell or pick up the weapon.
• As the first dungeon to get the weapon for slot #3 (first ranged weapon for fighter and cleric) was still too difficult, this introductory quest now only needs the player to kill a half dozen ettins in the greatly extended cave of the starting forest map. Finishing this quest unlocks Darkbough, the previous starting dungeon.
• Order services once again changed, now they provide their benefit to any player class, but only once.
• Blacksmiths now have a limited supply of armor pieces or armor sets, depending on the shop. Once you deplete the supply, you can’t armor up further.
• Sounds have been added to NPC conversations, currently a smallish mix of generic male and female voices and three different sounds to signalize whether the player pays money to an NPC, sells an item to an NPC, or receives a large bag of gold as reward. There is also a new menu option to turn these conversation sounds on or off.
  As a technical necessity for this new feature, menu sounds have been disabled. Let us know whether you prefer us to try and add menu sounds back in for the actual menus.
• New artifact added (time bomb).

This uncut video shows the first few minutes of starting a new game with the cleric, available now on YouTube. Comparing it to the original “Starting out” video, the improvements made in the last 3 months should be quickly apparent.

Spent the last few weeks ripping apart the old quest system and replacing it from scratch with a more malleable one. This is demonstrated in the video below (or watch it on YouTube), showing how the journal entry changes along with the quest progress, always letting the player know what the next step is. The new system also allows NPCs to react differently depending on the quest stage the player is on, this can be observed by what the mine guards say before and after the player frees the miners.

The latest beta release of Scattered Evil is available here. For more information on how to play, see this page. Please report any bugs you find to our Bug Tracker.

This update fixes numerous bugs, including the most frequent crashes. It also adds a new feature: selling items to merchants (currently the two largest coastal warehouses, Macy’s in Joral and The Merchant Lodge in Neusus). In addition, the first dungeon (Darkbough) has been tuned to be less daunting, let us know if it’s still too difficult.