Legends of Dawn Kickstarter Campaign Updates #2-3, $10,124 and Counting

The team at Dreamatrix has taken advantage of Christmas Eve to crank out two new updates to their Legends of Dawn Kickstarter campaign, with update #2 covering their thoughts on DRM, their plans to allow players to save anytime and anywhere, how the game's quests will function, and more, and update #3 treading into difficulty setting territory. A snip from each:
There are many non-combat quests in the game. There are many NPCs that will ask you to complete various quests such as those where you have to find items or carry items to another NPC, those that require you to find or explore specific locations, those where you need to talk with another NPCs etc. Some of these quests are in towns so there will be no combat in those quests, however there are some quests that require you to travel through wilderness or to go to locations that are filled with monsters. Even though those quests are non-combat in nature, it may still be required to kill few monsters just to get where you have to.

Some of these quests can be finished in only one way (for example quest that requires you to find specific location). Other quests can be solved in multiple ways. For example, if a quest requires from you to bring herbs to NPC, you can solve that quest in more than one way. That includes finding the herbs in various chests (for example in dungeons), or you can use herbalism skill to collect plants in wilderness, or search warehouses in the city, you can buy herbs from NPC merchants or you can even try to solve some other quests that give you what you need as reward.

Each solved or failed quest modifies your reputation with factions. Reputation affects way NPCs act toward you. Reputation also modifies prices with merchants of that faction. It's worth mentioning that some quests require you to choose way to solve quest that will positively affect your reputation with one faction and negatively with another faction. Factions in the game are not always in peace with each other, so solving quest for one faction may reduce your reputation with other one. Generally speaking it is best to try to keep every faction as happy with you as possible.

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Each difficulty level has different limits regarding max level cap, max skill levels, number of craftable items, number of items per itemholder, monster strength and so on. We thought about it and decided to test the following idea. Instead of changing existing difficulty levels and rules, we implemented fifth difficulty level - Custom.

Custom difficulty level allows you to configure various parameters before the game starts. This way you can configure game to run in easy mode but with all items enabled, or you can start the game in legendary mode but with lowered monster health, or any combination of 8 basic difficulty parameters you would like. Lead programmer had to throw quite a few special programming spells to the code to make it work without endangering the balance.