Today at the Triple-I Initiative, open world survival RPG Enshrouded revealed what's coming in next month's update, and it can be summed up in one foreboding phrase: "Rebirth of the Shroud."
That means deadly new monsters and mysterious new locations are lurking in those perilous shrouded regions of the world, along with plenty of new reasons to venture into the murk like a system that will let players build powerful new customizable weapons. Here's the teaser for the update:
Last week I spoke with Antony Christoulakis, Enshrouded's creative director, about some of the big additions coming in the next update, which is called Thralls of Twilight.
Christoulakis said the update is focused on the shroud because "it's not strong enough yet from our perspective. So, we introduced new enemies that are coming with the next update, as well as improving the topology and adding more points of interest to these [shrouded regions], and also some new mechanics that hopefully make combat also more interesting."
One of those new mechanics does indeed sound interesting: "You can find special gems that you can insert into weapons that have various abilities," Christoulakis said. "You can do so by finding these gems during combat or in treasure chests. But you can also enhance these gems as they all have special effects, and you can keep the specific effect, if you like it that much, across the rest of the game to basically level with you."
When gems are introduced in the update, the weapons you'll find will have a chance to contain a slottable socket to fit a gem into. But you won't be slotting these gems into your weapons at your cozy little base: you're going to have to find "special forges" hidden around the world in some dangerous places.
"The higher the [weapon] rarity, the higher the chance that it also has a slot for a gem," Christoulakis said. "You can mix and match, insert any gem into any weapon, but to do so, you have to unlock the slot first, which is one step, and then you have to insert the gem into the weapon, which you can do in special places that are also mainly found within the shroud."
That gives you more reasons to visit shrouded locations, and Keen Games has been working on making those areas more interesting to spend time in "because some areas were a bit too empty," Christoulakis said. "You can just run across it, basically, in a straight line without any obstacles, or the dangers awaiting you are a bit too repetitive. We felt there needed to be more variation."
Nighttime is also getting an overhaul in the update, though Christoulakis didn't want to spoil too much about it other than saying it'll give players more reason to "actually go out at night and not just sit it out and sleep," he said. "We will add specific things that only appear at night, that can be found and that are also necessary to solve certain problems that we throw at the player." Vague, but intriguing.
As for the biggest player request, adding water to the world, that won't be part of this update. "It's a tricky problem, adding [water] to a dynamic voxel-based world where players can just pull the plug on a lake and it just flows somewhere," Christoulakis said, though he added: "We are working on this, and it's definitely going to happen."
Keen Games also announced another big milestone today: Enshrouded has amassed more than four million players. When it arrives in May, Thralls of Twilight will be Enshrouded's sixth major update since it launched into early access in January 2024.
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