Weird West is the kind of immersive sim that wears the genre's RPG roots on its sleeve—though in this case the sleeve happens to belong to a duster that's also stained with trail dirt and zombie guts. It's a supernatural western that requires creative problem-solving, with stealth and climbing onto a rooftop from a barrel both options as valid as slapping leather and letting bullets fly, but it's also a game where after encounters you take your inventory to a merchant and sell all the guns and junk you looted.
That's why I'm glad Weird West's first patch, bringing it up to version 1.01, includes some improvements to the shop interface. As the patch notes explain, "You can now access your Companions and Horse inventory directly from the Shop UI to resell items directly from their inventory". I've already made use of that to clear out the spare picks and shovels in my horse Calamity's saddlebags, as well as whatever garbage was in my posse's pockets, without having to walk back and forth between them all. It's a blessing. What's more, the random wanderers you meet while crossing Weird West's map now buy junk items so you can lighten your load without having to go all the way back to town. Hallelujah.
Another change that will come as a delight to some is an increase in the number of autosave slots, with five of them being cycled through instead of the original three. If you get several steps into your plan to infiltrate a bank or a haunted mine then realize you goofed a ways back, that could well save your bacon.
Guards will now react to the noise of thrown objects from further away to make it easier to distract them, and on the bug-fixing side the odds of bounty targets you arrested rather than killed coming back for revenge later on have been lowered, as it should have been set at 15%, but was actually 100%. Whoops. The rest of the bugs that have been resolved can be found in the full patch notes.
These are all fine changes and fixes, but they're only the start. Developers Wolfeye Studios are looking ahead to version 1.02, which will involve less bug-fixing and "a bit more QoL updates and feature adds/changes." There's a suggestion board where players can put forward ideas and vote on them, and from that it looks like the 1.02 patch will include one-hit knife kills as well as NPCs you knock out but then carefully place in their beds no longer alarming other NPCs who find them slumbering.
Damn, I love immersive sims.
