Millhaven is being redone, what does it mean? (Patreon)

Hello everyone, Corintio here!

I just wanted to make a quick post to say that we currently have plans to review the whole town of Millhaven to make it look a lot more immersive, having a high street, some farms around it and so on. That means that we will soon be changing the landscape and buildings.

The hard work will actually start on day 19th of the next month, but until then, Tiny Talisman will be preparing the ground and we'll be discussing some improvements on the flow of the game until Kalyskah get to town. But this creates two short term problems:

• The time it will take to review the cutscenes: We have over a hundred of cutscene files for the camera and character placements right now, and when it comes the time to review Milhaven, since we'll be changing ground and the buildings, we'll also need to spend a whole month just to make sure that all the cutscenes are working properly. Most of them will need to be redone.
• Kalyskah will fall under the ground on old saves: In the future, when players coming from version 0.14 load version 0.15, Kalyskah will fall under the ground. But that's a minor issue because on the last patch we already made that if the player falls bellow the ground, Kalyskah will be respawned at the graveyard. So this will be just a minor inconvenience.

I can guarantee to you that all this trouble will be worth it but this leave us in a tight spot when it comes to releasing the game and advancing the plot for the next month or two:
We had some cutscenes planned that would happen exactly inside of Millhaven:

• Romance scene between Kalyskah and the couple at the end of the Heirloom lost depending on your choices (The video above shows a bit of what it's being done, although most of it is still in Blender). 
• Some trouble happening at the markets, which would trigger the alchemist quest. 

And keeping in mind that those scenes will have a lot of camera work, it might not be worth for us to make them until Millhaven is redone. We are not freezing the development to rework the town though, there are plenty of things not related to the world that we can do and this poll here gives us a lot of options.

The most voted option was the puppeteer's mechanics, they are great but they require the world because we want to add some objects that Kalyskah can interact with..... or be tied in so other people can interact with her. This will also require a lot of writing and voice acting, so it's not viable to work on it until the town is redone. The second and third options though, are pretty much doable. I might even try to sketch the basics of it before the month's end so we can release a patch to our amazing patrons: Improving the AI and the Stealth mechanics. Although less than a week to work on it might not be enough and it's mostly possible that what I'll do is release the latest Royal Blood patch to the Vampire and Neonate tier patrons on Sunday, since no one reported any trouble on the last patch yet. Another thing we can work on, is the dominant branch on the scene between Kalyskah and Boris, since it happens outside of Milhaven.

Please let us know your thoughts and know that we wouldn't even think about going through all this trouble to change the main town if we were not 100% sure that this change will be one of the best things in terms of level design to happen on the game ever since we released the open world for the first time. I would also highly recommend you to follow the amazing work Balm Labs, one of our level designers, posts on his YouTube and Twitter. Here's a sample: