It’s finally time to see who is the best at capturing innocent animals and making them fight to the death in a manner that Michael Vick himself would approve of in Temtem, with their latest patch that has just launched today. The entirety of the patch brings some meat to the relatively content-sparse monster-battling MMO developed by Crema and published by Humble Bundle, and it will take some doing to unravel all of the new features and mechanics that are now available.

As an update titled ‘The Ranked Matchmaking Update’ would imply, the primary focus on this update would just happen to be Ranked Matchmaking, and it appears to be well put together and thought out. Previously the community had to rely on external tools to put together competitions among those that have the itch to compete seriously, and now it’s all included under the hood of the monster-battler available on Steam and the Humble Bundle store.

The patch brings about a new system for matchmaking ranking, typically referred to as MMR, or SR in various titles; in Temtem it’s called TMR, for Tamer Matchmaking Ranking, and it will rate your performance as you win and lose matches against various other players.

Your TMR is used to match you with players around your skill level so it’s not an absolute stomp when you’re merely testing the waters. All Temtem will automatically be leveled up to the current cap of 48, and their SV’s are similarly boosted to 50.

Along with this is a new system for player intro’s and outro’s, a stylistic approach to introducing players to whom they are going to compete against, and the monsters that they’ve chosen to represent them in battle. Victory in battle will eventually award players with pansun, but that feature is currently disabled while the kinks get ironed out in this new mode.

Along with the magical new PvP mechanics comes a spectator mode for battles, allowing tournament organizers (and eventually, the community) to spectate ranked battles between two foes. Crema notes that the spectator mode is currently very basic, and is not necessarily comparable to the overall experience that Crema wants spectator mode to one day become.

Along with this comes a new battle log that allows players to identify the action history that all Temtem in a battle has taken, highlighting stat changes, along with remaining HP and stamina. The battle log is defaulted to on for competitive matches, but players can opt into it via the settings menu. The best way to figure out the nuances involved in this patch is to honestly dive right into the world of Temtem, where only your sense of moral ambiguity will guide you to victory.