The old-school RPG favorite, Tales of Maj’Eyal, has gotten even more love from the developer Netcore Games, or as he’s known on the forums, DarkGod. The brand new 1.6.1 patch has been dubbed the ‘Techno-Annihilation’, and as is typical for this developer, contains more content than we could reasonably go through in a single article. We’ll focus on the big changes to the hardcore roguelike RPG.
Tales of Maj’Eyal is ten years from today from the first line of code being written, and DarkGod has seen fit to celebrate appropriately.
A huge update to the Embers of Rage expansion is packaged in this update, and it includes a new class for the brutish orcs, called Annihilator. The massive orcs carry ‘steamguns’ and shields, making them a scary ranged tank perfect for delving some of the more open dungeons. Additionally, they can craft various mechanoids; one is called mecharachnid, that can be outfitted with flamethrowers, rocket launchers, and all sorts of various steampunk goodies (if the gun isn’t pulling its weight, I guess).
New class mechanics are being packaged as well, called class evolutions. Class Evolutions allow you to morph your starting class into a type of specialty. An example offered is the Technomancer, that evolves from the notoriously difficult Archmage class. While the cost of evolving a class is rather pricey, it opens up brand new abilities for your characters.
The previously stated Technomancer opens up three new categories from evolving: Occult, Terrene, and Galvanic, all with their unique abilities to move about and rip your foes apart. The developer has said that this first Class Evolution is live testing; if it works as intended, and users find it enjoyable, more Class Evolutions will be added in the future.
1.6.1 also sees a reworking of the four Prides, with far more variety in dungeons than previously experienced. Ranging from new tilesets, layout generation, and smaller levels with vaulted sublevels.
The base game, Tales of Maj’Eyal, has received the vast majority of bug fixes and tweaks, outside of new classes found in Embers of Rage. Trivial bug fixes are also found for the other DLC’s, Forbidden Cults and Ashes of Urh’Rok.
Tales of Maj’Eyal continues to be an endearing love-letter to brutal RPG’s of era’s long past, and the developer clearly has zero inclination of stopping production, or even slowing it down. Here’s hoping we get to discuss more of the Class Evolutions come next patch.
