We Who Are About To Die Blood and Sand Update

Developer Jordy Lakiere and his team at Aegic Entertainment are celebrating the next major update for We Who Are About To Die, called Blood and Sand. The update will be dropping soon and teases a major overhaul to combat, as well as adds a much-anticipated Sandbox Mode. If you are interested in the game, you can find it on Steam HERE. A list of features is listed below:

• Big focus on Combat + add Sandbox mode (Blood & Sand!)
• Design the rest of the game till 1.0 so it all fits in a larger plan
• Address common feedback + tackle all weaker features/aspects (unify the game’s quality)
• For Career that is: Patrons, Betting, Notifications (Redesigns, reworks and overhauls)
• For Combat: Hit impacts and reactions, physics stability, Polearm design (Redesigns, reworks and overhauls)
• Fix big gaps in the equipment arsenal and content
• Fix visually jarring elements and optimisation issues (low-framerate characters, expensive FX, etc)

We Who Are About To Die: Blood and Sand will feature a sandbox update that lets players tweak the game to their liking, as well as release Steam Workshop support to add their own mods to the game, making it truly unique. Here is what the team had to say about it.

“I’ve been looking forward to making Sandbox Mode for about 6-7 years. Personally super excited it’s almost ready.

My vision as a game designer is that games are ultimately a toy – the magic is interaction. So I had the idea to let players mess with the game on a much deeper level. Why not expose all the endless variables in the code? What if the player could adjust the game to their liking? A bit like modding, but made super convenient, so anyone can do it. AAA studios might freak out about how players could easily break the game, but well, in this case, it’s on you! The settings are ultra-flexible, including all the hazards that come with that.

Sandbox will allow people to make their own flavour of the game, make challenge runs, tweak things they don’t like and generally experiment.

Sandbox mode is a scary feature to make. It was a huge and very complicated amount of work, diving deep into the game’s core, and we’re hoping for people to experiment and share cool challenges on the Workshop or via our Discord. Fingers crossed it was worth it! As usual, if people love it, we intend to expand it and listen to the community about how they want it expanded. Your feedback shapes this game.”

Also teased in the update is an overhauled combat system and animations, after hearing that hits didn’t have as much weight to them as people would like. Aegic Entertainment have overhauled the system to have the enemies react a lot more realistically.

“First, because of an ignorant technical mistake ~10 years ago when I was a clueless whippersnapper, it was very hard to add decent pelvis and foot rotation to attacks. I’ve tried to patch this a few times over the years, but I’ve finally managed to crack it by using a few clever tricks together to circumvent the problem.

Now characters rotate on their attack-readying and then turn into a strike – including pelvis, knees and foot-work! Bonus of this approach is it’s completely dynamic, so it even changes per weapon type, etc.

Hits also felt bad – in large part due to a lack of proper hit reactions. So far, they were a simple physics-impulse (did that because of solo dev – limited time).
Now we’ve added actual animation-based hit reactions, but as usual, in a very dynamic way.

Characters will turn and respond in several ways based on the attack impact location. They also use their arms dynamically to balance when they got knockback (in any direction). Even shield impacts get this effect, hitting a shield barely did anything in the past. This is all layered together to get satisfying reactions.”

We Who Are About To Die is available on Steam now and for a very reasonable price of £19.99 and with this update coming out shortly, now seems a great time to jump in!