April saw Nordic Trolls launch its fantasy action role-playing game (RPG) Karnage Chronicles onto HTC Vive through Steam Early Access. There have been several updates since then, improving and expanding the universe, with the most recent being the biggest, adding Oculus Rift and Touch support.
Whilst Oculus Rift support is the biggest inclusion, the update also features improved Parry AI, meaning that enemies will be a bit more of a challenge. Consumables have now been added to regain health, these can be found throughout levels, just needing to be touched to eat. At present Karnage Chronicles doesn’t include an inventory system to take food with you.
Further increasing the difficulty, enemy close quarter combatants have learned new fighting tricks to break through the warrior shield guard. To aid players Nordic Trolls has now added critical hits to both melee and ranged attacks. Currently a critical hit will currently only do extra damage but future updates will bring additional effects.
“We had a rocky start,” CEO Thorbjørn Olsen said in a statement. “Without a publisher to back us up, and mixed initial reviews we had to pull up our sleeves and address the issues our community was most concerned with. We saw a shift of opinions after the 2nd update, three weeks after release, when we added the RPG systems. This really changed the disposition of our customers and we started seeing an uptick in positive reviews. As an indie developer that both humbles and pleases us.”
Karnage Chronicles has had four major updates; adding features like vendor, loot, weapon and armor upgrades, controller-tracked locomotion, difficulty variations, combat improvements to enemy AI, as well as a ton of bug fixes. Before Nordic Trolls fully release Karnage Chronicles,it’ll introduce two more classes, extended gameplay, and co-op multiplayer.
Checkout VRFocus’ preview of the videogame, and check back regularly for further updates.