20th September 2024
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - AUGUST 2024 EDITION
Hello everyone, and welcome to another studio round-up!
With big announcements for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition and sales across all of our games, August was another busy month for us here at Nomad Games. And with another busy month comes another monthly studio round-up for all the news, developments and more to come out of our small studio.
Below you’ll find all the exciting things that happened to us in August, so read on!
The biggest announcement to come out of our studio in August was that we’re going to be bringing your Talisman: Digital Edition expansions across to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, as remastered, updated versions of the classic expansions you know and love! Not only that, but if you already own the original expansion in Talisman: Digital Edition, you’ll be able to play the remastered version in Digital 5th Edition entirely free.
Because we knew that you’d all have a lot of questions, we put together a comprehensive FAQ which you can find here.
So far the reception from everyone to this announcement has been overwhelmingly positive, which has been great to hear! Bringing across these classic expansions to Digital 5th Edition is part of our long-term goal of making Talisman: Digital 5th Edition the definitive digital Talisman experience, and your support in making that a reality is massively appreciated.
We’ve been keeping a close eye on your feedback too, and will keep your requests in mind when deciding what expansions to bring to 5th Edition first. So if you want to see a specific one, shout at us!
And if you want to make sure you don’t miss out on any updates for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, the best way to do that is by wishlisting it over on Steam:
For the past few years, we’ve rolled out a special Autumn sale for all our games each year, and each year it’s been one of our most popular sales across the board. This year we didn’t want to let you all down, so we brought back the Nomad Games Super Sale, and this time it was bigger than ever!
With discounts across PC, console and mobile (with many of our games and DLC hitting record discount amounts), there’s was never a better time to pick up a Talisman expansion or one of our many games in our catalogue! If you did pick up anything in our sale, thank you again for supporting us!
As you should all expect by now, we spent most of the month working away on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, making lots of great progress on the game over the past month! While there’s still a lot of stuff we can’t show you yet, we can tell you some of the highlights of development in August.
Working on new features
When we first started development for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, our team put together a big list of all the most commonly requested features for Talisman: Digital Edition in the 10 years since it originally launched.
In August, we were able to start working on adding one of those community-requested features into Talisman: Digital 5th Edition. We’ve still got some more work to do before we’re happy to show it off, so make sure you stay tuned for a future developer blog where we’ll go in-depth on how we made this mysterious feature!
Expansion Layout
Now that we’ve confirmed that we’re bringing The Reaper Expansion to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we can talk about some of the work we’re doing to bring it into the game!
The first thing we needed to work on was allowing you to enable it before the game started, so we designed an all-new ‘Expansion Selection’ screen for you to do just that. We’re pleased to report that you can now choose to play with The Reaper enabled or disabled. Not only that, but we’ve designed the expansion selection screen with future content in mind, something that we weren’t able to do when we were first making Talisman: Digital Edition all those years ago!
Updating multiple choice dialogues
In Talisman, there are a wide range of adventure cards (and other abilities) that give you multiple options to choose from, such as the Fairy Stranger card.
As part of our goal to streamline and update the experience of playing Talisman in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we spent some time in August updating how different options are presented to you.
First new music tracks
A new version of Talisman means fresh new music too! In August, the first music tracks that we’ll be using for background music in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition came through to us, and we’re already very impressed!
New account page
If you’ve read our DLC carryover announcement in August, you’ll know that your Nomad Account is how we’ll be tracking your ownership of expansions in Talisman: Digital Edition to bring them over to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition for you.
Even if the system behind the Nomad Account remains the same across both games, we spent some time in August bringing the look and feel of your account page in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition in line with all the other modern menus.
Trophy Trading Timings
For those of you who pay close attention to the rules differences between Talisman: 4th Edition and Talisman: 5th Edition, you might have noticed a slight change to how trading in trophies is handled between the two versions. You see, in 5th Edition, you’re allowed to trade in your trophies at any point during your turn.
While this doesn’t make much of a change to the physical game (most of the time people played the physical 4th Edition of the game trading in their trophies at any point anyway), it does make a change to our digital version.
You see, if a player can perform an action at any time, we need to give them the ability to do so. This slows down the game, clogs up the UI and adds an extra step to every single part of a players turn. So, after much internal debate we have decided to instead prompt the player at the end of their turn as a reminder that they have trophies to trade in. Given that the rules change was made primarily to avoid players missing out on their change to trade their trophies in, we think this prompt will serve the same purpose.
Updating the in-game log
Ever missed what happened during the last round in your game of Talisman? That’s what the in-game log is for! Just like all the other aspects of Talisman: Digital Edition that we’re bringing into Talisman: Digital 5th Edition as an updated, improved feature, we’ve spent some time updating how the in-game log both behaves and how it looks. We’re hoping that the more easy-to-read and use log will help out whenever you’re looking for extra information about what happened in your game!
Steam Deck testing
In case you haven’t picked up one already, the Steam Deck is an awesome bit of kit that lets you play your Steam library wherever you are, and since it launched in 2022 plenty of developers (including us!) have been putting in the work to get that little green ‘verified’ tick on their games.
Well, in August we’re happy to report that we tried the most recent build of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition on a Steam Deck, and it worked like a charm.
In July, we sent out a survey to all our Talisman players to get an idea of what they were most looking forward to in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, and what they expected from the game. Well, in August we sat down and properly went through all the great feedback you gave us and what we could learn from it.
We’re now making a version of this analysis that we’ll share with our partners/publishers, and then we’ll make a version that we can share with you all publicly, like we promised!
While we know you all love us shouting loudly about our work on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, our team here at Nomad Games have been working hard on other projects too! Between our existing games and some cool external work that we can’t talk about just yet, we think it’d be unfair to not acknowledge that our team have been hard at work on non-Talisman things too.
From Lewis via Email
I don't know how I missed the Talisman player feedback survey since I white list your emails every time one of your updates shows up in the spam folder. But I do have a few questions about it. First & most important, (to me anyway), are you going to continue to sell Talisman 4th edition? If you are & assuming that BOTH editions of the game sell really well, will you make more digital only expansions for 4th edition? Or adapt things from 5th edition like the co-op expansion? Assuming that 5th edition sales are good & you have permission, will we see the 4th edition digital only expansions eventually made for 5th edition? If you do keep both editions for sale, I suggest that you put a video up on their respective pages outlining what the changes between editions are.
Speaking of changes, is the 5th edition going to come out with any house rules options, or will we have to wait for that? Will those include options for people that don't like some of the changes from 4th edition to 5th? Like I can see the frog keeping the followers, but not the items you had, (maybe only keep the items if you have followers to carry them), picking a longer duration for being a frog, or you think it should cost 2 fate to pick where you land, Etc. Can we expect new characters to show up before the first expansion?
Okay, there’s a lot for us to break down here, so thank you! We’ll go through each question one-by-one:
Are you going to continue to sell Talisman 4th edition?
Yes, we are! We’re going to keep Talisman: Digital Edition available as Talisman: Digital Classic Edition once Talisman: Digital 5th Edition launches.
Assuming that BOTH editions of the game sell really well, will you make more digital only expansions for 4th edition?
Our focus for Talisman Digital going forward is going to be Talisman: Digital 5th Edition - not only because it’s where new physical content is being released, but also because starting from a fresh slate with the game enables us to do so much more than we could ever dream of within Talisman: Digital Edition. Also, our plan to bring over all Digital Edition content into Digital 5th Edition would mean that any expansions we made for Digital Edition would end up coming to Digital 5th Edition anyway. Making a version specifically for the older version would mean that we’d be restricted already, and take away resources that could be put towards making this new version of Talisman much better.
Or adapt things from 5th edition like the co-op expansion?
While we can’t confirm right now whether or not we’ve got plans for making a digital version of the Alliances Expansion for Talisman: 5th Edition, we can say we’ve got a copy in the Nomad office that we’ve played with a ton. Given that we’ve not launched the base game for Digital 5th Edition yet though, we’re focusing on getting that released and polished up before we turn our eyes elsewhere.
Assuming that 5th edition sales are good & you have permission, will we see the 4th edition digital only expansions eventually made for 5th edition?
That’s the idea! Obviously we’ve got a ton of expansions to remaster before we hit the digital exclusive ones, but we’re also taking into account the popularity of the different expansions we have available in Talisman: Digital Edition when it comes to the order we bring them across in. So while we can’t confirm exactly when you’ll see The Ancient Beasts, The Realm of Souls, and The Clockwork Kingdom in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, they’re definitely on our list.
Speaking of changes, is the 5th edition going to come out with any house rules options, or will we have to wait for that?
We’re going to be launching Talisman: Digital 5th Edition with a number of different house rule options for you to choose from, which we’ll share once that list is closer to being finalised! From our experience with Talisman: Digital Edition players, we know the more house rules we give players the ability to toggle, the better. We’ll be keeping a close eye on community requests and rolling out more house rules as time goes on.
Will those include options for people that don't like some of the changes from 4th edition to 5th?
While we’re not going to be able to include an entire list of house rules that fully bring back the 4th Edition rules, we’ve been keeping a close eye on some of the more common house rules that 4th Edition players have been using.
Can we expect new characters to show up before the first expansion?
We very much doubt it! Based on feedback from our players, we know that expansions are the most important/requested content for Talisman, and we want to make sure we provide them first. We’re definitely going to be looking at new characters at some point, but right now that’s something we’ve not thought a ton about.
Hope that answers all of your questions!
From a Jonathan via Email
I know that your plate is currently full with Talisman: Digital 5th edition, but do you plan on adding a new game franchise to your collection or even creating an original game?
If so, can you expand on it?
And about Talisman: Digital 5th edition, are you planning to make it free to download with purchasable content? and for how long will the 4th ("classic" edition will supported after the release of 5th edition?*
Two questions this time! First up, we’ve got Board Game Cafe, our first original game which you can wishlist now!
And for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we’re not planning on making it free to download with purchasable content. First of all, making a brand-new free-to-play game in 2024 is a massive undertaking, with a much higher demand on the development team behind such a title.
The reason we could make Talisman: Digital Edition a free to download game is specifically because we had 10+ years of content to offer to new players who download the game for free. For Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we won’t have that luxury!
And that’s the end of this months update! Don’t forget, if you’ve got questions you want to ask the Nomad team, you can always send your questions to questions@nomadgames.co.uk, or fill in the form below! We answer each and every question that comes in, so don’t worry if you want to ask us something weird. In fact, we’d encourage it!
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