18th December 2024
NOMAD MONTHLY ROUND-UP - OCTOBER + NOVEMBER 2024 EDITION
Hello everyone, and welcome to a rare double-issue of the Nomad Games Studio Round-Up! There were a couple of big things that happened to our studio over the last two months, which is why we’re rolling them into one big bumper round-up.
But before we dive into it, we firstly want to say a massive thank you to everyone who has purchased, played and shared feedback on Talisman: Digital 5th Edition over the past few weeks.
We massively appreciate you joining us on this journey into a new era of digital Talisman, and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve got planned.
Now that the soppy stuff is out of the way, let’s get into it!
By far the biggest thing to happen in the last 2 months (and in the entire year too!) to our small studio was the release of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition!
On November 14th, players could finally get their hands on our adaptation of the 5th Edition of their favourite board game. Our small team were overwhelmed with feedback from you all (both positive and negative!) immediately, and we want to again say a massive thank you to everyone who picked up a copy of the game.
If you have picked up the game, please make sure to leave us a review over on Steam - it helps out small studios like us massively, and your feedback directly helps us make the game better.
Before we launched Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we headed over to the Talisman subreddit to host another AMA, answering all the community questions you wanted to throw at us!
We got an absolute ton of questions, and you can check out all the answers we gave over on the original Reddit thread!
Before we launched Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we knew that many of you would want to know what we had planned for after we launch the game! With that in mind, we put together a roadmap to go over the content you can expect to be added to the game over the coming year. Check it out!
Right now, we’re focusing on community feedback (more on how you can help with this, later in the round-up!) and fixing the more commonly reported issues. We’re also continuing to work on the remastered version of The Reaper expansion, as we know a lot of you are keen to add expansions to the base Talisman experience.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be showing off more of what you can expect in The Reaper Classic when it returns, so stay tuned.
With the release of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we of course had to put out a shiny trailer to make sure everyone was suitably excited!
Check it out below:
Not only that, but Tom (the same one writing this round-up) has been doing some streaming for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition over on our official Twitch channel - so go follow us there to get notified next time he goes live!
Alongside our official developer content, there have been a whole host of streams, videos and more published by various people across the internet around the launch of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition check some of them out below!
Following the launch of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, our team didn’t slow down for a single second - we launched straight into rolling out fixes, updates and more for the game.
Since launch, we’ve rolled out two hotfixes to resolve some of the immediate issues that you were all kind enough to point out for us, and we’ve also launched the first full patch for the game, adding some community-requested quality of life improvements.
We know that a number of you are still having issues, but don’t fear - our team are working tirelessly to roll out more patches and updates to improve the game.
With so much feedback coming our way since launching Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, it quickly became clear to our team that we needed another way of gathering all of the great feedback you were all giving us. While we can gather all your comments, messages and reviews together, we want to make sure that if anyone wants to give detailed, long-form feedback on the game, they can do so.
So, we’ve put together a feedback form specifically for Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, where you can give us your thoughts on all aspects of the game.
In October, we shared a look behind-the-scenes of how we’re bringing The Reaper Expansion from Talisman: Digital Classic Edition into Talisman: Digital 5th Edition.
We know a lot of you are extremely excited about all the new cards that The Reaper is going to bring to Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, so check out our developer blog to hear all about how we’re making this iconic 4th Edition expansion fit seamlessly into the new 5th Edition look and ruleset.
With two months of news to cover, that also means we’ve got two months of mailbag questions to go through! So, let’s once again dive into all the questions our awesome community have sent in over the last 2 months.
From Gabrielle Sanders via Email
“I wrote a couple of years ago requesting more expansions and new cards and characters etc for Talisman. This is what we Talisman lovers all want as it is the variety of play that is so absorbing. and not how it looks. So it saddened me to see all the effort go into recreating exactly the same game but with prettier graphics and some rules tweaks. What a waste of time!
Everything that has been released has just been a revamp eg the legendary cards are just the same but with higher numbers. Also, it worries me that the older version will now be left dead in the water with no more expansions and new content. I'm sure financially it seemed a good idea. Sell the same game again to those who have already bought it.
New content, new imagination, new creations. That's what we want. I really wanted to support Nomad but it seems I must start making more of my own content and part ways. Just needed saying as all my Talisman buddies feel the same. After all, a Toad with Strength 1 is still a toad with strength 1 even if it is beautifully rendered and animated. But a Toad that can be transformed into the Prince with a spell is a fun new twist (as in one of our creations)
Thanks for listening.”
First of all, thanks for the email Gabrielle - it’s clear you’re a passionate fan of Talisman, so we appreciate hearing from players like you. We completely understand that variety is a big part of the appeal of Talisman, especially with the 4th Edition of the game.
With Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we’re going to be bringing all of the 4th Edition expansions that you’ve come to love the variety of, over into the new 5th Edition. Not only that, but we’re going be bringing new content (like the digital version of the Alliances: Fate Beckons expansion) to the game, that you can use alongside your 4th Edition, remastered content.
During our discussions on the development of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition, we also discussed how Talisman: Digital Classic Edition is built upon a large amount of legacy code, making it a very difficult game to develop new content for. If we’d decided to make a new expansion for Talisman: Digital Classic Edition at this stage, for example, it would have taken us as long (if not longer) than it has to develop the entirety of Talisman: Digital 5th Edition. Now that we’ve put in the work to establish a foundation to build and expand on for years to come, we’re going to be able to make even more exciting content that we ever did for Talisman: Digital Classic Edition.
It’s also important to remember that this new game is still adapting the physical, 5th Edition release of the game - the rules changes, new visuals and other features unique to 5th Edition are in Talisman: Digital 5th Edition because that’s what is in the physical Talisman: 5th Edition board game. While the new edition does revisit the core experience with updated visuals and some mechanical refinements, Games Workshop and Avalon Hill have put in a ton of work and effort to speed up the classic Talisman experience we all know, and many veteran players have praised the rules changes for the new style of play it brings to their favourite board game.
So, to close, we’re working hard to deliver new and exciting content that we hope will reignite the spark you and your Talisman buddies are looking for.
From C de Malmanche via email
“Did you fix the issue with the RNG? It made the previous version not worth playing (yes, I uninstalled). No point playing something that gives me 80% bad rolls almost every game (sample 20) with no agency, while computer player almost always gets better options”
We actually got a question very similar to this in our latest AMA, so we’ve grabbed the answer we gave there and updated it slightly, as it applies to this question too.
First of all, we've proven, time and time (and time) again that the dice in Talisman: Digital Edition are random, and in all our years of working on the game, nobody has ever, ever proven otherwise.
Back in the early days of Talisman: Digital Edition, we used a different method of generating dice rolls than we used now. On the Steam forums, we'd often get people complaining that the dice weren't random, that they favoured the AI, and that we needed to change the system we used. So, we changed the way our dice rolls were generated (even though they were already random), exactly as people had requested.
We then continued to get people complaining that the dice weren't random, that they favoured the AI, and that we needed to change the system we used.
Even with an entirely new system in place to handle how the game generated dice being generated, the complaints were exactly the same - because the issue was never with the dice themselves, but the way human brains are wired.
We know it sucks when you get a bad roll, and that those experiences stick in players' heads far more than regular dice rolls would. The entire reason we added the "Change of Fate" house rule was because of this, because when you spend a resource (fate) and get bad luck, it sticks in your brain way more than any other roll. If you get two 4s in a roll to move, it won’t even register. If you roll two 1s in a row, it’ll absolutely register, even if from an RNG perspective, both of those results are equally likely to happen to you.
We fully, fully understand why it can sometimes feel like the dice are out to get you, and that the RNG needs ‘fixing’. We're going to look into other ways we can add digital-only house rules that make the dice more 'fair' for players (the ‘Change of Fate’ house rule is a good example of what we’ve got planned), but ironically these rules would actually be making the dice less random!
David Earle via our website
“Your monthly roundup reminded me of the physical copy of Talisman that you released a couple of years ago. I was wanting to get it for the switch since I have the full 2nd edition, base 3rd edition and full 4th revised edition physically. But I never saw it available and whenever I looked on Ebay and the like, all the copies were from the UK. Would that work on a US Switch and was it ever available for the US region?”
As far as we’re aware, the Nintendo Switch is not region locked, so a UK copy of Talisman: Digital Edition on Nintendo Switch should work on your US region console!
From patkow7 via Discord (and translated from Polish)
“Hello everyone. I have a question, can you play Talisman on xbox one with friends from other platforms, e.g. PC?”
Yes, you can - but only with the Windows Store version of Talisman: Digital Edition, due to cross-play restrictions between certain platforms.
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!
If you’d like to follow us, keep up to date with us and generally just see all the cool things we do, you can find all our social links, games and more over on our Linktree - how handy!