This thread is in response to the announcement for TU 1.3.1 that was released today...

So, instead of announcing any Level 2 upgrades for the abilities gained in the first River Raids DLC, we now have three new abilities which appear to give players new ways to attack enemies. I suspect these new abilities will be featured in the next Mastery Challenge.

The update changes the rules on rune socketing, so that only certain runes will effect only the weapons they are socketed in. Before, players could creates builds where all runes, no matter where they were socketed, benefited Eivor’s total stats, regardless of the situation. I would often put critical damage runes in my bow because the damage would affect both of my hand weapons. That is no longer the case. I get that the developers want to make the game more balanced, but the players are already limited by what runes can be placed in weapons and what can be placed in armor pieces. I am not surprised someone else already started a thread specifically about this while I was writing this post.

The update adds a new difficulty setting, which is interesting, but I sincerely hope this doesn’t lead to the kind of bugs we had when the new level scaling feature was added... like this, and this, and this. The update announcement does not indicate if these problems were resolved.

The update now allows players to literally buy ‘supplies’ from the store for those who couldn’t level up their settlement, but what about those of us who have maxed out our settlement and still have thousands of said ‘supplies’?

The update got rid of that unintended entry point for the Île de la Cité... why not simply update the city to be accessible after the siege and make it more interactive for the upcoming Discovery Tour?

@thenorfolkian I'm grateful I was able to complete Wrath of the Druids
River Raids are going smooth, I haven't found any of the bugs I previously reported.
I need to go to Île de la Cité and see what they did.

Glad there's finally nightmare difficulty and also love that it's increased damage taken and shorter parry windows but normal damage dealt so enemies don't feel like sponges, I just feel like I have to be more skilled.

The only things is I wish it was even more difficult - when I come up against a big bad I want it to be really risky business.

I'm also really happy that the kids at the settlement didn't run up to me right away and start jabbering, I feel I can breathe a little easier there now. Though I didn't hear my favorite blacksmith/spirit animal utter menacing threats either, I hope he's ok.

Graphics looks pretty sharp and smooth in performance mode to me on series X, slightly less tearing, tinge more saturation? Also Eivors character model and animation seems slightly simplified, it's a tradeoff I can handle. As well as the slower updating of river bump map animation (noticed this during a kill of the boar next to the pond). I haven't done a full on exploration to see how LOD is handling itself.

I liked that Reda's other lines started playing again too. I'd forgotten he had lines about the player knowing the score already, and I'd never heard the one about rewards increasing... not before.

So far I'm pretty happy with the update.

Couple of bugs still exist though - if you have level scaling at nightmarish then Reda won't have all the daily quests available, do you have to restart the game with default scaling which sucks.

Sadly I spoke too soon. For a couple of days it was wonderful. I could wander the settlement head held high feeling free, then mysteriously the brattlings came back, along with audio issues. Every time I go to Reda they come running down the hill yelling out to Eivor the same sample and Reda has gone back to just his two lines of audio, and of course to add icing audio cuts out in the settlemen.

Is there any way to mod the console versions? I would very much like to erase all the children from the settlement. Or at least make them killable.