YAR: Forgotten Throne news & patch notes

Hello everyone. In this update, I’ve added:

• The Mermaid ending.

• An option to disable damage numbers.

• Fixed the cave where you rescue people - previously you could get stuck on a second visit. Now you can’t enter the same cave twice.

• Added waterfall sounds in Khladny Yar.

• Decorated the bottom of the western island with rocks.

• Fixed the storage chest in Khladny Yar. It should reappear for those who lost it.

• Adjusted the difficulty descriptions in the menu for those who had layout issues.

• Added protection against Beloyar disappearing. He most likely won’t reappear in old saves, but in new ones he shouldn’t disappear anymore.

Right now I’m working on localization and handling console ports.

Wishing you all the best, and thank you for your support and kind words.

Many people wanted to support us, so I decided to release a pack of music from the game by our composer.

Hello everyone! The time has finally come - after 3 years of development, the game is releasing!

Yeah... it wasn’t an easy journey. The game turned out to be big - many players spend over 50 hours completing it even on standard difficulty. Of course, there’s always more to improve, and I will definitely keep working on it. I won’t even be taking any days off during the first week after release - all your feedback, bug reports, and suggestions will be heard.

If something critical comes up, I’ll fix it immediately. Everything else I’ll gather and release in larger patches.

Partially good news: the quests in the first location (around 7 hours of gameplay) are fully voiced in English. To be precise, everything has already been voiced, BUT only the first 7 hours have been implemented in the game so far.

The rest of the English voice-over will be released within 2–4 weeks. I originally planned to release on the 1st only because I didn’t have time to finish the English voice-over, but since that would be a very bad release window for an indie game, I sincerely ask for understanding and apologize to the Western audience for releasing slightly earlier with incomplete voice acting.

After release, I will focus entirely on localization and English voice-over. I won’t even be taking days off. Please, if you like the game, don’t postpone your purchase - I promise the voice acting is coming!

I’m grateful to everyone who supported me along this journey. And I have one last request:

We need to push this release no matter what. Otherwise, all of this will have been for nothing.

What matters most for Steam is activity at launch:

• sales volume

• discussions

• screenshots

• community engagement

• playtime

• concurrent players

Don’t just pass by:

• buy the game at launch (not now - at release moment)

• ask your friends, family, dogs, cats, literally anyone

• even if they refund later - the goal is to push visibility

Let’s push the game up so it gets noticed. Let’s show Steam what we can do.

Play the game, keep it running even while working, upload screenshots, write posts, be active in discussions - all of this helps a lot.

If you have any connections - ask for coverage. Share the game in groups, forums, anywhere you’re active. You know I’m a developer, not a marketer. Promotion is hard for me - but that doesn’t mean the project should be forgotten.

This was not an easy journey. But I kept my word and brought the project to completion. I won’t repeat what it cost - you already understand.

The scale of this game surprises even me, considering the resources behind it. Honestly, I’m impressed myself - and I genuinely enjoy playing through it.

I hope it wasn’t all for nothing.

See you at release.

Greetings everyone,

The decision has been made to release the game tomorrow - and for many of you, that’s already today, 03.04.26!

Why the sudden change? I was planning for May 1st, but I’m releasing tomorrow. Turns out I finished everything faster than expected. But there are other reasons too - starting mid-month, there’s a wave of AAA releases, DLCs, and big titles: Atomic Heart DLC, Diablo 4 DLC, Pragmata, Heroes: Olden Era, and several others - and after that, Gothic Remake. All of this will flood the news cycle and push indie games down in Steam visibility. Streamers and content creators will be playing AAA, not indie.

At the same time, I’ve basically wrapped up the final tasks, and realized - tomorrow is Friday, it’s quiet, no major releases, Crimson Desert hype has already cooled down. It’s time.

Partially good news: the quests in the first location (around 7 hours of gameplay) are fully voiced in English. To be precise, everything has already been voiced, but only the first 7 hours have been implemented in the game so far.

The rest of the English voice-over will be released within 1–3 weeks. I originally planned to release on the 1st only because I didn’t have time to finish the English voice-over, but since that would be a very bad release window for an indie game, I sincerely ask for understanding and apologize to the Western audience for releasing slightly earlier with incomplete voice acting.

After release, I will focus entirely on localization and English voice-over. I won’t even be taking days off. Please, if you like the game, don’t postpone your purchase - I promise the voice acting is coming!

I’m grateful to everyone who supported me along this journey. And I have one last request:

We need to push this release no matter what. Otherwise, all of this will have been for nothing.

What matters most for Steam is activity at launch:

• sales volume

• discussions

• screenshots

• community engagement

• playtime

• concurrent players

Don’t just pass by:

• buy the game at launch (not now - at release moment)

• ask your friends, family, dogs, cats, literally anyone

• even if they refund later - the goal is to push visibility

Let’s push the game up so it gets noticed. Let’s show Steam what we can do.

Play the game, keep it running even while working, upload screenshots, write posts, be active in discussions - all of this helps a lot.

If you have any connections - ask for coverage. Share the game in groups, forums, anywhere you’re active. You know I’m a developer, not a marketer. Promotion is hard for me - but that doesn’t mean the project should be forgotten.

This was not an easy journey. But I kept my word and brought the project to completion. I won’t repeat what it cost - you already understand.

The scale of this game surprises even me, considering the resources behind it. Honestly, I’m impressed myself - and I genuinely enjoy playing through it.

I hope it wasn’t all for nothing.

See you at release.

Patch Notes:

The game is playable on Steam Deck, but for the best experience, we recommend the following:

As promised, here’s the visual update for the T2 and T3 Volkhv armor sets.

Also a lot of small fixes - bugs, balance, and other stuff. I’m honestly too tired to list everything. I’m fixing things as I see them based on your reports, and anything that can’t be fixed quickly gets pushed for later.

I also tried to optimize the menu and overall memory usage. It seems like the game now uses slightly less VRAM, but not 100% sure yet.

Slightly increased Volkhv stats, and also improved mana regeneration from the Combat Mage passive.

Since the Challenge difficulty has been reworked, if you were already playing on it, switch your difficulty to "Hard" - it’s the same difficulty but without save restrictions. On Challenge, the manual save button will no longer be available everywhere - only in taverns. When you try to change the difficulty, the game will warn you that you won’t get the achievement. Ignore this and switch anyway, since you were already mid-playthrough, you wouldn’t get the achievement for this difficulty regardless. Essentially, you were playing on Hard, as Challenge didn’t differ before - I was keeping it as a placeholder, so nothing really changes for you.

In general, regarding Challenge - you can save in taverns, and you can also craft a Save Ration, which allows you to save anywhere. If you try to load a Challenge save on a different difficulty, you won’t receive the achievement. (Not recommended for a first playthrough)

I’ll be honest - I haven’t fully tested this mode, as it would take a lot of time, so play at your own risk for now. I’ve added a tag to grant the achievement later if someone completes it before achievements are officially added. Hopefully it works 🙂 In any case, the most important thing is not to lose your save after finishing the game. Once achievements are added, you’ll need to load that save and the achievement should be granted.

But remember - if you were already on Challenge before patch 0.9.5.6, make sure to switch to Hard.

This patch is focused on improving the gameplay experience in several critical areas.

First of all, interaction with loot and objects is finally working properly - much more convenient and consistent. No more struggling to target NPCs when there are multiple workbenches nearby, and no more having to turn away from an object just to restore its highlight.

To make this work, I had to introduce a new interaction channel. If you notice any missing interactions somewhere, just let me know - I’ll quickly fix it by assigning the correct channel to that object.

Second, I’ve done optimization work, switched the game to DX12, and implemented an upscaler similar to DLSS. You can find it in the graphics settings under scaling. FSR is also there but currently not working. XeSS works on both AMD and Intel GPUs. For example, on Steam Deck FPS increased from around 20 to 55-60 thanks to it.

Even without the upscaler, overall optimization improved by about 20-40% depending on your hardware.

Additional fixes:

• Skill reset now works correctly and refunds the exact number of points spent.

• Volkhv recipes can now be purchased.

• Fixed descriptions for new abilities and items.

• Fixed the DLC ring - it now fires correctly.

Looking forward to your feedback on the new interaction system and overall performance, especially from those with low-end PCs. I may add an option to switch between DX11 and DX12 if needed, but if DX12 works fine for everyone, we’ll stick with it.

Greetings, the Volkhv(mages) faction is now available to try. This update adds the following:

Hello!

In short: the final update with the full game is available, but it is not fully polished yet because the game has become very large. Now I’m relying on you and your feedback. If you don’t want to run into bugs, it’s better to wait until the beginning of May (the release).

Here is the update trailer. I apologize that it isn’t localized yet - this is not the final trailer. The final one will be fully in English, including the in-game interfaces and voice acting.

I would also like to address the Western audience separately. During development it may have seemed that the game was aimed mainly at a Slavic audience and that the developer was ignoring the West and localization. That’s not the case. Localization tasks are simply scheduled near the end of development. By release, the game will have full English voice acting and text translation. Don’t worry - I want the whole world to be able to play this game!

Now lets talk:

As promised, the remaining content didn’t take long to arrive. This is the final content update. The entire game is now complete. All future updates will focus on polishing - fixing bugs, improving functionality, and addressing your feedback gathered over the last two years.

I wish you an enjoyable time playing, but I recommend that only those who are already in the middle of a playthrough continue right now. If you haven’t started the game yet, it’s better to wait another month or month and a half until the full release. Yes, all planned content is already available, but it still needs time to be polished.

The Mages and magic system will also arrive within the next 3–4 weeks. So if you want to play as a mage, I recommend waiting as well.

As usual, the list of changes is so large that it doesn’t make much sense to list everything - you’ll see it all for yourselves in the game. There is a lot of new content and many fixes, but some old bugs were intentionally left untouched for now, since the priority was finishing the game itself. Now I can finally focus on everything else that didn’t get enough attention before.

In terms of scale, this update is almost comparable to the previous one, and it pushes the story forward much further. In this update you will encounter iconic characters from Slavic mythology, and this is where the main events of the story truly begin to unfold. A new winter region, a new atmosphere, new dungeons, and greater variety overall - new enemies, characters, quests, weapons, armor, resources, and more. Even the houses in the winter city were rebuilt to make the adventure feel fresh and different.

You can now continue quests that previously could not be completed. Ignore the message in the journal saying they are unavailable - that is no longer true. These entries cannot be changed inside existing save files. They will not appear in a new playthrough. In older saves, a few quests may still appear unfinished, but in reality they simply never existed in the game and never will - there should only be about one or two of those.

Also, the idols of the gods in the open world now accept offerings. Any item you donate grants experience equal to its value.

The balance of the new content will continue to be adjusted based on your feedback. Some things may currently feel too difficult, while others may be too easy.

At one point I believed that the hardest part of developing an RPG was simply the amount of content. In reality, the most difficult part turned out to be testing and finding bugs. When a game is made by two and a half people and contains a 30–80 hour adventure with multiple difficulty levels, testing becomes an almost impossible task.

Even finishing YAR once - and not just finishing it, but properly testing it - takes days, sometimes a full week. That’s a luxury I simply can’t afford, because in a single week I complete around 350–500 different development tasks for the project. I can practically create a small game in a week, and that’s exactly why YAR became such a large project in just 2.5 years. To fully test the game ourselves would take several years.

That’s why we chose Early Access. In a single day after releasing a patch, I receive more bug reports than I could find in half a year of testing on my own.

So yes - the game still contains bugs under certain conditions. Over the next month and a half I will be fixing everything you report. However, in early May I will have to release the game for two important reasons. Wishlists gradually lose momentum over time, and the release of Gothic - a direct competitor in the genre that will dominate the news cycle - is getting close. That leaves me with little choice.

To be completely honest with you: ideally, I would like to polish the game for another six months, removing bugs and refining everything until it’s perfect. But if I do that, the wishlists will fade away and Steam’s algorithms will not give the game enough visibility at release. The game will sink, and with Gothic already released everyone will be playing that instead. In that case, all of this work would have been for nothing.

So in order not to undermine the work that has already been done, I will release the game earlier than originally planned and continue polishing it afterward. I’m not in a hurry to start new projects, so I’ll keep improving this one.

Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? 🙂

I couldn’t resist and decided to release another small patch — but one that I believe is important for the overall visual perception of the game, especially since atmosphere is absolutely crucial here.

The new rendering method gave us a significant performance boost, made the image cleaner and less blurry, and added more depth to textures. However, since it doesn’t support SSAO, it also introduced an issue with “floating objects” and a flatter-looking image.

This was especially noticeable in interiors. If you look closely, you could see that objects lacked shadows underneath them — something that never happens in real life. As a result, objects appeared to be hovering in the air.

In this patch, I addressed this by adding Ambient Occlusion via post-processing, which essentially creates fake contact shadows around objects.

The difference is immediately visible in grass, trees, and foliage. Previously they looked flat, but now they have a sense of volume.

And of course, in interiors the feeling that objects are floating has disappeared. Look closely at gaps, under cabinets, bread, sacks, bushes, and other objects in the before-and-after screenshots — you’ll notice that proper shadows have appeared.

In motion, the effect is even more noticeable. It also slightly reduced overexposure — for example, Ratmir’s tunic is more blown out on the left side in the older version. Overall, the change may seem subtle in screenshots, but personally, the lack of contact shadows really hurts my eyes in games — everything ends up looking flat.

Hello everyone! A bundle featuring my game and Oleg Kazakov’s Gedonia 2 is now available with a 33% discount!

I’m sure many of you already know the excellent RPG Gedonia and its sequel, but if you don’t — I highly recommend checking them out.

Balance Changes

These balance adjustments are aimed at making the game more comfortable and fair.

Hello everyone! Happy belated holidays to you all, and I wish everyone all the best!

I’ve released an important patch that fixes many critical issues, improves optimization, and enhances overall quality of life. The patch itself was made fairly quickly, but it was delayed for two reasons: health issues and some unexpected engine-related difficulties when switching to a new rendering method. There was a problem that I couldn’t resolve for quite some time, but everything is fine now.

My health took a hit — severe autonomic dysfunction caused by stress and overwork led to many issues throughout my body. As soon as I recovered enough, I immediately got back to work. I’m still dealing with various difficulties, but at least I can function and work again.

Below is a list of changes included in this patch.

Fixes:

• Fixed an issue where control bindings (keyboard) could not be changed. All on-screen hints now correctly display the keys assigned in the settings.

• Fixed an issue where gamepad button names were displayed instead of keyboard keys.

• When using a keyboard, the “Controller Type” option is now hidden in the settings. Previously, it confused players — this setting was never actually used for keyboards, but people thought their input was being switched to a controller.

• Fishing works again.

• Fixed an infinite reward exploit for the bear pelt quest from Velemir.

• Fixed infinite experience gain when loading the game.

• Demolishing your own buildings now works correctly: take the construction hammer, hold RMB, aim at the structure, and click again to destroy it. Anyone whose buildings were blocking NPC paths can now remove them.

• Dead archer bodies no longer block movement.

• The “Heavy Hand” skill at level 3 now matches its description requirements.

• Mana potion crafting now requires wormwood and produces 3 potions from 1 unit of wormwood.

• The house spirit quest reward is now given only once, as intended.

• Fixed excessive rewards for Basurman weapons and lizard hides from Beloyar.

• Tsvetana now gives the tablecloth only once, as intended.

• Fixed a bug where turning in Striga bones to Tikhomir caused all money to disappear.

• Fixed a bug where crates dropped items after being destroyed even if the items had already been taken manually.

• Fixed an issue where crafting a protection scroll gave a ring instead of the scroll.

• Fixed an error in the required mushroom count in Tikhomir’s quest.

• Purchasing the Precision Inscription from Dagal’dar now gives the correct scroll.

Quality of Life:

• When crafting, you can now see which items you currently have enough resources for. Items that cannot be crafted will be shown faded with the text “Not enough resources.”

• You can now see exactly which resources are missing for crafting: available resources are highlighted, missing ones are shown in gray.

• The Exit and Menu buttons on the death screen have been moved lower to prevent accidentally clicking them instead of Load.

• Empty chests and crates are now marked.

• Added one additional autosave slot and one additional quicksave slot.

• Corpses of unlooted monsters no longer disappear.

• Crafted food now stacks up to 50 items, including cooked meat.

• Abilities on cooldown are now shown in gray to indicate they are not yet ready for use.

• Fixed issues where text, inventory, and UI elements were cut off or didn’t fit on the screen.

Optimization:

• Significant FPS increase (Steam Deck now runs at 60 FPS on Ultra settings).

• Reduced video memory and RAM usage.

• Reduced GPU load.

• There is a good chance that players who previously had blurry textures will now see them displayed correctly.

Balance Changes:

• Damage of the second ability has been reduced.

• Life-steal enchantment has been weakened; previously it restored too much health on hit.

• Enemy difficulty is now non-linear. Previously, once you reached a certain power level, you could no longer encounter worthy opponents and the game became too easy. Now, different locations contain different creatures with more refined progression. Some caves will remain too difficult for quite a long time. Forest monsters and enemies around Yar remain unchanged, but enemies in many caves, the Dark Forest, and parts of the islands have become significantly stronger.

Since I’m working alone and the game has grown very large, it’s difficult to thoroughly test balance changes without stretching development out for years. So I’ll be relying on your feedback regarding difficulty.

Of course, this isn’t everything that’s planned — but these are some of the most critical and important changes. From here on, it’s mostly smaller adjustments.

Now the focus shifts to the major update covering the second half of the game. As you remember, it’s already complete, but it needs polishing. I expect to release it within 1–3 months. That update will include the full game content. After that, I’ll add achievements, final bug fixes, and then we’ll move toward full release.

Greetings! A patch wasn’t actually planned anytime soon, but there are several critical bugs preventing people from playing. So, the following issues have been fixed:

• Sudden FPS drops over time.

• Gleb getting stuck in a room.

• Gleb can no longer die.

• The lever in the winter cave now opens the passage.

• The “No free slots” message no longer appears.

• You can now return to the hornet island if the task is not completed.

These are currently the most critical and easily fixable issues. I had some free time, so I patched them first — the rest will be fixed later. I recommend saving your progress in multiple slots, and when reporting problems, please attach two files: your save file and your Gamesettings file, both located in C:\\Users\\\\AppData\\Local\\YAR\\Saved\\.

Without your saves, fixing many bugs is very difficult or even impossible, as some situations are very unique and non-standard.

Greetings to everyone! The moment has finally come, after 16 months. Yes, you won’t believe it, but I spent 15 of those months working on this update, and now you can see it for yourself and understand why it took so long. The update is truly large; prepare 25–30 hours to complete it fully. And that will only be half of the game. You won’t have to wait another 16 months for the second half — it’s already finished, but I want to introduce new content carefully and gradually.

Important to read!

Hello everyone. Let me say this right away for those who doubt — the whole game is ready! But it has a lot of bugs, or at least it had a lot. Right now, I’m actively testing and fixing issues. Every single quest and the entire story are already in the game — coded, voiced, and fully playable, from the very beginning to the end credits.

But I’ll be releasing the update in parts — to properly test and polish everything. Please, show a little more patience. I’ll try to release the update before the end of the month, and if that doesn’t happen, don’t think the game’s abandoned or anything like that — it’ll come out during the first week of next month. There’s really not much left now. I’ve got 140 tasks of varying difficulty left — mostly simple ones, but some are tough.

After that, I’ll hand the game to a few close people, watch their playthroughs, fix any critical issues they encounter, and then release the update. Don’t forget that the game isn’t small — it’s much, much bigger than what was in Early Access, and testing it is hard and time-consuming, but also rewarding :)

I’m working non-stop, cut my sleep to 6 hours, and don’t bother telling me to “take care of my health” or whatever — I don’t care anymore. I’m just done with all the haters, doubters, trolls, and random people who’ve been pestering me for a year and still can’t understand that big open-world RPGs made by one person aren’t built easily or quickly — and that if the foundation changes, you can’t just patch it without breaking everything else.

But it’s okay. The time will soon come when they’ll all feel ashamed — if they have at least a drop of conscience left. Everyone who turned away, betrayed, unfollowed, removed the game from their wishlist, doubted, accused me for no reason, or spread hate — I hope you’ll feel really ashamed. And if you don’t — then leave and never come back. We’ll build a community of sane, decent people.

Thank you to everyone who still believes and stays with me. If not for you, I honestly don’t know where I’d find the strength to keep going. Steam shows I’ve lost 20,000 wishlists — that’s a lot, and it really hurts. But what can I say — farewell to those who left. I won’t give up. My goal is to finish this game no matter what — even though it’s obvious it probably won’t pay back the time and effort, and if the wishlist keeps falling, it might just fail completely. But even that doesn’t matter anymore. I just want to make the best Slavic open-world RPG ever made.

I never stopped, never took a break, and if I rested — it was maybe once a month since the last update. And honestly, I’ve worked like this for years — not only on this game. That’s just how I am.

Overall, the game is in great shape. There are minor bugs — sure, but that’s inevitable when you don’t have enough testers or time.

By the way — I’ve added full gamepad support, except for building (which isn’t mandatory) and the card game (though if you’re using DualSense or Steam Deck, you can do those too).

I don’t even know how I’ll write the next dev update when the release comes — how to describe everything new without people getting tired of reading it. Honestly, it’s like a book’s worth of new stuff — mechanics, quests, everything you could imagine in an RPG.

The update’s coming soon — and then you’ll understand why it took so long.

That’s it. Peace to everyone. Wishing you all the best, patience, and understanding. Now I’m going back to polishing the update :)

Greetings everyone. To begin with, I’ll try to show you through screenshots the amount of content I’m currently working on and polishing. Without further introductions, here we go:

On the picture below, you can see the marked zone that will appear with the next update. The red area shows the new territories. The blue area shows what was already available in Early Access (not the demo, but the purchased version).

As you can see, the world will almost triple in size, not even counting what was already there. But that’s not all, since islands have been added as well—here’s one of them:

For comparison, I circled a small island roughly the size of the village of Torzhok, so you can better understand the scale of the new territory.

Next, I’ll just show you screenshots of some locations from the new areas. This is only a small portion, since I don’t want to spoil too much. My goal is only to give you an idea of how big this update is, and why it’s taking so long. Also keep in mind that the winter biome and many other locations not shown here are already 90% complete (just like the full story). In fact, the whole game is essentially ready—it’s in the polishing stage. But I’ll be releasing it in two parts. What goes into the first half I’m showing in this news post, and I’ve also described it in the previous ones.

Dead Forest:

Here there are actually enemies at every step, but I decided not to show them ahead of time—I want you to encounter them yourself in the game.)

New Continent:

Crimson Yar:

The Pier:

Across the world there are monsters and people scattered around, but they aren’t visible in the screenshots, because I captured everything in a mode that doesn’t render characters or monsters (for optimization reasons). They only appear when close to the player character, while I was flying around the map with the camera.

The Forest:

(I was taking screenshots directly from the engine, so the graphics look worse than they will in the final game.)

Dungeons:

I can’t say exactly when the patch will be released. It’s obvious that I won’t be able to make it by the end of August. Firstly, I still haven’t received the remaining part of the voice-over. Secondly, there was a force majeure situation and I had to move to a new place of residence.

And thirdly, at the new place I started having back problems—the endless work on the patch is really taking its toll.

Overall, the patch is already ready, but I still need time to work on optimization, fix bugs, adjust balance, and of course wait for the voice-over. Personally, I played through the game with the new update in 25 hours (that’s exactly half of the game). And since I know everything as the developer, for you it will take even longer. I think the full release version will be around 50 hours of gameplay—and then there will be DLCs as well.

I want to remind you once again that this year I’ve been working not just on this patch, but on the entire game. That means the next patch will come out much faster.

Thank you all once more for your kind words, your support, and your patience.