Game Update - Patch 1.2

Hello! We hope you've been enjoying Nighthawks so far. We've been keeping track of your bug reports and other issues, and here's a big collection of fixes. There are too many small ones to mention directly, from preventing characters coming back from the dead without narrative permission, to minor typos and smoothing out the sequence flow of various sections, but here are some of the most important/most requested! In addition, you can now acquire a set of Nighthawks trading cards, badges and similar. I highly recommend putting them on the auction house for a million dollars. You never know!

Game Systems

• Player Skills. By popular demand (really!), we've tweaked some of the traits and item boosts to be just a little bit less generous. Not a massive nerf, just dialling a few numbers back a touch. This may in rare cases lead to issues where you currently have something equipped that you can't re-equip because your tier has dropped below the relevant point. This isn't a bug - just keep using it until you change equipment and look forward to being able to pick it up again later.

• Achievements. Missing achievements that you should have unlocked in your playthrough should now trigger from your Sanctuary at the start of the next night. Note, this has to be the character that should have unlocked them, and a save after the point where they would have unlocked. UPDATE:* Some of these are still being Annoying. Looking into it - sorry!*

• Urban Champion. Made this easier to acquire, changing it to just requiring a number of victories instead of clearing out entire enemy groups. Tempest has also re-investigated the Conquerer's Band relic that makes fights more likely, and deemed that it now resonates with the Predator trait, to make it easier to track down battles as necessary. It will now also overpower any other effects that make encounters less likely, such as travelling with Veronica Castigliano.

• Tainted Blood. Made this less likely to trigger when feeding on humans, particularly those in a certain labyrinthine setting.

• Hunting. Added additional clarification that this isn't intended to be 'pick a location, go there', but a more general 'you wander the city in search of opportunities and arrive here' type arrangement that keeps providing different things to do and different ways to experience being an urban predator. You'll also now gain extra Suspicion and Infamy while Hunting. If this becomes problematic, speaking to a 'friend' on the force is a good way of bringing it down a little bit. Remember, high Suspicion makes being arrested or caught feeding a much riskier proposition, as well as causing you to face tougher enemies in random encounters while travelling the City.

Storyline Changes

• The Doll House/Broken Toys. You can now choose to abandon the investigation at any point after your first mysterious encounter. Doing so is highly unlikely to lead to a happy ending, but the front door is no longer hermetically sealed by Plot for players who find the contents disturbing.

• The Vampires Below. If you ask at the Clinic, you'll now be told exactly where in the sewers you need to head to find the feral nest, instead of having to search them or ask an expert.

• The King's Secret. You can now run the stakeout on the hospital a second time, if you bring along someone who has specific skills in that regard, to prevent running out of investigation options.

• The Long Game. There is no longer a need to be nice, before being nasty. Cryptic? Perhaps.

Troubleshooting

• Some Linux systems, particularly handheld devices, were being mistakenly detected as Steam Deck specifically, which could cause a few issues with things like character creation name entry. You can now use the argument -forcelinux to skip that check and just treat the device as a desktop system. Most people should never need this, so don't worry about it if none of this sounds relevant!

• There was only one thing for here, but a single bulleted list looks silly.

That's all for now. See you in the shadows!