Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Age of Calamity: Version 1.3.0 Released

title screen with version 1.3.0 at the top right corner

Today we can already download the latest update for Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity, which seemingly contains the data for the second wave of the Expansion Pass, "Guardian of Remembrance". You won't be able to play it until the official release date, October 29th, however...

The update itself doesn't seem to contain anything new, other than fixing some unspecified issues, so there is no reason to boot up the game yet. And that's a shame, because the original Hyrule Warriors also had its share of free content, where Age of Calamity isn't getting the same luxurious treatment. Cia, Volga, Wizzro and Medli all got added as free characters, even though their weapon upgrades and all that were tied to the paid DLC. But it was still something that everybody could give a try for free, potentially bringing some players back to the game, which isn't the case with Age of Calamity. Free content is always the best promotion.

It would also be so much easier to integrate new characters in the new Hyrule Warriors, because they don't actually need that much and you could add their Challenges and Quests anywhere on the map. There are already four optional characters in the base game, which follow the same principle – a principle that could have been easily applied to additional DLC characters to create some more standalone content. They could have added Beedle for example, as another fun bonus character.

But overall it seems like Age of Calamity is currently flying under the radar, where Nintendo doesn't promote the Expansion Pass at all, outside of the Nintendo Directs. Maybe we will get a release trailer today or tomorrow, but it's also possible that the second DLC pack simply drops and that's it, where we will have to find everything out ourselves.

They haven't even revealed the final character yet, but to be fair this might be because it's a spoiler. Nintendo kept things unusually spoiler-free last year with the base game, where they had only revealed Link, Zelda, Impa and the four Champions as playable characters in advance. They have teased some additional characters, like Hestu and King Rhoam, but they have never confirmed them as part of the playable cast. That's all for the players to find out.

Now, if the final character really were to be Sooga, then this would raise a question mark for all those people who aren't really familiar with the game's story and don't know that Master Kohga is already playable, where the Yiga are joining the forces of the good guys. So, this could be a reason why they haven't revealed the third DLC character and have only focused on Robbie & Purah so far, because everyone knows these two from Breath of the Wild.

We still might find out who the last fighter is in advance if someone is going through the effort of data-mining the new update, but we're so close to the release that it should be easy to be patient. See you on Friday!


Update: According to reddit, version 1.3.0 fixes a variety of exploits with certain characters (see here) and you can also now get the new base 80 damage weapons from Vicious Monster Sightings (see here). The latter is a pretty good change. Luckily, the update doesn't seem to extend any of the current maximums yet again.

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