New Wartales update Harag's Marshlands adds a region, new enemies, and places to explore

What is a Wartale anyway? I always thought it was a story from a war, but it turns out it’s actually an open world RPG where you control mercenaries as they explore abandoned terrain. Wartales’ most recent update, Harag’s Marshlands, is one of the most substantial additions to the game so far, and it’s out now.

If the name of the update didn’t give it away, it’s about swamps. It includes a new region called Ludern that’s been “inspired by Scottish landscapes.” There are also patch notes for an update that'll expand crafting, add some new additions to the combat, and bring some more general balancing changes too. Here’s the trailer:

The new region alone would be impressive enough but there are some other substantial additions to the game buried in the update. New places called Forsaken Villages have been added, “where the player has to choose some members in his group to explore and loot abandoned and plague infested village.” You have to be as quiet as possible as you scavenge it for resources, to avoid alerting the nearby enemies. Your camp’s been expanded as well, giving you some new items and crafting recipes to mess around with.

The most important update is that all the animals in the game can now be tamed, and each species also has their own dedicated skill tree. Really hope that means you can use a bear like a Pokémon at some point.

The combat’s had some nice additions too. The level limit has been increased to nine, while also giving you some new skills to unlock. On top of that, there’s also two new battle modes you can run into when exploring: Survival, which is wave survival, and Escape, which is about running from hordes of enemies as they chase after you.

There are some general quality of life changes and bug fixes in the patch too, and you can find the full patch notes over on their steam page.

"I could point to the depth of systems or an approach to design that trusts the player enough to let them discover things themselves," Nic said in our review. "But I think the most useful thing to impart about Wartales is that it just has, well, a certain special something. Maybe there’s some cool sounding French for that that I’m forgetting. The fact that it’s far from finished has me very interested indeed. Moar acorns, please."