Enemies That Actually Chase You
This is the biggest update since v13, and most of it comes down to one problem: combat was optional. A level 1 cultist at a full sprint was slower than the player out for a walk, which meant every fight in the game happened because the player agreed to it. Fixing that pulled on almost everything else.
VR Motion Combat
Your weapon rides your right hand, the lantern rides your left, and a swing is something your arm did — not an animation fired by a trigger. Each weapon class wants its own strike: daggers thrust, swords cut, hammers need a genuinely committed swing. Cuts have to lead with the edge; a blade travelling flat neither whooshes nor lands.
Windup is free and silent, so raising your arm never costs you anything. Swing sounds scale with how hard you actually swung. Stamina drain and DPS come out mathematically identical to desktop, so nothing about the balance changes when you put the headset on.
When you're exhausted, a swing degrades instead of being refused — it lands for about 18% damage, sounds dull, throws no sparks. You can't refuse a real arm mid-flight.
Toggle: VR Motion Combat (on by default). VR Grip Pitch sets blade angle relative to the controller.
PAD Support
Gamepad support has been strengthened and corrected. It's a very nice way to play Oath of Ash now !
Enemies Chase, Hear, and Commit
Three speed archetypes now:
Pressure (Cultist, Spider) — 4.2 m/s. Beats your walk, loses to your sprint.
Soldier (Skeleton Warrior, Bone Fletcher) — 3.5 m/s. Closes steadily.
Anvil (Lizard, Brood-Tender, Queen) — 2.7 m/s. You can walk away. That's the deal.
Nothing outruns a sprint, so retreat is always available — it just costs your whole stamina bar. Backpedalling is now slower than running (0.55x), so free kiting is gone. Attackers step forward during their swing instead of standing still and hitting air.
They can hear you, too. Sprinting adds +18 m to their detection radius, fighting adds +12 m. Moving carefully is finally different from moving fast. Detection range went from 20 m to 34 m, and spawns now favour the arc in front of you rather than the empty ring behind.
Faction Camps
Six factions, six carved altars, each with its own garrison. From a ridge you can read what's waiting before you're close enough to be in it — the silhouette tells you which fight, and a floating plate over the idol tells you the level (BARROW WATCH · LV 7), colour-coded green/amber/red. Hold ALT (or LB on pad) to call the plates up; they don't hang there permanently.
Five camps per map, all different factions. Camp difficulty now comes from where it stands, not from how long you've been outside — previously your second camp could be nine levels above your first for no reason you caused.
Supply Caches
Five one-shot crates scattered across the wastes, opened with E. Coins, a decent potion chance, and gear capped at uncommon — caches pay in supplies, not rewards. Barrow chests stay the only reliable source of good equipment. They only show on the radar from 25 m, because a marker that tells you where to go turns exploring into ticking off a list. One new crate returns every 15 minutes.
Loot and Supply Rework
Rarity used to lose to item level — three levels of ordinary progress beat any colour on the screen, and something coloured dropped roughly every eighth kill. Now level scaling is gentler, rarity multipliers are much stronger (legendary 1.50x → 2.10x), and coloured drops are roughly a third as common. A legendary is worth about twelve item levels; you can't walk to it, you have to find it. Rare finally has a coloured name — it never did before.
Potions and bread stopped being a win button. They now heal over time (3.5 s / 3.0 s), have a cooldown, and you can only carry five of each. Corpse drop rates roughly halved — but chests, caches and barrow hoards keep theirs. The reward belongs to the place you reached, not the body you walked past.
World Scale
The game used to send you to places outside the terrain that exists — caches at 200 m, camps at 235 m, all standing on bare slope with no grass, trees or rocks. Terrain is up to 160 m and every distance is pulled back inside what's actually built.
New Content
Barrow Warden — axe and shield, heavier and slower than a regular skeleton, new model.
Ash Cultist has a voice — aggro, attack, hurt, death.
Potion and bread consumption sounds, HUD icons for both.
Astrid's own storyline is now separate from the contract board — the main quest used to show up as an ordinary gather contract and could be taken by mistake.
Batch selling — tick a dozen items, sell in one click.
Journal on J (Back/View on pad), potion and bread on 1 / 2 (d-pad left/right).
The on-screen legend rebuilds itself when you pick up a controller instead of still naming keys.
You can skip a whole scene from the prologue without watching the intro first.
Fixes
Enemies no longer pile into each other or accelerate off into the sky when wedged.
Recycled bodies no longer arrive already suspicious of you.
Cave hoards can't be looted from ten metres above them.
Camp reward chests no longer spawn half-swallowed by the altar.
Props stopped looking like wet plastic — normal maps were being silently discarded and everything had a lacquered-countertop finish.
