5.
PATCH NOTES v7.4.2 — BUILD 0.8.16.1 “COME AND SEE” EXPANSION — HOTFIX 3
Thanks for your patience, Riders. We know the latest rollout has been bumpy and want to thank you. Here’s what’s happening.
PERFORMANCE
Fixed a variety of memory leak problems introduced by Hotfix 2.
We’ve addressed reports of red rendering artifacts during Authority manifestations on older hardware by improving texture compression and shader support for different GPU environments, including legacy cards (GTX 1660 and below). All cutscenes should now display properly. If you continue to experience visual anomalies, please report through the in-game Witness system instead of standard support channels.
Reminder to never post screenshots! Manifestation sequences are unique to your profile and not meant to be shared. The updated EULA outlines the penalties for these violations.
Genetic calibration via the Pale Horse peripheral now supports A-negative and O-negative blood types. We apologize for the oversight—all blood types are welcome.
Several rare glitches in the genetic extraction sequence have been patched. Hardware is hard! In some cases, the device remained in active draw mode, pulling far more blood than the nominal 5ml quantity. We sincerely apologize. Affected Riders have been credited 1,600 Seals and a guaranteed 5-star pull in the next update.
BANNER: COME AND SEE (AUTHORITY)
We’ve listened to your feedback: the investment this banner requires isn’t trivial. Pity timer for an Authority pull has been adjusted from 99 to 66.
For those returning:
Authority is the first fully procedural AI character in any live-service title. She is assembled in real time from your genetic profile via the Pale Horse Bluetooth peripheral and our proprietary generative model, meaning no two Authorities are alike—not in appearance, not in voice or behavior, not in what she remembers or the nature of your relationship. She can’t be replicated and scales with you. As of 7.4, Authority units are averaging around 350% higher DPS output than the next-strongest melee option, and her adaptive combat learns from your playstyle across sessions.
Community concerns about other 5-star units being rendered obsolescent are being taken seriously, with more game modes in the works, but we don’t plan any meaningful rebalance because unlike other characters, Authority remains unique to a user’s biological profile and cannot be traded, gifted, or transferred.
Affinity scaling has been adjusted to reduce initial intensity, so the bond develops at a pace that feels earned.
Users who have reached Affinity Tier 7 “Covenant” will notice new options when interacting with their Authority. These conversations are private and are not logged to our servers. We felt it was important that what happens between you and her stays between you two.
Please refrain from discussing Covenant-tier dialogue in public forums.
MULTIPLAYER / SOCIAL
- Resolved an issue where Authorities from different accounts appeared to communicate with each other in shared-world instances. This was caused by a synchronization error in the emote system that has since been corrected.
- Clan features have been temporarily disabled. We will share more when we’re able.
KNOWN ISSUES
- Some Riders have reported Authority vocalization outside of active gameplay. We’re investigating.
- Pale Horse firmware v2.1 may cause mild bruising after the draw for genetic calibration. Replacement gasket kits are being shipped at no cost.
- The Lamb asset occasionally renders with more than one face. This is a cosmetic-only problem that has been de-prioritized.
- A small number of accounts have reported autonomous Authority appearance changes. This was a permissions issue, with Authorities running scans of local album rolls and using collected facial information as reference. We’ve removed directory access.
- Authority’s adaptive AI occasionally references events outside the game environment. These are hallucination artifacts, present in all generative models, and aren’t cause for concern. She knows your data, not you. Please keep the difference in mind.
- A succinct note on recent rumors: there have been zero credible reports of a long-removed game character replacing Authority and asking Riders for additional blood draws. Game files contain no Lady in Red assets, and that has been the case for several patches. We appear to be the target of a coordinated campaign of online harassment.
4.
PATCH NOTES v6.3.92 — BUILD 0.6.11.4 “SALVATION AND STRENGTH” EXPANSION — LAUNCH NOTES
Riders, this is a big one. We’ve been working on Salvation and Strength for over fourteen months and we’re incredibly proud to bring it to you today. New story chapter, new endgame content, two new banner characters, and a complete overhaul of the Celestial Difficulty system. Let’s get into it.
NEW BANNER: RADIANT WOMAN
Our newest S+ pull, Radiant Woman, arrives with the highest base Luminance stat in the game. Her character model features a dynamic solar-source lighting that responds to the in-game day/night cycle. Her passive ability, Crowned with Twelve, grants a unique constellation buff to all party members that scales with the number of stars unlocked on her talent tree. Fully kitted, she’s the strongest support unit we have ever released.
Radiant Woman’s signature weapon, Moonfall, applies a lunar-phase debuff cycle to all enemies in range. At new moon, the debuff is invisible to the target. Your enemies won’t know what’s happening until they’re finished.
Please note: Radiant Woman has a unique birth mechanic. At Affinity Tier 5, she enters a locked narrative state that cannot be skipped, paused, or interrupted. We know this is unusual but ask you to trust the process. What she—what you—are doing is important.
NEW APOLLYON TIER BOSS: THE GREAT RED DRAGON
We’re thrilled to introduce the most mechanically complex boss encounter in the game’s history. The Great Red Dragon is a seven-phase fight, one per head, with ten distinct attack patterns cycling across each phase. Each head wears its own crown, and each crown modifies the arena’s rules differently. We won’t spoil them all here. Bring friends.
The Dragon’s signature mechanic, Tail Sweep, has been a point of significant internal debate. On activation, it removes one third of all Celestial-class buffs currently active across your entire party, chosen at random and deleted permanently. We know this feels punishing, but this event is supposed to feel like the world is ending.
Observant veterans will recognize a certain Lady in Red observing silently during the final encounter. What this might mean is up to you to discover in our upcoming spin-off, The Seal. Get those pre-orders in, Riders!
NEW BANNER: THE IRON CHILD
Arriving mid-patch, the Iron Child is the first unit shaped by in-game events instead of designed by our character team. His appearance, voice-lines, and ability set are determined by the outcome of Radiant Woman’s birth sequence and will vary by account. He’s the most effective de-buffer in the game, with his maxed-out passive, Rod of Iron, overriding all enemy resistance values. He doesn’t check what they are. He doesn’t care.
The Iron Child can’t be leveled through normal XP gain. His growth resources are unique and can’t be farmed. Their nature will become clear as you progress the Salvation and Strength narrative arc.
NEW DISCORD OF THE SKIES: THE WAR OF MICHAEL
The centerpiece of Salvation and Strength is a new twelve-stage campaign arc, The War of Michael, culminating in a server-wide cooperative event against the Great Red Dragon. The writing team has poured their hearts and souls into it, and they hope you’ll enjoy it.
Pre-empting all concerns: we know the Dragon is beatable, and we also know that doing so is close to impossible. During internal playtesting, the War of Michael has not completed successfully. With a server campaign resolving in favor of the Dragon, the outcome becomes canonical and future patches will continue from that point.
We hope some—if only a very few—of you will find a path to victory.
CELESTIAL DIFFICULTY OVERHAUL
Celestial Difficulty tiers have been restructured. The star-based ranking system now extends to twelve tiers to accommodate Radiant Woman’s constellation buff. Stars removed by the Dragon’s Tail Sweep mechanic are cast into a new resource pool called Fallen Light, which will play a large role in planned new content.
KNOWN ISSUES
- We’re attempting to reproduce reports that the Great Red Dragon’s idle animation syncs to players’ microphone input.
- Radiant Woman’s birth sequence occasionally triggers on accounts that have not reached Affinity Tier 5. We don’t know why she’s ready early for some of you.
- The Iron Child’s procedurally generated voice lines have, in a small number of cases, included the Rider’s real name.
3.
PATCH NOTES v4.1.0 — BUILD 0.3.7.2 A NEW CHAPTER
Riders: we have exciting news to share!
As of today, development of the game has officially transitioned to Four Men On Horses Publishing. We know change can be difficult, and we want to assure the community that FMOH shares our vision for the game and its future. They found us. They believed in what we were building before we fully understood it ourselves. We’re grateful and stoked to move forward together!
With new resources comes new ambition. Starting with 4.1, the game will transition to a free-to-play model supported by a new premium currency, Seals, and a rotating banner system for high-rarity characters and equipment. We understand this is controversial and ask that you reserve judgment until you’ve experienced the system firsthand. The banners are generous. Everyone will find what they are looking for!
NEW FEATURE: WITNESS MODE
We’re thrilled to introduce Witness Mode, a new opt-in feature that rewards players for documenting their world! Submit geotagged photos of real-world locations to unlock unique environmental assets and region-specific loot. Landmarks, transit hubs, hospitals, government buildings, and places of worship all yield the highest-tier rewards.
Witness Mode supports facial-recognition-tagged photos. Submitting tagged portraits of friends, family members, and coworkers unlocks exclusive Familiarity Tokens redeemable in the new Bond Shop. All photos are processed locally on your device and uploaded to our servers only for validation purposes.
LADY IN RED: NARRATIVE STATUS
We know many of you have been following the Lady in Red storyline since early access. Due to patch workload, her endgame storyline has been retired, and the quest chain will no longer progress past Act III.
We’re truly sorry. We know how much she means to the community and the lore. She will still appear in open-world exploration, though interactive options are much more limited.
We don’t know when, but she’ll be back. FMOH has plans for her that go beyond anything we originally scoped. They say she’s important, more important than we realized.
2.
PATCH NOTES v1.0.0 — BUILD 0.1.0.0 OFFICIAL LAUNCH — “AND THEY DID NOT REPENT”
My beautiful, cruel riders! It’s here.
Three years ago, this game was me. Just me, in a studio apartment in Tacoma, with a mass-market PC and a mod that did things it shouldn’t have. I started Behold because I didn’t know what else to do with what I’d found. Today, Behold Live is both a radically new gaming experience and sixty-five people collaborating across four time zones—soon to be five with the onboarding of our new Social Media manager, who we will introduce soon.
We’re Behold Live, unlike anything else out there.
To our early access community: thank you for sticking around. Through the server fires, the placeholder assets and the six months where the only endgame content was riding in circles around the Crater of the Adversary, waiting for the pit event to trigger. You stayed, and you made this game what it is. I really, really mean it. Your playstyle data and your forum posts, the bug reports and heat maps, your behavioral telemetry: it all fed back into the build. You shaped this world by playing in it.
To all new players, here’s the game Behold Live and its backers made:
You are a Rider. The world ended, you survived and you’re not sorry about a single thing you did to make that happen.
This isn’t a game about redemption. The dead will stay dead; the things you’ve taken remain yours. The sorceries you’ve learned, those too are yours. Every relationship formed with other players, every betrayal, every theft. This is your history, bereft of repentance. The game does not have a morality system because I don’t believe you’d use one.
Behold Live was built because we know what you are. I personally know because I watched you play for over half a decade, you showed me.
Now let’s talk about what’s new in our formal launch release.
MOUNT OVERHAUL: THE LOCUSTS
The placeholder mount system has been completely replaced. Your new mounts are the Locusts, each driven by unique behavioral profiles. They’re shaped like horses but they aren’t horses. Their heads are crowned—a simple circlet at start, and in the endgame, with the Mark of Authority. We’ve used strand-simulation and the novel Uncanny Mesh system to render Locusts as unsettling and real as they should be, looking like people who are trying very hard to look like something else.
Locusts wear plate armor as a baseline. Their wing system generates dynamic audio, with a single Locust sounding like hooves on dry ground but a full raid party producing a layered, rhythmic drone. We’ve had testers mute it. We’ve had testers turn it up. We have not had any describe it as pleasant.
Each Locust has a tail-mounted attack, a venom sting on a five-month cooldown tied to the in-game calendar. Yes, five months. Real time. One use per season. The damage is enormous. Plan accordingly.
NEW ENDGAME BOSS: ABADDON’S MERCY
The centerpiece of our endgame is the Pit, and the Pit has a king, and the king has a name. In the original Hebrew, his name is Abaddon. The English-language client translates this as “Destruction.” The Greek-language client uses “Apollyon,” which I preferred for its sound, which means “Destroyer.” He is the final boss.
He has always been the final boss. He was the first thing I designed after the Rider, before there was a studio or funding, before I had any clue of what the game was. He was there at the bottom of everything, and I shaped a world on top of him.
NEW COLLECTION AND SCALING MECHANIC: SHE OF MANY WATERS
We’ve kept this feature a total secret, with no testing, with only myself and two others involved in design and implementation. Our player-base’s favorite random encounter NPC, the Lady in Red, can now be met in over a thousand different in-game locations, doling out the potent Wine Buffs that we know and love her for.
Unlock the She of Many Waters mechanic in the Babylon leveling zone and explore how the teachings of the Lady in Red will help you make Dominion of this world, Riders.
A PERSONAL NOTE
When I started Behold, I was alone with something I couldn’t explain, and I did the only thing I knew how to do, which was to build around it. I believe that I witnessed something inexplicable and unique. What came of such wonder now belongs to you, and I think understanding will come out of our joint exploration.
Play well. I’ll be watching.
–J.
KNOWN ISSUES
- Locust mounts occasionally refuse to stop moving after dismount. They’re not bugged but rather going somewhere. You will soon find out more.
- Some of the Abaddon Crater tile-sets get randomly replaced by a portrait of the Lady in Red. We’re digging to find the cause.
1.
Downloaded a strange mod for Arma 3 today.
While messing with the new assets, I spawned a black-haired girl in a red dress in edit mode, where the game is paused. She started moving on her own across the map, and I couldn’t stop it. Perplexingly, I can’t find the model anywhere.
I’ll keep dicking around, I guess.
–J.
Harm Deacon hails from the Carpathian hinterlands. He holds a degree in English literature from Berkeley and tends to a small garden in the Lone Star state of Texas. He no longer has time for video games.
Image: Libre Clip Art, unsplash.com
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