Expeditions: Samurai Received Early Access Update 1

Catherine Daro October 1, 2026 News

Developer Campfire Cabal and publisher THQ Nordic have released Early Access Update 1 for party-based RPG Expeditions: Samurai.

“Massive thanks to all of you who have given us your feedback and chatted with us on our Discord, or reported issues or requests in our Redmine. It’s thanks to your input that this first update is so comprehensive, and you’ve all proven to us how valuable the Early Access model can be even for a story-driven RPG like ours.”

Expeditions: Samurai – Early Access Update 1 Includes:

New Additions:

2 new European heads for each gender (available in character creation).
2 new European hair styles for either gender (available in character creation).
New heads for older Japanese male and female NPCs.
New Japanese hairstyle for NPCs.
New “Ronin” outfit which is used by Kage as well as ronin-type enemies.
5 new unique items spread across Act 1.
6 additional armors/helmets added to the loot drop tables.
10 additional weapon variations added to the loot drop tables.
New contextual drop-down menu for interactions.

Additionally, players can now carry barrels which makes the naval battle preparation more intuitive and cool. Or you can move a gunpowder barrel and place it right in the path of a patrolling enemy to blow them sky high when they walk past.

Enemies will now change their behavior when they enter high alert, such as if they spot a dead body. Depending on the situation, they will either fan out after clearing the area and enter more aggressive patrols, or group up at tactical chokepoints to defend against an impending attack.

The developers also promise greatly improved intro cinematic and a little new cutscene when the crew spots the São Gabriel during Perils on the Sea. More cutscenes to come in future updates.

Game Balance Changes

Improved stealth takedowns in several ways, most notably in how the AI reacts to them:

When an enemy witnesses an ally being killed, they will now immediately escalate to combat.
The sneak attack can no longer be spammed to essentially stun-lock enemies.
Stealth takedowns now use walk/sneak speed instead of making the character run.
Surprise Attack skill bonus no longer applies to aware enemies, and has reduced effect on ranged stealth attacks.

Stat changes across the board:

Nerfs to ranged weapons.
Better thematic stat spread on certain weapon types.
Fixes to some weapon types having wrong stats.
Adjustment to takedown damage to account for balance changes mentioned above.
Stats adjustments to enemies’ base stat setups. All enemy health has been increased.
Stats adjustments to specific enemy classes.
Piet’s Passata Soto ability has been nerfed.
The Effective and Ineffective status effects have been nerfed.

Loot tables now drop more mon, to keep your party out of the pauper’s house.

Carrying a bleeding-out character will now temporarily disable the bleeding-out.

Breaking a door using the Break skill is now much quieter so it doesn’t attract the AI’s attention, unlike just smashing it with a weapon attack.

Major Improvements:

The “trade value” is now shown in the UI to make it easier to set up a fair trade with merchants, and we have added an “auto balance” button when selecting how many of a certain item stack to trade.
Added stack visuals for multiple items in trade.
Did a pass on the light menu textures to darken them a bit based on player feedback.
There is now an offset on the camera in the vertical axis when in dialogue, so the dialogue UI will no longer sit right on top of the characters who are talking.
Kage’s and Piet’s beards have been remodeled to fit the player character beards better.
All companion facial expressions have been tweaked in a more subtle direction.
Restructured the filtering of the Perks page by popular demand.
Perk tooltips now show their associated status effects so it’s easier to understand what a perk does before you buy it.
The game is no longer rendered when a full-screen UI is open, significantly improving performance in those cases.
There is now a shortcut to trigger stealth attacks on mouse/keyboard similar to the one on controllers. It automatically detects the closest enemy to attack. Default option for stealth takedown is R, and it is rebindable in the options menu – the previous R binding, “Reset Camera”, is now unbound by default.
Skip dialogue and select dialogue are now bound to different inputs.
Several inputs that were implemented as “Hold” have been changed to “Press” as designed.
Various fixes and improvements to the way morale works.