Hello! Today's 30XX 0.34 introduces powerful new Gamma enemies in 30XX's lategame and scales up lategame Boss health by a modest amount.
30XX's game difficulty hasn't kept pace with increases in player power since we launched 30XX in Early Access, often resulting in runs where if you can make it past level 3-4, you'll probably win - which isn't super fun. It feels great to be an unstoppable crushing machine once in awhile, but we want these runs to feel special.
Our design intent here is that, on an average run, the game's threats should scale slightly more than the player's average power gain - so you'll find the game get tougher the deeper you go most of the time, while still allowing for variance that makes for easier and harder runs. Today's changes are a first step - we'll be overhauling 30XX's enemy designs in the coming months, too.
GAME CHANGES & FIXES:
- Added Gamma enemies! These are a new tier of challenging foe that you'll only see late in the game, joining our Alpha and Beta enemies.
- Today's patch is our first step in this direction, and is far from final. Today's changes add stronger versions of foes, but we're still working on more unique movesets for 30XX's enemy cast (and more enemy types in general!), which we'll be introducing over the next several patches.
- In general, Beta enemy types are slightly weaker than they were prior to this patch, but the new Gamma types are significantly stronger.
- When we shipped Early Access last Spring, lategame player power was significantly lower than it is today - the introduction of powerful new Augs, new Cores, the Resonant Armor, and Set Bonuses make the player very powerful - so as we begin work on our Big Enemy Iteration Pass, we're also making lategame enemies more powerful to better keep up with powerful players.
- Beta enemies will spawn earlier in runs, before being gradually replaced with Gamma foes.
- Some new enemy behaviors use placeholder visuals while we make sure they're fun & well-tuned.
- In addition to Beta/Gamma moveset balancing, some enemies have also had their behaviors tweaked.
- Watergrav doesn't have new Gamma enemies yet. (This patch will technically make Watergrav slightly easier, as the current Beta enemies will spawn later into runs than before.)
- Updated lategame Boss HP scaling:
- Bosses now have 8-30% more HP when fought on levels 4-8. (This means if you fight a boss on Level 5, for example, it has roughly 14% more HP than it had before this patch. At level 8, it's a full 30%.)
- We're pretty sure this is a conservative take - we don't want to push it too far at once.
- We'll keep a close eye on this as we continue to iterate on the game. A few of our bosses are due for mechanical iteration updates, too - we haven't forgotten about that.
- Fixed Experiment 9's Divekick behavior so it'll no longer get stuck for a moment sometimes.
- Fixed Ace's interactions with Li'l Hoot and Forgotten Memento.
- Fixed Ace's Victory animation not playing properly.
- Fixed a scenario where Dracopent's Fang might not store an Ultracharge generated by Dracopent's Claw.
- Fixed an issue where a Miniboss Choice Machine might be usable before defeating the Miniboss.
- Watergrav's Beeg Frog miniboss' mini-frog spawns no longer drop loot or power up Renewal Pod (since it's terrible to feel like you have to farm them, like any infinitely-spawning enemy).
- Fixed Singleton Prototypes also giving the player a blank item.
- Fixed Mega Mode rarely spawning more than four Gauntlet pieces (so they'd reward duplicate Resonant Armor pieces).
- Updated Powerless Void's description to indicate that it reduces Powers gained over the course of the run by -3, -5, and -8 (instead of 2, 4, 6).
- Resonant Armor (other than Arm) pieces now slowly float toward the ground like Memoria and Potentia do.
- Chaser Fish (Watergrav enemy) is now a little more discriminate about when it starts flopping toward players when out of water.
- Fixed Zookeeper's Burden applying bonus Repros when reloading the game.
- Fixed an issue where Save and Quit would negate Zookeeper's Burden's penalty.