DEFENDERS,
Another day, another patch! The studio is all abuzz on getting as much done as soon as we can, so that we can get it into your hands. This is a crazy busy week for the studio, and there’s some stuff to go over, so let’s get into it.
PAX East
Some of us from Chromatic are going to be at PAX East, showing off Dungeon Defenders: Awakened and interacting with our community face-to-face. We’ve got some fun swag to give away, so if you’re going to be there, come visit us, let’s talk games, and have some fun! We’re going to be at Booth #12074 (right next to the big Nintendo booth). We hope to see you there if you’re venturing into the beast that is PAX East!
Key Bindings
This patch coming out today may affect your key bindings, and reset them to default (we've made some changes to key bindings). Just a heads up before the patch goes out here in the next couple hours.
COMMUNITY FEEDBACK: Upgrading
We’ve been messaging with this project from its inception, throughout our Kickstarter, and in pretty much every Steam review that we are listening constantly, and that the success of our game is going to be heavily dependent on our community helping show us what’s important to them and how to make things feel better.
This is the first big change that we’re going to be making due to a TREMENDOUS amount of feedback we’ve received so far. Upgrading is currently WAY too strong on all fronts. It was first surfaced to us via the Propeller Cat being incredibly strong when upgraded. Then we dove into it more, and people provided a ton of feedback and screenshots showing how strong they were able to get via upgrading, and how it didn’t feel good. It trivialized content and overall made progressing and higher tiers feel very easy very quickly. We have a difficulty for that, it’s called “Easy”, but the feedback said that Insane should potentially be named “Sane” because of how easy it was being cleared. After investigating, this was clearly unintended and there was a bug in the upgrading formula.
We’ve listened to the feedback, and to ensure that the game provides challenge, the efficacy of upgrades are going to be restored to their intended values due to fixing this bug. This is not going to only scale to just new gear, only to reroll gear you’ve got, or undo any upgrades you’ve applied. Every piece of gear in the game (equipped, received, and new drops), in regards to upgrades, will be scaled to not provide the crazy amount of stats they were applying. This fix will be coming in a patch later today. We’re going to be keeping an eye on this to make sure it feels great, and listening to feedback from you all based on this fix. Feedback on your feedback, if you will!
This is one of the things we love about Early Access. Players are helping us not ten, not one hundred, but one thousand times more than we would have been able to do so on our own. We also are so proud of our community for pointing this out, that you all WANT the challenge, you WANT to be able to have an achievement that felt good to get, and are pointing out what the problem is, instead of just upgrading and cruising through what’s meant to be the hard content. It’s why we call you Defenders, and not babysitters. You’re here to defend and fight, not AFK and win. This is the exact kind of moment that really just reinforces our decision to listen to our community and work with you to make sure the game is the greatest it can be.
This is such a big fix that we wanted to be as transparent as possible, as soon as possible. Our studio and community have the same goal — making the best Dungeon Defenders game possible, and open communication is a big part of that. Letting you know what’s going on and why certain things happen ensure that what we’re doing is to provide the best experience for the game, and that experience is the one you as a player are seeking.
Continued Feedback
You’ll see it said on most reviews for this game, spammed all over the forums, Discord, and Reddit, but keep the feedback coming through the in-game escape menu feedback link. It’s a direct portal to get feedback to us, so that we’re able to read through it all in one place and get the game the best it can be as fast as possible. We’ve got a ton so far, and it’s been incredibly helpful. Together we’re able to get an extraordinary amount of work done!
Bug Fixes
- Adjusted how upgrades are presented on the upgrade screen to represent improvements better.
- Fixed an issue that prevented getting the final upgrade applied to certain stats.
- Fixed an issue to auto detect when an upgrade was no longer valid.
- Fixed an issue with activating the camera toggle with gamepad.
- Fixed an issue where Ogres or Dark Elf Warriors were not being damaged by Spiked Blockades.
- Fixed an issue where binding left and right arrows to movement removed the character rotation bindings.
- Adjusted how often Dark Elf Warriors target the core, forcing them to focus on players and towers before focusing on cores
- Adjusted some spawners to fix stuck issues on Arcane Library (Survival)
- Fixed an issue where the Squire was able to use Circular Slice without cooldown.
- Disabled the ability to toggle split screen. This was unintended for this portion of Early Access, and was creating an unenjoyable experience for those able to activate it.
- Adjusted Hard difficulty unlocking, requiring players to instead beat the map on Easy or Medium to unlock the Hard difficulty, OR beat the previous map on Hard.
- Gemstones now have different names and descriptions to better communicate what they do.
- Fixed some grammar and typos in pet descriptions.
- Fixed some spawning issues in Royal Gardens.
- Adjusted Royal Gardens crystal core to having 2000 HP.
- Adjusted mana culling checks.
- Adjusted Tornado Valley crystal core to have 1500 HP.
- Adjusted Tornado Highlands crystal core to have 1500 HP.
- Adjusted Throne Room crystal core to have 1750 HP.
- Fixed an issue with chests not spawning in Tornado Valley.
- Fixed an issue that saves profiles correctly on disconnects.
- Adjust weapon damage upgrade caps.
- Adjust ogre projectile targeting to prevent it from getting stuck in spawners.
- Fixed a memory leak that was caused by enemy tac map icons and loot icons.
- Provided options for AZERTY keyboards, so that they can update movement bindings without issue.
- Adjusted some collision and spawners in Tornado Highlands to fix enemies getting stuck.
- Fixed an issue where multiple Hero Boost buffs from multiple Monks were stacking. Now the first Hero Boost sticks, and later applications are ignored.
- Fixed an issue where multiple Tower Boost buffs from multiple Monks were stacking. Now the first Tower Boost sticks, and later applications are ignored.
- Adjusted how many enemies could spawn per frame, and adjusted radius of spawn points to address enemies getting stuck.
- Added the ability to upgrade crossbow ammo capacity.
- Fixed an issue where Block damage reduction was scaling improperly.
- Adjusted Pet Upgrade scaling.
- Fixed an issue where Ogres were not included in Deeper Well (Survival).
- Added the ability to upgrade Pet Attack Speed.
- Fixed an issue where the XP bar was not updating properly on initialization.
- Fixed an issue where filtering by accessory type was filtering all accessory types regardless of your selection.
- Fixed an issue where the Tac Map could be opened while other menus were open.
- Fixed an issue with Ogres getting stuck in Royal Gardens spawners.
- Fixed an issue with Summit clouds translucency.
- Fixed an issue with Damage Dealt and Damage Received show up on the defense tooltip incorrectly.
- Fixed an issue with Defense tooltips not displaying with decimal places.
- Added a fix that destroys drop items if the owner leaves the game.
- Fixed various places on Alchemical Labs that a player could get permanently stuck.
What’s Next?
We’re going to continue to keep working hard and listening to feedback. There's still a bug or two we've had some players running into with smaller progression issues, so sit tight and we'll let you know when we've got a fix for it out. Outside of that, we’re pouring through it constantly, so keep posting it through the in-game escape menu. It’s how we were able to get ALL of these bug fixes taken care of since our last patch, which was TWO days ago. The more you give us, the harder we work, so let’s keep this train going!
Social Defenders
To get reliable updates on the future of DDA make sure to follow us on all our social media platforms:
- Discord
- Twitch
- Forums
Keep an eye out for more info.
For Etheria!
Chromatic Games