Hello sinners! It’s been a while since the last update, but there is a good reason for that. I’ve been hard at work at the single biggest update since release, a complete and total combat overhaul! Every single player attack and animation has been reworked to look nicer and be more responsive, and the combo system has been revamped entirely to be smoother and more rewarding in the context of Mortal Sin’s frantic combat encounters. This changes the game dramatically, and many of the old cheesier, spam friendly strategies have been nerfed or removed all together. In their place is a more polished, more varied, and more rewarding combat experience that is closer to the original design intent.
New heavy attacks that hit so hard they'll make you squeal with sinful delight!
The monk can now charge his attacks, perform thrusts, and perform whirlwinds, opening up his play style.
Quaffing a potion takes some time now, so think before you use it. Sometimes it's best to kick your enemies away before you go for a drink. Glug glug.
Performing combos has never been easier with a new buffering system and the ability to keep comboing after blocking. Also, every combo has been reworked to have different animations and more potent finishers.
But that's not all! Here is a comprehensive list of the major changes in this update:
Content
- Completely reworked every player attack and animation in the game! Attacks should read a lot better now and feel more impactful than ever before.
- All weapon sets (including fists) have access to the common set of combos with some move variations. This means that with fists for example, you can charge power strikes, do thrusts, do whirlwinds and more!
- Spell casting revamped: You must power strike in order to cast your spell or else you will get a melee staff attack. However, there are far more ways to power strike now from combos and also staff durability has been increased across the board to make them more viable as main weapons. All of the magic classes are now tightly integrated with the combo system which makes them much more rewarding and interesting to play.
- Added new attack types such as power thrusts, fast power strikes, fast whirlwinds and (slow) whirlwinds.
- Every combo has either been reworked or replaced. There is always a tradeoff in time to execute versus how desirable the finisher is and this must be weighed into your decisions.
- Combos can flow into one another seamlessly!
- Drinking potions now has an animation making it a more strategic consideration.
- Blocking, drinking or swapping your weapon does not reset your combo, allowing you to “hold” your combo and pick up where you left off.
- Added a buttery smooth action buffering system that makes performing combos way easier than before.
- You no longer need to actually hit something to perform a combo in most cases
- Added active frame canceling, which allows you to cancel the recovery animation time of your current attack by performing any other action (even if you don’t hit anything). There is also still hit canceling as before, which is even faster than active frame canceling.
- You can cancel the early startup frames of any attack with a block now.
Balance
- Whirlwind is now a baseline ability that doesn’t need to be unlocked
- Overall player speed has been reduced a bit, so I lowered all enemy attacks, movement and projectile speed by about ~25% or more to compensate. Also helps with parry timings which were somewhat unreasonable before.
- Enemies are stunned for quite a bit longer than before
- Enemies will now flash briefly before blocking or attacking
- Enemies no longer animation cancel with defensive options such as dodges or blocks
- Most whirlwinds have a slow startup so that spamming whirlwind is now longer the go to option in every situation. Sometimes you need to use the faster combo strings in tight situations instead.
- Removed Brawler passive skill since it would allow fists to reach silly levels of speed
- Removed Swap Cancel technique. It was a little too spammy and I wanted to encourage other movement techniques, although swapping your weapon and bashing is still the fastest movement option technically.
- Infinity Blade has been renamed to Pins and Needles. Now allows you to hold thrust for up to 2.5 seconds (was endless before leading to some silly abuse).
- Spellweave now shoots a fireball instead of waveblade and works for any staff thrust
- Guard break / Guard Flinch state now trigger with fists and bash as well instead of just weapon swings
- Thrusts no longer cause you to dash forward
- You can stop your dash by releasing movement input now (kept going forward before). This means you can now reliably bash in place without moving from the dash that goes with it.
- Whirlwind weapons now do a weaker half-duration whirlwind as their basic attack. This makes it so that you still need to either charge or combo to get the full power strike whirlwind.
- Increased the range of kick slightly
- Cheat Death now has a 30 second internal cooldown
Polish
- The final boss’ scares are now a different color to stand out more against the floor of the maw of sin.
- Reworded Perfect Parry to simply parry (parry versus block so no need to distinguish further)
- Reworded various unlockables, descriptions and tutorials to be more clear
- Removing enemy shields with a parry now plays a special effect
- Gladiator’s Battle Cry ability has an animation and plays an actual battle cry sound now
- Made Bloody Palm blood balls smaller so its less intrusive
- Gave the forest swinging branch trap a blue hue to make it a bit easier to see
Bug Fixes
- Fixed the alignment of the ability icon UI in all resolutions
- Holding block no longer cancels your ability right away
- Removed Tainted Treasure curse for now since it is likely to be causing crashes
- Removed Darkness curse since its intrusive and causes some performance issues
- Fixed many player animation bugs related to the old clunky animation system which has been replaced
- Fixed bug where the player death animation would sometimes cause the camera to clip through the floor
- Fixed bug where Helena’s level up ding effect would keep playing after coming back to the starting area each time
Thank you for all the support and I hope you enjoy this update! It was a lot of work but I believe it has taken the game to a new level of quality. As always, if you have feedback, feel free to stop by the discord server. I'd love to hear from you!