Thank you all for your valuable feedback and for sharing your experiences with Striving for Light!
Update 0.9.10 brings a massive wave of new features, major improvements, and balancing changes—particularly for melee combat and the rogue character. We're also redesigning the Pathfinder UI, adding dodge cancelation and dodge from a standstill for a more intuitive experience and reworking co-op mode to allow greater freedom of movement.
These changes are rolling out early to ensure thorough testing and further refinement before the 1.0 release, so we encourage everyone to try them out and share their thoughts!
We still have plenty of rough edges to polish for the 1.0 release and further improvements and redesigns planed (like condition damage rework), so fear not, if you do not find your feedback addressed in this patch.
New Features
- New Co-op Player Camera System: The existing co-op camera system has been completely reworked to make co-op feel more organic and give both players much more freedom of movement. The new camera system now features a fluid zoom-out when you move further apart from your co-op partner.
- New Pathfinder UI: The Pathfinder user interface has been completely reworked, as the Pathfinder system was quite confusing to understand and had plenty of downsides, especially when playing with a controller.
The new Pathfinder system not only allows map crafting with permanently visible map stats, but it also introduces unique icons for each negative map stat and a new condensed view that grants you a sleek overview of map stats without cluttering the screen. You can seamlessly toggle between the detailed and condensed view. A new feature coming with the reworked Pathfinder UI is grouped map mods, allowing you to see which map mods have been applied multiple times. These map mods can now also be inspected using the controller, which was not possible before.
- Apprentice NPCs: Heleja, Darokin, and Goladir have found new apprentices! When playing character classes that are town NPCs, you will now find apprentice NPCs in town that take over their roles. This means you can still unlock weapons when playing Goladir, unlock skills when playing Heleja, and gamble when playing Darokin. This was a necessary change, as character unlocks are now possible even when not everything has been unlocked yet.
- Dodge Cancellation: A new dodge cancellation system has been implemented that lets you cancel the dodge animation on dodge button release. The dodge distance will now be equivalent to the duration the dodge button is pressed. Holding the dodge button for the full dodge duration will result in the maximum dodge time and the maximum dodge distance. This will also allow completely new uses of on-dodge skills. What about some bunny-hop leap slam?
This is what a canceled dodge looks like if you immediately release the dodge button:
And this is the full dodge range in comparison if you keep the dodge button pressed:
- Dodge without Movement: Pressing dodge will now trigger dodging in the last performed movement direction. This will lead to a much more consistent dodge experience, as it fixes the issue where a dodge might not register if a movement direction was not pressed at the exact same moment.
- Awakened Gatekeeper Rework: The Awakened Gatekeeper spawn chance has been reworked. The Awakened Gatekeeper will now only start to spawn on map Tier 4 and above (previously Tier 2). The awakened spawn chance on a map has been reduced to scale up to a maximum of 80% (was 100%) on a Tier 15 map. The maximum awakened gatekeeper spawn chance will now only be reached on map Tier 15 (previously Tier 10). This rework should keep the endgame more dynamic, as not all high-tier maps will contain an awakened gatekeeper.
Major Changes and Improvements:
- Increased base movement speed of all player characters.
- The maximum zoom level has been increased so that you can zoom out even further.
- Added a co-op icon on the co-op stone in town to indicate where you can start the co-op game mode.
- New Pathfinder tutorial.
- Boss projectiles now get destroyed when you are defeated. This will further prevent boss ability stacking in pinnacle boss fights.
- Projectile modifiers that extend projectile range now also increase the max distance for triggering projectile on-hit effects.
Balancing:
- Reduced boss shield duration scaling in rifts to result in overall shorter shield durations.
- The Rogue now has increased base damage stats with only -30% melee and ranged damage (previously -50%).
- Increased melee damage skill nodes now increase melee damage by +80% (previously +70%).
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed a bug that caused Trembling Ground to be triggered twice.
- Fixed a bug that caused Trembling Ground to deal 10 more damage than your current melee damage.
- Fixed a parallax background effect pop-in on the Pathfinder for ultrawide screens.
- Fixed rift boss shields so they are no longer applied to the first boss encounter in your maps.
- Fixed a potential crash on game startup when failing to receive server time.
- Fixed translations for exit button labels.
Thank you, everyone, for your immense support. Without you, the game would not be what it is today.
Like recently announced we are doing a price adjustment for the 1.0 release which will become active on the 18.2.25.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1646790/view/706602564760633468?l=english
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We truly appreciate each and every one of you!