The Steadfast Steward’s update will be released by the end of this week! 

For those who missed it, The Steadfast Steward’s update has been in an open beta period since May 29th. All the work contained in this release was created in collaboration with the Darkest Dungeon community. We pushed 8 updates over the course of 7 weeks for players to test, hosted numerous discussions, and posted both polls and exit surveys to gather community feedback. 

This process saw us making a large number of tweaks and adjustments to many systems across the game. In preparation for the release build, we thought we’d recap some of the biggest changes coming your way.

UI Updates

Steadfast Steward includes a number of UI improvements, primarily focused on tooltips and tokens. Tooltips overall have been made more uniform to improve readability. As for the token glossary, special tokens now only appear if contextually relevant and token colouring and categorization has been updated.

We also spent some time adding more information to the Academics View. This has now been expanded to include more helpful information while you’re in combat. For monsters it shows requirements and conditions for skill use. For heroes, we now show skill cooldowns, skill uses, and stress RES. Speed can now also be viewed on this sheet for both heroes and monsters.

Design Updates

The Steadfast Steward’s update contains a large number of design changes to the game, including  hero reworks for the Plague Doctor, Runaway and Occultist. Aside from those extensive hero reworks, we wanted to take some time to briefly highlight a handful of the system changes you’ll find in the update.

First up, we continued with more changes to the Ordainment system to make it more interesting and impactful on gameplay overall. The +10% Bleed, Blight, Burn RES Piercing buff has been removed, and several Confession specific buffs have been updated, primarily to replace Apply On Hit: DOT (10%) effects. We’ll have the full details on this in the patch notes.

The community also voted for us to spend some time looking at the Memory system. We’ve added the late game ability to reroll hero memories, and have reworked a number of existing memories. These changes focused on improving the low performing Memories and replacing them with more useful, simple modifiers. With the addition of memory rerolling, we hope that late-game players can engage with this new feature to work towards their ideal combination for their heroes.

Another featured update in this build is our changes to Battle Advantage Modifiers. The previous set of 8 modifiers were not hitting their stated goal of providing variety while also offering increased challenge. This small pool also led to encountering the same battle modifiers too frequently, which could be frustrating. A great example was running into Hastened Enemies (+4 speed) who also happened to be Ordained (which previously also granted bonus speed). With this review, we updated many of the existing modifiers and decided to add several new battle modifiers to help increase variety. We wanted to keep the buffs and effects relatively simple, and to tap into token interactions and effect triggers that most enemies can take advantage of. New modifiers include Entropic Enemies, Vengeful Enemies, Intimidating Enemies, and more! 

Gameplay Updates

We used the Steadfast Steward as an opportunity to add a run modifier section to the Altar of Hope called The Dam. This allowed us to address a number of community requests we’ve received since release. This update will allow players to toggle the following options for their expeditions: retreating in Confessions, selling at the Hoarder in Confessions, having the Mountain appear at all inns, and increased chances for battle modifiers to roll in all encounters (these three later options will only be available once the game has been completed). There are plans to add additional options to The Dam when/where appropriate.

Another highly requested feature we’ve added is combat and driving speed toggles. These toggles can be found in the Options menu and will allow you to independently increase speed of driving and combat up to 1.5x.

What’s still to come

We accomplished so much since we started this process in May! You’ll be able to see the full list of changes once The Steadfast Steward’s update goes live on PC and Mac.

Console players, we have news for you too! We have begun the porting process to bring all these changes, as well as the free Hero Origin Pack, to our supported console platforms. More specific dates/times will come in the following weeks. 

What’s next? Players can expect a new Kingdoms module dropping at the end of August on PC and Mac. This 3rd free module features the return of the Crimson Courtiers. Once the K3 module is released, our team will return to the final two hero reworks - Hellion and Leper. Similar to the Steadfast Steward’s update process, both of these heroes will be available to test during a limited beta period on our coming_in_hot branches so we can collect public feedback before they get locked in.