A refund note said the combat "animations don't even hit where they show they hit... you just have to keep running and spamming hoping something would hit." Blunt, and correct. It was a real bug, and it took an audit of the whole combat layer to find. Thanks for leaving it.
Hit registration
- Enemies hit you when their weapon reaches you. Every monster's damage landed on a fixed stopwatch that had nothing to do with the swing you were watching. On roughly a third of the bestiary the blow landed in the first third of the animation, and the goblins you meet first were connecting a fifth of the way in, while the axe was still going up. Damage now fires off the attack that is actually playing, on 123 of the game's 128 enemies. The wind-up you see is the wind-up you get.
- Swinging into a crowd no longer eats your hits. A melee swing could only register so many things at once, and scenery counted toward the limit, so in a prop-heavy room a swing could fill up on crates and land on nothing. That is why fighting a pack felt like flailing: the more crowded the fight, the more hits vanished. The limit is four times higher on every melee class.
- The Knight's sword hits where the swing shows it hitting. Its contact point was on a stopwatch, so anything that sped your attacks up (a level, a talent, a haste buff) slid the damage off the swing. And starting a new swing before the last one landed threw the old hit away entirely. Both fixed.
- Headshots work on big monsters. The headshot zone was one fixed size tuned around a human body, so real headshots on dragons and ogres registered as ordinary body hits. It scales with the creature now.
- Enemy spellcasters fire from their hands. Bolts spawned at a fixed height regardless of caster size, so big ones fired out of their chest and small ones out of thin air above their head. The projectile, the effect and the line of sight now all come from the same point on the actual creature, and casters aim at your body.
- Fewer monsters underground, fewer walls you can walk through. Spawn points that dropped a pack on unchecked ground now refuse the spawn instead, hero collision was under spec and let you push into geometry, and the Level Editor was building colliders smaller than the pieces they belonged to.
Menus
- Every button in the game lights up. Main menu, settings, pause screen, shops and pickers: a warm gold glow when you point at one, brighter while you hold it. On a controller, whatever the stick is on gets a softer version, so you can always see where you are.
- The Feedback, Steam Community and Store Page links are findable now. They were crammed into the last few pixels of the menu panel, jammed against the status line and each other, and most people never saw them. They now sit in their own row along the bottom of the screen as proper framed buttons matching the rest of the menu, and they fill in and glow when you point at one.
Under the hood
- The old combat toolkit is fully out of the game. Its leftovers were still supplying weapon models, attack animations, impact effects and a large slice of combat audio. All replaced. Along the way I found the Warden firing its bow with literal pistol animations: it draws and releases a bow now. The impact effects that rendered as hard-edged white cards are gone too.
- The Barbarian runs on the same combat code as every other class. It was the last one still on the old stack. New kit: a four-hit chain into a two-handed cleave, an overhead smash, and a Rage roar that staggers everything around you and speeds up your swings.
Same ask as always: if something feels off, say so in the Steam discussions or the Discord. This patch exists because one person did.