Hi everyone!
Before anything else, I would just like to say a HUGE thank you, to all of you that are supporting our work one way or another, grabbing a copy of course but with feedback, bug reports, and in general just being awesome human beings! I cannot believe how lucky we are to have such a welcoming and supportive community behind the game! I really do hope that the game brings you a lot of fun for a very long time, we hope you are enjoying the new content and rest assured that it is still just the beginning, after all, this is day ONE of Early Access!
The path is long, but to take it with you will be an honor! Today we bring the first-ever Early Access update, it is not the most exciting for most of you haha, but will be very helpful to some of you that are facing some of the problems we just fixed! Without further ado:
Full change list for version v0.9.027g:
General changes:
- Fixed issue where certain players are not able to unlock the Barbarian character;
- Fixed an issue where certain players would start the game with the Effect visibility slider all the way to 0;
- Fixed issue where the Cursor on Linux would go invisible after you started a match, and then went to any menu such as pause or level up;
- Fixed an issue where having lots of power-ups would go in front of the Options menu during gameplay;
- Fixed issue where characters can equip other character weapons;
- Increased the size of the Damage number in the ending screen to assist with the very small numbers;
- Fixed issue where Achievements that yield Runic Power were displaying the wrong information;
- Fixed Bloodlust cooldown calculation not working as intended, now Bloodlust properly no longer affects its own cooldown (or the cooldown of multiple instances of Bloodlust);
- Fixed issue where the Demolish skill would not be affected by the Effect Opacity setting;
- Fixed issue where Summon Ballista, when having its duration increased, would not show the increase in the tooltip;
We wanted to get this patch out as soon as possible to make sure that players are not affected by some of the critical problems that have been fixed, but will continue working on further updates over the next few days to address other critical issues, the two main ones being Steam Achievements and Endless Mode.
Steam Achievements
We are currently working into addressing the issue that is preventing the sync between Steam and the game, but it is our mistake. This is our highest priority right now and we expect to have it fixed very very soon. At any rate, all the progress you have, WILL carry over, so you are not wasting any progression right now.
Endless Mode
We know that when you go too deep into Endless Cycles, the game starts to slow down. This happens most of the time because of the CPU, which is having to make millions (literally) of physical collisions every frame to detect and push enemies around while calculating hundreds of thousands of negative effects being added every second. We still have a few big optimisation paths to work on which we will do over the course of Early Access, but I believe we were too generous in the Endless implementation.
To have as open a development as we can, here are our thoughts for an endless rework in the next couple of days:
- Today, when you go into a new endless cycle, we reset your experience but keep your levels. This means you level up very very quickly, and while cool, this is the root of all evil. We will likely reduce this quite a bit, which will make it harder to level up. You will still continue getting stronger, but at a more manageable rate;
- Due to the excessive scaling you get from the excessive levels, enemies end up with excessive amounts of health. We HATE how tanky enemies get now, when the only challenge is your patience. Endless is meant as a different experience to the Curses, which are quite demanding in their own ways, but we don't want them to be excessively long, and especially excessively tanky. You should feel like the challenge is scaling, and not the health bars.
- To build more interesting challenges, we are considering adding Random Curses with every endless level you progress into. This way, we can introduce challenges other than just scaling enemies, and making every tier of Endless different from the previous one. We will test how this feels to play, but we believe will make endless more interesting to play.
With those changes, what we expect will happen is a considerable reduction in the CPU load from the currently extreme levels of scaling, you will still be very strong (but more limited than now), and challenge level will be more varied with different curses every Endless cycle.
We will test those changes, and will likely make them public through the Alpha branch very soon as well, so if you'd like to give us more feedback and let us know what you think, the best place to to reach us out fast is to join our Discord! (https://discord.gg/5RcXb8attT)
At any rate, I would like to thank you all once again for the amazing support, and the patience to deal with the pesky bugs you are finding, and to read this wall of text! haha
Best wishes,
- The dev team