Hello everyone!
We have just completed our second full day of Early Access and to celebrate we bring to you our second patch, version v0.9.027h! The focus for this version has been on reviewing and reworking the Endless Mode. I will talk a little bit more about it at the end of this post but first, here is the full list of changes for this version:
Full change list for version v0.9.027h:
General changes:
- Endless Mode rework:
-- Entirely changed the scaling progression. You will level up slower, and enemies will have considerably less health, but be more dangerous;
-- Extra Lords of the Void will join the battle, which will pose a much bigger challenge than before;
-- Enemies are now more and more resistant to slowing effects, so you will have to stay alert;
-- Reduced quantity of enemies needed per objective, but more time for you to fight the Lords;
-- Overall we expect the new design to be more challenging, shorter, and a million times more performant;
- Adjusted Achievements to reflect the change in difficulty of Endless Mode, requiring less Cycles for the same rewards;
- Added slider in Graphics settings to control the FPS limit of the game;
- Changed Player Area indicators (blue circles) to be a lot less intrusive, but still help you identify where your skills are landing;
- Fixed issue where arrows pointing to towers or any other object would point in the wrong direction in certain cases;
- Fixed an issue where the Blacksmith was very generous and would not verify for achievement completion before crafting weapons;
- Fixed issue with Legionnaire and the Dogs becoming invisible in the menu;
- Fixed an issue where Totem skills were not adjusting their tooltips according to Buff Duration power-ups;
- Fixed issue where enemies would walk around destroyed objects in The Dungeon of Despair;
- Fixed (fore real this time) the visibility of Demolish not being affected by Effect opacity setting;
- Fixed issue where Piercing Shout would not appear as a skill for the Barbarian;
- Fixed error with certain projectiles when you replace the skill, causing an error;
- Fixed an issue where if you replaced Ice Vortex with another skill at certain point in time, its visual effect would stay forever;
- Fixed an issue where locked character names would show up in the Blacksmith;
- Small performance optimisations;
Balance changes:
- Aelfraed will now use Bladestorm from further away from you, and move slightly faster;
- Reduced damage of Call Lightning from 120 to 80;
- Reduced initial damage of Chromatic Bolt from 70 to 50;
- Reduced damage of Ricochet Shot from 150 to 100;
- Reduced damage of Storm of Arrows from 300 to 200;
- Reduced damage of Chaos Golem from about 400 to about 250;
- Holy Fire now fires 3 light waves in the direction you are aiming, instead of one;
About Endless Mode:
When you have a chance to try this new update, you will notice that it is very different from before, and I wanted to touch on what is our thought process for these changes.
First, the performance issues. The game certainly started getting extremely slow at higher Endless Cycle levels, but unfortunately there are no optimisations in the world that would fix the problem. The problem is that with you being able to reach extremely high levels, 200, 400, 600... you scale your powers SO SO much, that you are firing hundreds if not thousands of skills and projectiles every second, that are as large as the map itself. In practice, this means millions of calculations for physics effects hits damage and everything else every second. There ARE optimisations to do in the game and we will get to them very soon, however, nothing we could do would make this level of craziness scale correctly, it is just too much.
Second, while at first it is very cool to scale absurdly like before, seeing your skills covering the whole planet and all that haha, it leads to a stale gameplay loop. In the previous iteration it was very easy to become immortal, to hit the entire planet with every skill and then you are left watching as the numbers pop-up as in an idle game. It definitely has its charm (if it ran at a decent FPS), but it gets old really fast. Our intention for endless is that you eventually die from a very challenging scenario where YOU are pushed to the max together with your build, and not just your computer while you go have dinner and wait for the level to be over. We believe that with these changes and a more challenging gameplay, we are getting there.
Third, we don't like Endless being extremely long matches. Since the challenge was basically non-existant, you could push endless until your computer exploded, which is not great. We want endless to finish in any amount of time between 20 and 40 minutes. It can go longer than that, but now that is an actual show of skill, not of patience. At times, if your build is not very good, we expect you will have a very hard time defeating the Lords of the Void and may end earlier than that, but that is ok, you can always try a new setup, new skills, new runes, and see how that works out for you.
Finally, we are always open to change. We still want to make more adjustments to Endless mode and will continue working on it and all other features of the game, and hearing your opinion is critical for us. So please, do share what you think! Remember this is still Day 2 of Early Access haha (officially 3 I could say), so the road is just beginning, and we will continue working as hard as we ever have to make sure that the game continues getting better and better.
Whats next:
Having said all that, the work is far from done! We got a lot of other fixes to make and the next big one are the Steam Achievements not syncing. This is an error on our side and will require an update, but we are working on it, alongside many other smaller fixes that will be coming shortly.
I wanted to thank you all very much for your support so far once again, we are blown away by the response to the game so far and I really, really hope we can make it as cool as possible for everyone! We will continue listening, continue working, and we still have A LOT to add to the game! This week we are focusing on these release issues but soon, very soon!
Thank you all for the attention,
Best wishes,
- The dev team