Development continues on Memory's Reach with a lot of little tweaks and improvements making their way into the demo with this patch. But also some big changes to the level design and progression.
Most notably: the Virishal Depths section has been removed from the demo. This was a semi-hidden section accessible after completing the main portion of the demo. However it's inclusion required a bit of custom work and as development continued and changes were being made, it was becoming difficult to maintain two different versions of the game. So I have made the decision to remove it from the demo, which will allow me to focus a lot less on maintaining parity between the demo and full game, and more time focusing on development.
There's a few other little level design and progression changes in this update, as well as a host of tweaks and improvements.
Level Design Changes
Note: Due to extensive design and progression changes in the patch, you may encounter odd inconsistencies if you load a save from a previous version. Old saves should still work without causing any softlocks, but do let me know if you find yourself stuck.
Removed Virishal Depths region from the demo. If you load a save with the player location somewhere in the depths you will automatically be teleported out to the mines entry in Kogil Rainforest.
Some other behind-the-scenes changes to the data structure of Lagash Valley may mean that if your saved position was in certain locations in this area your position may be moved to a safe location in the Temple Plaza.
Added new section to Lagash Valley to contain the Decryption Key upgrade.
Various other minor changes to level design and progression.
Reduced the shard cost required to access the Translocator upgrade. I decided to leave this in the demo even though it can no longer be used to access the Virishal Depths, as it allows players to explore a little more of the accessible areas and collect a few pickups after completing the main portion of the demo.
Gameplay Changes
Removed Energy Surge's AOE blast function from the demo. This is now a separate upgrade you'll get later in the game.
Energy Surge no longer requires a minimum charge to use a level 1 surge. Simply tapping the trigger will fire a surge. As a result it is also 33% fast to charge up a level 3 surge.
Significantly reduced the speed penalty while carrying a dodecahedron and enabled running while carrying. It's still slightly slower compared to not carrying anything, but not annoyingly so.
Allowed throwing of dodecahedrons before acquiring the Energy Surge ability, however the throw is limited to the minimum (zero charge) distance.
UI
Holo-puzzle UI: Renamed "Bypass" button to "Puzzle Assist". This window now provides and explanation of the puzzle mechanics in addition to the skip function.
Removed the language option from the demo. All localizations were (often bad) machine-translated placeholders intended to test implementation and help gauge audience interest from non-English speaking countries. I'm satisfied I have the information I need from that now so I have decide to disable the language option until such time as the game is professionally translated closer to release.
Other little improvements to the settings menu and UI more broadly.
Additional Display and Graphics Settings
Added FSR 3.1, DLSS 4.5, and XeSS 3 support (DLSS and XeSS are Windows only). Additionally, DLSS now actually works correctly.
Added additional granularity to several Lights, Shadows and Volumetrics settings. Additionally, Volumetrics Quality settings should give far more visually pleasing results at lower quality settings while providing better performance improvements.
Added Tonemapping settings which are useful for adjusting the brightness on HDR displays.