As I type this, I melt away from the summer heat! That being said, it's a great day to update Odyssey with its first DLC! This DLC Package: The Dev Commentary is something I've always wanted to do with a game, and it's a great opportunity to test out DLC integration into the game, because we have so much more coming along the way. The DLC is also completely free!
Patch highlights:
Developer Commentary DLC
New Side Quest
Soundtrack Release
Engine Optimizations
New Side Quest: The Grand Dremid'ir Bar Crawl
Travel to the Eastplains to the town of Ixonia, to the newly created tavern: The Kapaleia. There you can talk with Iosef, who will send you on a journey to visit and drink at all the other taverns across the lands! You'll see some new locations, meet some new people, and more importantly, be rewarded with powerful new bonuses!
This quest comes with an expansion of Kor'rin Temples, with new shops and NPCs, and three new taverns all across the game world, and some new dialogue with a couple of existing NPCs. This quest is included with the update, you do not need the new DLC for it.
Free DLC: Developer Commentary
After enabling the DLC, you can play a scavenger hunt to discover over 100 developer comment nodes peppered throughout the world. Some comments are long, some are short. Some will show snippets of old bugs, code, or even concept art as either one of the two game devs for Odyssey tells you about some facet of the game's behind-the-scenes development. Some of the comments will give hints or spoilers to the game's storyline, as the comments assume you already know everything about it.
Some of these nodes are placed in non-repeatable locations, such as Northern Forest, or Pammod Ruins, so we suggest enabling the DLC for a fresh, second-time playthrough of the game. The game will track how many comment nodes there are, and how many you've found in the pause menu, very much like how chests are, so you'll always know what's left to find.
Performance Optimizations:
There's been even more work to make the game run better. I feel like now that I've had a time to watch the game be played without the stress of needing to make all of the game's content, I can observe how it all works easier.
There's been a lot of optimization to light sources, the main factor to FPS loss in any local screen draw, I've also done what I can to cut down on unused level geometry and collision to squeeze the slightest FPS improvements where I can.
Lower spec PC's can rejoice -- Odyssey's VRAM consumption has been cut in half. This patch will possibly seem like a very large download because the compression of most assets in the game have been changed to save on VRAM, absolutely slashing the average VRAM use in a level by 50%. Bigger levels that used to use an upwards of <3.5gb of VRAM now use closer to 1.6-1.8. If your PC is of a stronger variety, this change will most likely not do much to impact your moment to moment performance, but lower end rigs with less RAM to spare will certainly notice an upgrade. Sadly, some of the larger levels, such as New Bastion, I am still trying to improve performance for.
If you're interested in reading the raw patch notes, you can find them on our website, on a new page that will hopefully be going live very soon!
We'll be back again soon with even more content! We have a lot of exciting stuff planned for Odyssey over the rest of the summer!