Greetings Circus-goers!
The release of the Butcher’s Circus is a month behind us, so we wanted to give an update on what’s coming up next for the DLC as well as details on how the Circus Seasons will play out. We are hoping to have this patch ready within the next couple of weeks, and we will have more specific dates once we have a release candidate containing all of these changes.
Season Structure
Since launch, we’ve been planning on adding a Season structure to the ladder to help keep the competition fresh. The next season will start when this patch is released, which we hope will be in the next week or so. Once we have a confirmed date we will announce it here again as well on social media and our discord!
Here are the specifics of how the Seasons will operate moving forward:
- Each season in the Circus will last 6 weeks. During this time, players will have the time to climb the ranks to the Darkest League. At the end of the season, participating players will unlock pieces of an exclusive banner for that season. There will be one piece per league, and a player who achieves a higher league will earn all pieces from lower leagues.
- After the season, each player’s rank will decay based on the highest achieved rank in the preceding season. For instance, a player who reached Darkest League Tier I may now be in Veteran League Tier I (the exact decay may change from season to season depending on how many players reach each tier).
- The season rollover will also give us an opportunity to introduce potential balancing changes in the event that the metagame needs a shakeup.
Here is a list of the other new features coming the The Butcher’s Circus with the next update:
- New Banner In addition to the Season banners discussed above, we also created a new banner as a gift to everyone for bearing with us through all the desyncs we hit during the release window of the DLC.
- Party Builder A common quality of life feature requested since release was the ability to save party presets to make it easier to mix up your strategies and experiment with different builds. Coming in the next patch you can now save up to 5 predefined parties. These saved parties will retain their skill and equipped trinkets and can be customly named.
- Controller Support For all of those that use the gamepad to play the base game, you can now enjoy the Circus without having to swap back to the mouse and keyboard!
What’s next after this release?
After this patch we have a few more items we would like to action.
Mac/Linux Support!
The Mac and Linux builds are so close to being ready for release! We need just a little bit longer to test and ensure they are fit for the wide release. So while they won’t be in this next patch, they will follow very soon after.
Offline Mode and Better Bots
We want to allow users to access the DLC while offline so those who are doing the campaign and see the Town Event but don’t have an internet connection (or perhaps don’t want to face another human user) can still complete the event by facing a team of BOTS.
We also want to improve the BOTS so that they present a little more challenge as well as give our modders access to them in some capacity to allow for custom BOTs to be shared around the community.
Connection Code
Last but definitely not least, we want to continue to improve the connection code. Since release we have made great strides towards a more stable environment. We still have some work to do in this effort. While this change might not be the flashiest, it will help set up the DLC in a great position for longevity as the Seasons progress.
https://www.darkestdungeon.com/the-butchers-circus-season-2-update/