In our update post yesterday we said we would be checking to see if there were any outliers in the area clear times during the campaign. Now that we have done the first pass of our assessment, we can talk about some of the changes that we are making to improve things.
Our focus this time is on Act 3 areas since this act has a somewhat overall longer completion time.
The Drowned City
This area had a very large dead end that was intended to contain an entrance to an area that was temporarily cut to ship Early Access. Unfortunately this means that in the live version, this leads up to an inaccessible door with no checkpoint. We are removing that part of the level and the part that leads up to it which will reduce the overall size of the area quite a lot, but more importantly prevent the frustrating situation where you go the wrong way and have to backtrack.
Utzaal
This area has exactly the same problem as the Drowned City and we are doing exactly the same fix, but in addition has a second dead end where the entrance to the Treasure Vault is located in the Present version of this area. We have removed that dead end as well.
The Apex Of Filth
This area is shaped like a large spiral which was originally done because the boss arena had to be in the center to maintain continuity with the Past version. We are breaking that continuity to make the area smaller, which will make the area better overall.
The Azak Bog
This area is a large square that has extremely high variance in how long it takes to find the boss because the location of that boss is highly variable. We have changed this area to be more rectangular with the boss at the other end from where you start which means that you can get to the boss more quickly without needing to explore the entire area as well as making it somewhat smaller.
Infested Barrens
This area primarily trips people up because it requires you to find a waypoint to the Waterways before you can continue on to the Chimeral Wetlands if you want to be able to come back easily after finishing Jiquani's Sanctum. We are modifying the area to have a bottleneck requiring you to go past the entrance to the Waterways near the start meaning that there are less things you need to try to find in this area and cutting down the size slightly.
Jungle Ruins
This area had a problem where it was often hard to identify the exit to the Infested Barrens from far enough away. We have made the entrance more clear and moved the checkpoint further so that you are more likely to see it. This area has also been made slightly smaller.
Chimeral Wetlands
This area has some random variations that put the entrance to the Temple of the Chaos very far away from the entrance to the Machinarium requiring a lot of backtracking. We are moving these two entrances closer together.
Jiquani's Machinarium
This area primarily takes extra time due to searching for Soul Cores. We have added an extra Soul Core to reduce the average amount of time it takes to find them.
Jiquani's Sanctum
This area suffers from the same problem as Machinarium. We have added an extra Soul Core to this area as well to reduce the amount of time you need to search.
General Changes
We have also noticed that a common issue is doing a side area and then coming back to the main area and finding that it has been reset, making you need to clear it a second time. We have a more permanent solution in mind for this, issue but as a temporary improvement we have increased the timeout time for areas with side-areas off them. This should reduce how often you run into this issue.
These changes should be deployed within the next few days. Of course, we will continue to monitor things and see if further changes are needed.