Greetings Wildkeepers,
Welcome to 0.4. I know it's been a while since the last update, but that's only because this is by far the biggest update we've shipped yet!
Gear Up
The main star of this update, as promised in the roadmap, is the introduction of Gear.
Here's how it works.
As you play missions, you'll collect pieces of gear. Those are permanent, so you keep them after the mission is over. In the village, you can examine your gear, upgrade it and equip it to both Wildkeepers and Guardians.
Each piece of gear can be equipped to every Wildkeeper and every Guardian simultaneously, so nobody is going to miss out.
Gear pieces fit in a single slot, either a helmet, a chest slot, boots, a weapon, ring, necklace, or even some food, a book, a potion and a trinket. Wildkeepers and Guardians have different slots.
Gear combines with the previous Meta-Upgrades system to provide you with more choices than ever to strengthen your team as you progress through the game. Most gear pieces can be made stronger by upgrading them with the appropriate currency. Where will you spend it?
At this time, there are a total of 76 different pieces of gear, each with its own functionality.
And if you've been playing a while and worry about having to go back and farm for gear, worry not. The game will award you some gear when you open 0.4 based on your existing progress, so you're all ready to go!
Quality of Life
Working on Gear, we've had to play the game a lot to make sure it feels fun and balanced, and that has also led to the introduction of a few Quality of Life and polish updates:
Difficulty selection is now presented upfront, and all difficulties are unlocked from the start. You get to decide what level of challenge is right for you.
In spite of adding power with the introduction of gear, the first two difficulty levels remain almost unchanged, but we've made Ridiculous and Ludicrous difficulties even harder, and levelling up will also be slower.
The tutorial for using Supers has been updated, to ensure nobody misses it
Upgrades (both individual and team upgrades) can be enhanced, increasing their rarity. You can get enhancements by equipping the right gear.
DPS numbers no longer include the damage dealt by Sigils, now it's only direct damage by the Wildkeeper or Guardian. You can still see Sigil damage in the tooltip for each weapon Sigil.
Wildkeepers will grunt when hurt, so it's easier to tell when you're taking damage.
The icons in the minimap are bigger and sorted properly, so they're easier to see.
Guardian icons in the minimap look red when the Guardian is fainted.
We improved gamepad controls a lot:
A visual cursor is now drawn over buttons and other UI elements, making it clear what the selection is
Added acceleration when using the analog stick to move the cursor
Button prompts are presented contextually right next to the UI element they affect, besides also appearing in the bottom right of the screen
Polished the UI with the introduction of stat icons, making it more visual
Guardians in the inventory will look red when fainted, and you'll be able to see the revive timer.
The map screen can be scrolled by dragging with any mouse button (besides moving the cursor to the edges)
Infested Mounds will no longer show up as an objective arrow unless they are, in fact, a mission objective.
The Infested Mounds mission has been moved to the right side of the bridge. It's better for players to focus on releasing Guardians at the beginning, and now the mounds can be anywhere in the level.
Wildkeeper collision is now disabled while dashing
And a few balance changes:
Buff Kerpi:
He received 20 block, to make him more durable
His ball drops a heart on every bounce when thrown
Nipper's revive upgrade has been made stronger
Kiraboom will no longer try to pick up hearts
Grampth will stay a bit closer to you
Devouring Tree's health has been cut in half
The Sacrifice Sigil has been nerfed to only absorb 50% of the damage
Some Technical Stuff
Up until now, we had been running on version 5.4.4 of Unreal Engine. It was time for an update, and we upgraded it to the very latest version 5.6, released just a few short weeks ago.
This version should introduce bug fixes and performance improvements, and make it easier to port the game to console as we approach full release.
Another change we decided to implement is to go back to using DirectX11 for rendering. While DX12 offers an opportunity for better performance in some cases, this is mostly true if you use all the latest features in Unreal (Nanite and Lumen), which we don't really need for this game - and which would negatively impact the overall framerate, especially on older hardware.
With the rollback to DirectX11 we also hope to remove hitches due to PSO caching which, even with the mitigation approaches provided by Unreal Engine, seemed to be causing problems for some players.
As with any technical changes, there's always risk something can go wrong, so let us know in our Discord if you encounter any issues.
And with this, we're deep into the next update, which we expect to be even BIGGER than this one, if you can believe it. Which is why it might take a while, but until then we hope you have a chance to experiment with gear and put together some crazy powerful combinations. I know we have.
Sergio.