Hey everyone and happy Easter!
It's me again, bringing you some fresh content and improvements to the game!
As promised, the second entry into the 2.X patch cycle is a Passive Tree rework. If you followed the game's development for a while you may remember that I said the Skill Tree was releasing in its current state because I had no better idea for the implementation, but wouldn't want to stall the release any further... Well, the time has come to go back to the drawing board and figure out what this system is even supposed to be- and that's exactly what I did.
But before I go into more detail let me officially welcome you to the 2.2 changelog review!
Passive Tree
The above is the brand new tree. I've renamed it to Passive Tree over the old Skill Tree since it's not much of a skill tree, but rather a set of passive improvements.
How does it differ you may ask?
Well, for starters, each node provides better stat improvements compared to the old one.
The branches are now labeled to better indicate what their specialty is.
Each branch ends with a Key Stone, which is a more powerful culmination of that branch. As an example, let's look at the Key Stone of a Follow-Up attack branch:
You can now click on the node to open a side panel with a description. From that panel you can unlock or disable the selected Key Stone or special nodes
As you can see above, a culmination of a branch focusing on cooldown reduction of Follow-Up type weapons results in a buff that is rather significant overall
But the last node of each branch is not the only special node!
Each first node of each branch is a special node that unlocks a mechanic in the game
As an example, the first node of the Reactions branch unlocks the ability to use Elemental Reactions in the game, which means some game mechanics will now require you to unlock the node first to benefit from them.
Lastly, the Elemental Damage path ends with repeating Key Stones that you can continuously invest points into to buff the related stat
Quality of Life changes
In addition to these changes there are some quality of life improvements in place.
As mentioned before, you can freely disable nodes if you don't want the effect to be active.
You can re-spec at any point for free by clicking the Reset button in the top left corner
You can double-click nodes to interact with them: double-clicking on an unlockable node will unlock it, while clicking on an unlocked Key Stone will disable/enable it
You can now zoom in and out to your heart's content (there is no limit to how much you can zoom, do with this as you please)
Also, if you have any points to spend, the Passive Tree entry in the main menu will show a red dot indicator
Because we all love red dots in our menus, right?
That wraps up the quick introduction to the new Passive Tree
I hope you'll find it more interesting to interact with and explore!
Now we move on
Recurrence Difficulty
I would like to introduce a new difficulty called Recurrence
Players get access to Recurrence once they complete the Deep V difficulty with any character, and it is unlockable separately for each map
Recurrence difficulties don't have an upper difficulty limit. Completing Recurrence 1 unlocks Recurrence 2 and so on, each being a harder challenge.
As an additional change, the Deep difficulties will now be limited to up to 3 de-buffs, with 5 de-buffs being reserved for Recurrence difficulties
In Game Inventory
When opening chests, instead of picked-up items being activated immediately, they will be placed into an inventory slot. This way, the use of items can be timed for maximum benefit.
Key-binds for inventory can be freely changed in the settings
Key Prompts
It's a small change, but one that's been driving me insane.
The game will now try to guess which input players are using (keyboard or gamepad) and display proper key prompts for various interactions
Relic Sub-Stat filtering
You can now use text search to find sub-stats and include them in the search. As you can see in the attached screenshot, typing "damage" results in crit rate appearing — that's because it has a flat damage sub-stat.
Additionally, hovering over a sub-stat will now display a small popup with the stat name
Character Tuner Attack Type Filtering
You can now filter the list of weapons by their attack type if you wish to limit your search to just AoE or DoT weapons
New Stat and Relic
Elemental Accumulation has been separated from the Elemental Reaction Effect.
Up until version 2.2, the speed of accumulating element stacks on an enemy was determined by the Elemental Reaction Effect, which felt a bit strange to me. Now the accumulation has its own stat to increase the speed of application, while the Elemental Reaction Effect still remains as a stat increasing the actual infliction effect
Tutorial Changes
I went ahead and improved the tutorial a bit. No more full-screen popups info-dumping. Tutorials will now display text on the side explaining the very basics.
To make things more interactive, weapons will be set to manual casting in a few tutorial scenarios, allowing players to experiment and see the mechanics and differences much more easily
Minor changes and bug fixes
Chest highlight will now disappear right away upon interaction
New post-processing pipeline is now on by default and will be toggled on current save files; you can fall back to the old one in the settings
Optimized background DoT calculations
If a player leaves after the host dies, the game will now end immediately for the host
Fixed Relic equipment flag that got saved when migrating from old save file format, marking relics as equipped even if they weren't
Sprinting did not work in CO-OP
CO-OP player health bar now uses the same reddish background as normal health bar
Fixed the issue with loading certain controls in Control Settings with a controller enabled, which could result in an error or an incorrect button being displayed in either the keyboard or controller section
Fixed mini-boss enemies not leaving Memory Rifts behind after being defeated
ESC key should now close the Leaderboards menu
Fixed an incorrect collider flag on the Angel Statue in the Forbidden Zone map that prevented players from obtaining its achievement
New post-processing pipeline should no longer ignore tonemapper settings
Fixed an issue that caused the new post-processing pipeline to lock the game rendering scale at 66% of the resolution
Fixed a networking issue that caused the game to randomly softlock when a joining player had auto-select upgrades enabled
Afterword + Roadmap
Apologies for the smaller update this month — life's been a bit hectic as of late, and some health issues got in the way too. Nothing serious, just annoying as hell.
There are two more reworks planned for future versions:
The previously mentioned Upgrade Rework, which will touch all weapon and possibly item upgrades to make them more interesting by increasing the impact of player choices during the game
Boss Rework is also on the menu
I'm not yet sure which one will come first. Most likely the boss rework, since it's the easier one to get done.
As for the upgrade rework, I did make a little mock-up a month back, but I have no idea if that's the direction it's going to go
So a rough roadmap as of now would look like this:
2.3 - Boss Rework
2.4 - Upgrade Rework
2.5 - Nóreia Release
2.6 - Old Characters done reworking
2.7 - Completed Story
2.8 - Purely bug cleansing patch with no new content
3.0 - Out of Early Access Release
3.1 - Character Cores - new progression system
3.2 - Capital Map
3.x - The Abyss, a new map with a whole different gameplay being more of an RPG experience
I will try to commit to this roadmap, though some things may shift up or down depending on circumstances. I'm also moving on to work for a different company, so for a while I may have to put development of Requiem For a Lost World aside, but I hope it won't come to that!
Also, I know I was supposed to exit Early Access with version 2.0, but seeing how many things can still be improved, I want to at least get all the reworks out of the way before calling it a release