New areas
Better starting area
The improved starting area gives new players more time to adjust to the controls of the game and softens out the difficulty curve.
Extended climb
Past the castle and up the fallen towers is a new climbing zone, its still heavily in development as the focus has been on the assets past this climb. This new ashy zone is padding / infill to set up the end of the climb better and as such isn't going to be anything special, just an easy momentum builder after the technical climbing of the castle.
Improved visuals
Another round of improvements, most notably the new surrounding water and desert shoreline.
Work is also going into improving the far distance effects to help sell just how big this climb is, atmospheric haze and colour shifting along with a dynamic sky that adjusts based on the players altitude!
Hopefully, as the FLAX engine improves so will performance. Most notable is the coming of occlusion culling because believe it or not - EVERY rock, stone, bush and grain of sand is loaded and rendered at all times. No, that's not a good thing and its a pain point on performance. Ideally distant areas would have a sort of LOD system, but until the climb is finished this would be prone to falling out of date. Occlusion culling should provide a good stopgap if I can get it to work well, The climb is bigger than you might think and there's thousands of assets - Thats a lot to consider.
Delivery
There's a fair amount of touch-up and bugfixes to be done along with waiting for a minor engine update. Expect this update to show up in roughly two to four months. Longer than I would like...
