Another month, another patch! This time we have some much needed fixes, and more polishing to get us closer to a full release.
First of all, we've added Follow Ally. A new power for use in exploration only, you can select your friend and select Follow Ally and the game will keep you on their tail until combat starts or you use a power!
Rather have someone else control where you're going, or set up a marching order? Now you can! Also, if you're sitting in the menu long enough (~10s), and the camera nudges you back on screen, you'll now auto-follow the nearest ally, allowing the rest of the party to keep exploring. You can turn off this behaviour in the main game settings, “Menu Idle Auto Follow”.
Secondly, now when the party wipes (TPK, aka Total Party Kill), instead of just resurrecting you at the nearest Destiny Marker, we actually reload the game from the last checkpoint save. This prevents "zerging" encounters. An encounter too difficult for you? You can always turn down the difficulty in the Main Menu Settings.
Finally, as many have noticed, our game was in dire need of some optimization, especially around The Prologue. Well, we've taken a lot of time this patch to really get down to the nitty gritty and fix up our bottlenecks.
The Prologue has had significant art optimization done, making it run 2 - 3 times faster than previously on all graphical settings. Keepers and Pilgrims now have multiple LOD models which should make lower graphical settings run a fair bit faster at the beginning of The Prologue as well. Combined with a few systemic programming optimizations, and the game should run faster in general. Let us know how it feels!
Here are a few other fixes and improvements in this update:
- Melee Line of Sight removed. Previously, if there was an enemy between you and your target, you'd have been limited to ranged powers only. We weren't communicating that very well, and it led to a lot of frustration and just looked like a bug to players. We're removing the restriction for now to test how that goes.
- Interacting with things such as chests, dialogue nodes, skill checks, etc. should now be significantly more consistent. Already on the node? Should be able to activate it; targeted an ally first then the node? Should activate now; Destiny Marker overlapping interaction node? Should be able to activate it now.
- Status Effects now show up in White above the character when being applied to make them more obvious. We also now show status effects falling off with gray text so it should be more obvious as to the lifetime of status effects.
- Powers on the Power Wheel should now have a set spot and will never move, even if you purchase new powers or upgrade current ones. So if your top slot is Slice, it will always be Slice. No more dancing powers!
- And more...
You can see the complete patch notes here.