This update to Fantasy Strike is live right now.
The biggest thing in this update is a new playable character, Lum! We've been working on him for a long time, so we hope you enjoy him. Our other biggest improvements this month are technical in nature. We've improved performance pretty significantly by lowering CPU usage (though we still plan to improve performance even more in the future) and we now correctly handle sound effects during the "rollbacks" that happen during online play. We added a handy new way to add friends in the new "recent players" tab of the friend list screen, and we've done several balance changes too.
CONTEST!
To commemorate the release of Lum, we're giving away copies of his favorite gambling game: Pandante. It's the DELUXE version with professional quality clay poker chips!
To enter:
1) Follow us on Twitter @FantasyStrike
2) Tweet us your favorite picture/gif/video of a panda.
3) Make sure to include #PandasyStrike in your tweet.
We’ll enter you into a drawing to win one of 10 copies of Pandante Deluxe (more than a $100 value!). You’ll have until Monday, November 20th at 11:59pm PST to enter, after which we’ll be selecting the winners and contacting them via Twitter DM.
CHARACTERS
NEW CHARACTER: LUM!
--Lum is a Gambling Panda
--Lum is now in the game.
--Lum is based around item toss, his C button move that throws a random item onto the playfield. His ground super is a slot machine that spits out 4 random items, too.
--Try to cause chaos and make things happen.
We made a video to show you all about how Lum works:
https://youtu.be/4c9n40tCxAo
And our lead developer talks about the design side of Lum in this video, too:
https://youtu.be/O75tRHZMz_4
GRAVE
--Grave jump A and jump B have more pushback.
--Grave jump B has more landing recovery.
JAINA
--Flame arrow impacts now have a variety of different sound effects.
ROOK
--Air super now requires the same minimum height for all supers (though DeGrey’s is an intentional exception). We don’t really know why it was allowed to be done lower than other supers. The net effect is that jumping and then doing it takes 5f more than before.
VALERIE
--Her B,B,back+B retreat now retreats farther so it better avoids Rook’s and Grave’s supers when she baits them.
--Fixed a visual issue that caused the dust effects at the beginning of her C attack to appear too late.
SETSUKI
--C tumbler has 12f projectile invulnerability at the start. This seems to have been accidentally removed last month.
--C tumbler (when holding the button down) no longer throws opponents who are in the air.
--B kick now breaks armor so that Rook can no longer beat both of Setsuki’s B and hold-B options by him doing C throw (or super).
--Hold B throw now has the same extra hit that B-kick has to prevent an option select any character can use to always jump / block correctly vs Setsuki’s hold-B / B mixup by doing the same set of inputs and letting the game give the optimal outcome.
--Fixed a bug that could cause the victim of Setsuki’s yomi counter to fly upward off the screen sometimes if the yomi counter was the last hit of the round.
--Fixed a bug during her B teleport move that would cause all character animations to become frozen if the opponent did a super on a particular frame.
--Added facial animation to more moves.
GEIGER
--Air super duration slightly reduced (by 0.5 seconds).
--Gear projectile impacts now have a variety of different sound effects.
--Ground super distance travelled is quite a bit less. This is a nerf in some ways and helps in other ways. The reason for the change is to allow at least some safe zone from full screen where other zoners can throw projectiles without always being hit on reaction with Geiger’s time stop. Those characters could still win by rushing down, but the dynamics of the match were too constrained by TIme Stop’s reach, so the point here is to allow more varied gameplay, separate from whether it happens to end up as a buff or nerf.
DEGREY
--Fixed the display of DeGrey’s neutral A (first hit) frame data to look sensible instead of wrongly implying that the first punch had two hits of its own.
MIDORI
--Last month we fixed an issue that caused online games to desync if Midori blocked a move immediately after transforming into a dragon. Now, we have fixed a second issue that ALSO desynced the game in that exact same situation.
--Throwing as the Dragon now keeps the victim's block damage state intact so that it works like all other throws.
PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENTS
--We’ve done several optimizations which, in total, reduce CPU usage by a significant amount: about 15%! During online play, you might feel an even greater improvement than that would imply because online play’s GGPO networking basically multiplies the CPU usage (as well as multiplies the effectiveness of this new optimization). On the other hand, you might feel less than the 15% improvement would imply if your particular computer happens to be bottlenecked by the GPU rather than the CPU. (There are no GPU optimizations in this update.)
--Several full screen image effects (such as ambient occlusion, bloom, depth of field) are now disabled on lower graphics quality settings, especially on Lowest. This will help a wider range of computers to run the game at good framerates.
--Fixed several memory leaks. We discovered multiple technical issues that caused the game to slowly use more and more memory over time if you played for long time in a single session. This could result in worse framerate over time until you restarted the program. These issues are now fixed.
STAGES
--Morningstar Sanctuary has environmental sounds now.
MENUS
--The menus have new sound effects for navigation, and clicking on things.
--The friend screen (press tab to get to it quickly) now has an “add friend” button if you’re in mouse mode (rather than game controller mode). This lets you add a Steam friend.
--The friend screen now has a “requests” tab, which lists any pending Steam friend requests you have, as well as lets you accept/reject them.
--The friend screen has a “recent players” tab. Players you face online will show up here, and this tab allows you to easily add them as friends (so you can challenge them directly).
--The XP system has been more fully implemented. Note that XP is not something that ever affects the power level of your characters, it’s only an indicator of how long you’ve played.
--XP now shows up for each character on the character select screen for online play.
--On the versus screen before each online fight, the XP values shown are now correct, rather than incorrect.
--When you reach level 32, the XP system no longer bugs out, causing loud sounds as you wrongly gain dozens and dozens of levels instantly. Instead, it goes to level 100, then flips back to level 1, but gives you a “star” in addition to your level.
--After each quick match, the XP now correctly adds up. That is, it gives the correct values for each possible XP item and it now counts all three games you might have played vs that opponent, rather than only counting the final game in the set that you played.
MISC
--Fixed a bug that made the practice mode training dummy’s settings for wakeup action work incorrectly.
--The practice mode setting for wakeup action and after blockstun action, when set to “random”, no longer heavily favors doing a reversal rather than a throw.
--Sound effects now pause when you pause the game. This is especially good in the case of long sounds, as before they’d continue to play when you paused the game, then when you resume the game, the move making the sound would play out in silence.
--During online play, sounds now obey rollbacks. That means if a move starts playing a long sound on frame 1, but then online rollbacks cause that move to not even really show on screen, you will no longer hear the entire sound effect of the move that didn’t really come out. This was especially noticeable before in the case of playing “yomi counter” sound effects when no yomi counter actually happened on screen.
--Looped sounds (such as from Geiger's gear or Grave's lightning cloud) no longer accidentally play when the SFX volume is set to 0 or SFX are disabled.
--Fixed an issue during online play that would cause movement directions on the PS4 analog stick to do nothing if you attempted to manually map them to the d-pad directions.
--Fixed the problem of the game locking up if you were in the loading screen of an arcade match at the moment that you got a new online quick match opponent.