New items
3 new items have been added to the loot table! The Chest Armor is Legendary, while the gloves and quiver are Epic in rarity. These items provide some more unique abilities including a defensive barrier to help protect yourself against some of the more recent enemy additions.
Death System Adjustments
Until fairly recently, player death was a rare occurrence. Due to this, the system was not given too much thought as to mechanics and consequences. This update will be the first step in addressing the issue. Many games have a standard "respawn timer" which is the primary punishment for player death. I feel that the inability to take actions is not a particularly fun or interesting consequence, so the respawn timer is being reduced from 8 seconds to 3 seconds, just enough time to see that you're dead and to get some audio-visual cues about respawning.
To replace the timer consequence, a gate damage system has been implemented. At time of respawn, the gate will take damage (effectively you draw from the gate's power to be restored). This solves two issues. The first, and more inconsequential one is that it still makes death meaningful with the reduced respawn timer. The second, and much more important one, is to train players about this system before they have encountered Event Tiles.
Without this system, to lose an event tile would either require a new mechanic to keep track of, or require the enemy/puzzle to damage the gate instead of players as their main source of combat. By implementing a global system that does damage to a gate when a player dies, it effectively creates a life counter for the events, and bosses can focus their energy on killing players as the primary method of attack, leading to more interesting encounters.
The damage numbers are not final, and will likely be tweaked over the next few weeks to end up with a fair value.
Other Changes and Fixes
- Fixed issue where multiplayer map layout could be out of sync
- Fixed score duplicates on leaderboards
- Added new death visual and audio effects
- Improved game UI performance
- Added floating combat text for enemy immunity to certain abilities
- Fixed corner gate rock pathing
- Fixed issue causing rare environment changes
- graphictest branch depricated for default branch, new performanceboost branch created for improved performance at risk of crash on launch.
Still working on the updated Armory inventory selection system, creating an infinite scrolling wheel turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated.