Difficulty Changes (General)
Gate Closing - Closing the 2nd and 3rd gate will now increase difficulty by a small amount. The 2nd gate increases the difficulty by 25, and closing the 3rd gate increases the difficulty by 50. This happens each time the gate is closed, including restoring the gate via critical strikes.
Increase over time - The difficulty that passively increases over time has been significantly reduces (by 25%), to rely more on active difficulty boosts such as combos and headshots.
Difficulty Crate - The difficulty crate in the second zone no longer scales with the number of players present (which was a bug). Additionally, it has been scaled up to the current difficulty range of 1-1000. It now grants a starting difficulty of 150 (up from 30).
Enemy Type Threshold - Harder enemy types will now be restricted to much harder difficulties. Before, every enemy was available to spawn at diffuclty 100, this has now been transformed into a 1000 scale (ie. Shield enemies will only start spawning after Difficulty 500). This should lead to a much more manageable difficulty curve.
Difficulty Changes (Curves)
Many of the difficulty scaling systems that previously used linear formulas (ax+b) now use customized curves.
Spawn Rates - Previously, the enemy spawn cooldown was a simple formula of: SpawnCD = BaseSpawnRate / (CurrentDifficulty/80)This has now been changed to dividing the BaseSpawnRate by a new curve evaluated at the current difficulty, it is more exponential, leading to a lower spawn rate in the beginning of the game, but the same spawn rate near the end.
Enemy Movement Speed - Previously, enemy movement speed was a static formula multiplier to each enemies base speed range:SpeedMult = 1 + (CurrentDifficulty/600) Now, each individual enemy has its own speed multiplier curve allowing certain enemies to increase in speed at a different rate than others. It also allows for an exponential increase at higher difficulties and a much slower increase at lower difficulties (0-500) instead of a simple linear increase.
Thrown Orb Mechanic Change
Due to a number of requests and first hand experience with "dropping" orbs, the throwing mechanic for ability orbs has been changes.
Instead of pressing down the touch pad to spawn an orb, and then releasing the touch pad to release the orb, the new mechanic will be to press the touchpad to spawn the orb, and then pulling the trigger to release it.
This new system should feel more comfortable, as you won't risk letting go of the controller, since you actually hold it tighter. And it also should prevent and accidental releases of the orbs as a secondary input is required.
If, however, you have grown accustomed to the previous throwing mechanic, you can swap back to it by using the settings menu, going to Controls, and turning on the "Touchpad Release to Throw Orb" checkbox.
The tutorial voice over has also changed to accommodate this new mechanic.
Performance Improvements (Enemies)
Animation Culling - Previously, enemy animations always ran regardless of their position on screen (even if they were not visible). This is because the damage and audio system was tied to their animations. However, moving that code to a timer based system that uses the length of animation clips instead of current position in the running clip, the game can now spend animation resources only on enemies that are visible on screen. This should be a sizable performance improvement.
Animation Compression - Previously, enemy animations were not modified from their original files. Now however, they use Unity's animation key-frame reduction and animation compression system to reduce the amount of processing required to run the animation.
Performance Improvements (Misc)
- Slight performance improvements when loading into multiplayer
- Removed Time-Warp physics logging
Other Changes and Fixes
- Moved around arrow alters for better zone synergy
- Continue panel button activation delay is now enabled for singleplayer
- Fixed flying enemy path error
- Fixed error about negative collider size
- Teleport delay on close reduced to 1 second (down from 3)
- Close gate teleport will now be canceled if gate is destroyed
- Fixed Workshop Uploader item type (this is the cause of large update size)
- Changed Workshop Uploader tag system
- Added tutorial line about voice chat in multiplayer