Hey all,
So that wretched Comic Sans infested update that we launched into beta last Friday night at like 8PM, actually didn't turn into a dumpster fire, which is nice. In fact it seems that you all really like the changes that Noja and the GPPs cooked up for you.
However... We're not actually done with just that.
The Legacy Update:
The Legacy Update is something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. As we moved towards regular updates and iterations on the game, we were always bugged by the fact that we were drastically changing the experience that a lot of people had come to love (something that you all have vocaly reminded us of on occasion).
From here we always wondered whether it would be possible to dig up the old versions of the game and store them somewhere, so that interested players and future generations of developers could look back at how our little game developed and grew into the Action Game of the Year 2018.
So, now you can load up every major iteration of the game from the first build of Early Access right up to present, and we will of course make sure that we stock all of our future major updates in there too. This way, the nostalgic, the ragers and the “it was better before” crowd will always have the option of playing the version of the game that they loved.
How do I access these mythical branches?
- Go to your Steam game library.
- Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
- Select the tab "Betas".
- In the first dropdown box select the version you'd like to play.
- Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
- Start playing.
On top of that everything that you got in the beta of the "Christmas Update" which was just us being tired and hungover, is included for everyone in the Legacy Update right now. So here's the breakdown:
Steam Cloud Hack
I won't go so far as to call it a "fix" but we've now made it so that there is regularly a backup of your saves to a folder that SteamCloud can't get to and delete (which is how so many people have lost their saves up until now). So from here on it, you should, if you lose your save be able to find this backup folder and get it back... Emphasis on the should...
Here's how it all works:
Dead Cells now backs up your save files daily. This reduces the chances of losing your game in case of issues with Steam Cloud, crashes, accidental deletions, etc. Shall you ever lose your save, don’t panic, we’re going to walk you through restoring backups!
TL;DR for experienced users: The game now keeps daily backups of your saves. It creates backups as zip files in the “save” folder. To restore a backup, you must turn off Steam Cloud temporarily, and then you can extract one of the backup zips directly into the “save” folder.
Detailed step-by-step guide:
- First, quit the game and turn off Steam Cloud for Dead Cells.
This is necessary so that you can restore your save files. In your Steam library, right-click on Dead Cells, click Properties, click Updates, then uncheck “Enable Steam Cloud synchronization”.
- Open the game’s local files.
In your Steam library, right-click on Dead Cells, click Properties, click Local Files, then “Browse Local Files”.
- Go into the “save” folder. In it, there’s a series of files named “backup”. Those are the ones that we need. More on those in a minute. You might also see a bunch of “user” files – those are your local save files. We’re going to replace them, so keep a copy of them somewhere else just to be safe! If you’re not seeing any files named “user”, no problem, that just means you’ve only ever used Steam Cloud, so your games had never been saved locally.
- In the “save” folder, pick the backup file you want.
In the save folder, you will find a series of zip files named “backup” plus a date code, such as “backup-2019-12-04-1.zip”. Try to remember the most recent date when your saves were still OK, then pick the corresponding zip file.
- Unzip the backup file directly into the “save” folder.
Right-click on the appropriate backup, click “Extract All”. In the window that opens up, make sure the path ends with “save” (if it doesn’t, you can delete the end of the path):
Then click “Extract”. If Windows says that there’s already a file named “user_0.dat” (for example), pick “Replace”.
- Start the game and check your saves. If the game asks you if you want to use Steam Cloud, it’s important to say no for now – we want to force the game to use the save files you have extracted locally. Then, look at your saves, make sure they’re the ones you expected. If they’re not the ones you want, go back to step 4 and try another backup.
- When you’re satisfied, you can turn on Steam Cloud again if you wish. If the game asks you whether you want to transfer your local saves to Steam Cloud, it should be safe to say yes.
New weapons:
We’re adding in 2 new weapons/skills to the game, they are; the Ice Shield and Ice Armor. Crowd control and panic reduction are our main objectives with these weapons and we hope you’ll appreciate being saved right at the last possible second by your brand new panic button.
Weapon reworks:
Game feel and being able to choose your playstyle has been a core design element of Dead Cells from day one, but let’s be honest, there have been times when the ideas that we had for weapons sounded great… But turned out to be total crap (I’m looking at you Spartan Sandals).
Because of this we’ve reworked the 3 least used (*cough* most *cough* hated *cough*) weapons, with the idea of bringing a lot more balance to the game.
New Mutations:
We’ve added in two new mutations, which for the initiated is kind of a big deal as they have some very interesting impacts on game play for Survival players, allowing more synthesis with ice effects.
Christmas Skin:
It’s Christmas, and why the hell not? So we added in a Santa (jolly fat drunk man) skin. Ho ho ho.
Patchnotes are available here.
Cheers,
Steve and the EE & MT teams.