Hey everyone,
We're back with another alpha! This time there's no balance changes or new weapons, instead we're focusing on improving the learning curve for everyone (but particularly newcomers & occasional players), without altering the overall difficulty of the game. All the new features are entirely optional and designed to allow you to improve your skills with no ragequits! OK maybe you'll still get a couple...
TLDR
- Training room - hone your skills against all the mobs and bosses you've seen, except the spoiler boss of course
- Aspects - extremely strong powers to make your run easier (but you can't win the next Boss Cell if you beat the game)
- World map - see the paths you can take through the island
- When you pick up a scroll you can see the change to your overall damage for each colour
- Multi-binding moved to Custom Mode
- Lots of smaller quality-of-life changes
How to play the alpha
If you want to jump into the alpha without any more detail, back up your save first (if the worst happens then there’s a save restore hack detailed here), then follow the instructions below to access the alpha:
- Go to your Steam game library.
- Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
- Select the tab "Betas".
- In the first dropdown box select "Alpha - Not for the faint hearted".
- Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
- Start playing.
Bear in mind that everything is still being tweaked according to feedback, so some things may break, have strange interactions or just straight up crash the game.
If you want to leave feedback (or bug reports) for the alpha, please fill in this short form.
This lets us collect all the feedback in one place rather than spreading it over Steam, Discord, Reddit etc. If you really don't want to fill in the form then please continue to post in the usual places, we're not going to stop checking them out, but just be aware that we may miss things that are posted there.
The Training Room
The Tutorial Knight returns to help you reach your potential. Well, she'll try at least...
Before you reach Prisoner's Quarters you'll find an entrance to a new training room where you can practise against any enemy that you've already faced. The mobs will start as statues (like in Slumbering Sanctuary) and re-animate only when you press the button at the entrance of the room.
We've even given you some presets that reflect the bestiary of each biome to make your life easier, because we're just that kind.
You can also train against all the bosses in their own environment, except for the spoiler boss. Just go through one of the doors at the back of the main room to train against the big guns.
Special tubes and a training Guillain are also there to provide you with all the tools you need to train, so get cracking!
Aspects
To help players reach new biomes and discover more of the game, we're introducing the Aspects - optional super-strong buffs equippable at the start of a run that make the game a lot easier. There is a catch though: you can’t unlock a new boss cell or flawless boss achievements while an Aspect is equipped, so you still need to rise to the challenge if you want to get to the next level.
Aspects provide a specific buff, centered around a core synergy element. The update features 13 Aspects and new ones could be added in the future, if we manage to have any more ideas that is...
World map
Probably the most self-explanatory part of this update, the world map features all the biomes you've already discovered and displays the connections between each level, but again only the ones that you've seen will be displayed. You can find it in the map screen of your current biome.
Other features
- Reminder after killing the Hand of the King to use the Homonculus rune to exit the run (except in 5BC or after the first 0BC kill). No more panicky posts to answer for me, woohoo!
- Total damage change is now displayed when picking stats from a scroll, time to retire the calculator...
- Incentive (cell drop buff) for picking your least visited biomes. Yep, it's time to go back to the [insert your most hated biome here].
- Return stones now teleport you outside their relative Z-door.
- A few tidbits of lore hinting at something coming in the near future, found in High Peak Castle and Undying Shores.
- Multi-binding is now properly removed from Normal Mode and available in Custom Mode.
That's it for now, feel free to leave feedback or suggestions and we'll be back soon with the beta!
Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT
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