Hey everyone,
We’re back with another public alpha! This time around we’re trialling our 24th update, which brings some more item balancing (before the pitchforks come out, check out the extra info below), more rooms for Distillery, Fractured Shrines and Undying Shores, plus some room creation support for modders.
We’re also killing multiple item binding, there I said it. You won't be able to use it in this alpha but you should be able to find it in custom mode when the update is officially released. I’ll expand on this a bit later too.
For the full list of everything affected, check out the patchnotes here.
Item Balancing
So, the idea of this balancing update is to buff the least used items, not to nerf everything powerful into the ground (I think as of right now there are 68 buffs and 20 nerfs, so roughly a 3:1 ratio of buff/nerf).
We’d noticed that a lot of the ‘old’ weapons are just never used after the item pool opens up because theres usually a better option to pick up and hack away with. That takes away from the whole roguelike feature of grabbing whatever the RNG gods give you and rolling with it because it can still kick ass. So, we wanted to give these items some more 'oomph' so you can have more freedom to play around with your build.
As mentioned already, there are a few item nerfs. However, we're not trying to destroy their stats or remove key mechanics, we just want to stop the ridiculous stuff like melting the Giant in 3 seconds flat with Barbed Tips...
Finally, a handful of weapons have had some mechanics tweaked, but these are basically to make things work how they were supposed to work in the first place, like weapons capable of reflecting grenades can now reflect all grenades in range. Let's call it spring cleaning.
Binding
We are also removing the option to bind multiple weapons and skills to the same button and moving it to Custom Mode only. It was a fun bug/feature at the beginning, but now it’s turned into a full on cheese tactic. It seems like a lot of you have a good time using it, which is why we’re going to keep it in the game, but we do need to keep Normal Mode resembling something of a normal game.
For the moment it's disappeared entirely from the game in alpha, but should be brought back in Custom Mode when this update is officially pushed.
Extra rooms
The Distillery and the Fatal Falls biomes were feeling a bit empty, so we've added some extra rooms to give them more spice. Not much else to add here soooo yep, go check them out...
Room creation for modders
Modders rejoice! We have new room creation support for you lot, in the form of Tiled. You probably know that it’s a free, open-source level editor and I have no idea what I'm talking about here so I’m gonna shut up and just let you read the file written by someone more qualified than me.
Just go to the Dead Cells Library page, then to 'Workshop' then 'About' and there is a Google Drive link on the right hand side under 'Related Links' -> 'View Official Documentation':
If we’re missing instructions in the document or anything doesn’t work then let us know and we’ll get it fixed.
How to play the alpha
So, if you want to play through the changes, 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 can you 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.
Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT
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