Hello everyone,
Our latest update 'Breaking Barriers' is live and making Dead Cells more accessible to everyone. It's been five years since our Early Access release (yep, five freaking years!) and we realised it's about time we made sure that Dead Cells can be enjoyed by as many people as possible.
TLDR
- Loads of new options to improve accessibility, such as adjustable font type & size, input customisation and individual adjustment of sound effect volumes
- Assist Mode including customisation of enemy health/damage, trap speed/damage and parry window. Plus options for multiple lives, auto-hit with primary weapon & full map reveal
- Big reduction in cell cost of early-game weapons
- 7 weapon reworks
If you prefer videos, here's a VLOG showcasing all the changes. Warning for short attention spans: it is 9 minutes long!
So, we're trying to achieve this greater accessibility in two ways – one is a whole bunch of new options, mainly based around visibility and mobility, such as outlining characters and objects in-game, holding a button to repeat actions, or changing the font style and size. There's a full list of these options below.
The other part of the update is an Assist Mode that allows you to adjust elements of the game such as enemy damage, enemy health, trap damage, parry window and trap speed, plus options for auto-hit and multiple lives.
There's also a rework of 8 weapons, and the cost of early game weapons is being heavily reduced to allow players to unlock weapons while also working towards the crucial upgrades like health flasks and gold.
So, why are we adding the accessibility options?
Hopefully we don't need to justify adding accessibility options, but we'd had quite a lot of feedback that the game can be inaccessible for a wide range of reasons.
Dead Cells is intended to be tough but fair - sure, you die a lot, but you grow your skill while gaining new weapons & powers until you can beat the final boss. Then you add a Boss Cell to up the challenge and die to a rat on the next run, pick yourself up and go again until the next Boss Cell, and repeat.
However, we realise that the way the game is designed can put up barriers to reaching this experience for some players. These new options are designed to allow tailored, specific adjustments of the game for those who need it, to make this "tough but fair gameplay" accessible, instead of adding arbitrary difficulty levels which don't actually address players' needs.
We hope that these changes can let more players enjoy Dead Cells as we intended, and if the unaltered version of Dead Cells already hits the right balance of challenge and progression for you, then these changes are all optional - just leave the game as it is and continue having fun :)
If you know anyone who didn't try Dead Cells or put it down because they found it inaccessible, then please do let them know they can come and give it a go!
What are the new options?
All the changes that are described below were tested with a panel of players with various disabilities at AbleGamers, and of course the usual legends in our Steam community. Thanks to everyone who helped us to figure everything out!
Input
These options are designed to address mobility disabilities.
- Hold to second jump
- Hold to roll
- Shield toggle option, instead of long press
- More options to customise controls, especially actions that require a long press or a complex input + joystick action
Additional input options
Visual
These are designed for players with various visual disabilities such as limited visual acuity, colour blindness or who suffer from sensory overload.
- Customisable interface size and transparency
- Choice of game font styles (including pixellated)
- Game font colour customisation
- Font size can be changed for item names, item descriptions and dialogues
- Stats (Brutality / Tactics / Survival ) colour customisation - affects the stats colour for the HUD, menus, icons, weapons, items etc
- Texts in the stat selection menu no longer use "Red", "Purple" and "Green", but "Brutality", "Tactic" and "Survival"
- Display stats icons (fist, lightning, plus sign) next to character stats
- Add an outline to the Beheaded, projectiles, enemies, active skills, NPCs and secrets. Outline colours can be customised
- Add a colored filter between the background and foreground. The color and opacity of the filter can be freely customized
- Synergy and stat icons in equipment menu to help readability
- No-blood mode
- Adjustable particle limit (reduce the particle effect from enemies dying or weapon effects)
- Option to toggle critical hit feedback
- Adjust the size of the attack announcement exclamation mark
Reduced UI size
Transparent UI
Font colour menu
Stat icons displayed next to items
Outlines applied to Beheaded and enemies (plus customised stats colours in bottom left)
Sound
Finally, we have auditory options.
- Adjust volume of different sound effects separately
Everything is collected in a specific accessibility menu to gather all these options in one place! There's no point making an accessibility menu inaccessible...
Assist Mode
This mode exists in it's own menu and allows you to make several adjustments to the gameplay.
- Multiple lives – each time you die you can resurrect from the beginning of the biome (this effectively already existed by quitting the game when you die, now it's just 'official'). You can choose between 1, 3, 7 or infinite lives. This is targeted for players who have involuntary movements or activity, such as muscle spasms, to have another chance if their run is ruined by something that is out of their control.
- Auto-hit – automatically target nearby enemies with your primary melee weapon. The one time that the mobile version was ahead of us! This will automatically attack with your primary weapon, allowing players to just manage their secondary weapon and skills, reducing the need for rapid inputs.
- Adjustable trap damage, enemy damage and enemy health in % increments, plus toggable options for slower parry window and trap speed. This is meant to allow specific, dare we say delicate, adjustment of the game’s challenge. For instance, the standard trap speed can make a Challenge Room require a series of rapid inputs to get through it successfully, which might not be doable for some players. But, if they find the rest of the gameplay balanced already, they can just change this specific part of the game and leave the rest as it is.
- Option to instantly reveal the whole map.
NOTE: We wanted to add a game speed slider at the beginning but it just isn't possible without breaking the game.
I don't really know where to put this in the post so it's going here, but the "Show Kill Count" option is now enabled by default as we've seen way too many people who don't know that this exists, which is criminal.
Weapon Reworks
This update also brings some reworks of older weapons, which were in pretty dire need of a tune-up:
- Barnacle: new crit condition on bleeding or poisoned targets to make it less awkward (and bad).
- Tentacle: lots of bug fixes. It should be way more reliable now.
- Magnetic Grenade: full rework: it doesn't send enemies flying around (often in your head) but instead pulls them towards the explosion.
- Biters pets: now way more resistant to attacks and effects that don't specifically target them.
- Corrupted Power: now in % instead of a flat bonus. No other difference functionally speaking.
- Wings of the Crow: lots of bug fixes.
- Decoy: can be manually detonated after a few moments (it's not a grenade, but you don't have to awkwardly wait for it to explode if you don't want to)
Early-game item cost reduced
The cost of most of the beginner items has been drastically cut, to make the early game less tedious for new players and to make new items a viable unlock option while trying to get your flask, gold and other useful upgrades. This should also make it easier to catch up on your item pool when starting a new save.
Negative feedback for Assist Mode during alpha & beta
Thankfully we saw pretty much zero negative feedback on the general options that we're introducing. However, the Assist Mode has seen a certain amount of 'pushback'. Rather than ignoring this part of the community, we're going to address it here to be fully transparent with everyone.
The Assist Mode is designed to let people to enjoy the game who would otherwise be excluded from doing so.
We recognise that some people who don't 'need' the mode will use it anyway and as a result they will die less and won't learn from mistakes, which is a key part of roguelites.
However, we've put multiple messages explaining this in-game, so it's on them if they want to go ahead and use the Mode anyway.
It's also a single-player game, so people are free to play and enjoy the game as they want, and it doesn't affect anyone else's enjoyment of the game. The only area that it would have affected other players is the Daily Challenge leaderboard, and here we have prevented scores from being registered if players are using Assist Mode.
We are also not disabling achievements for players who use these options. As said above, the intent of this update is to open the game up to players who would otherwise be excluded from enjoying it. We are not going to make that possible and then take achievements away from those players.
If you’re a Dead Cells player who doesn’t need any of the content that we’re introducing in this update, don’t worry we have plenty of shiny new things to introduce to Dead Cells this year!
Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT