Changes have been made to enhance close quarter combat and make it feel more satisfying. Apart from that, this is kind of an under the hood pre-patch for major updates to come. During the past months we have rewritten the majority of the game code to support two major upcoming additions to Karnage Chronicles, namely Content Update 2 and Co-op. With the amount of changes done to the game code there might be new issues that we have not been able to discover ourselves, hence this pre-patch to make sure things are good.
Rare Crash: In order to fully support native resolution for different VR headsets we upgraded to Unreal 4.19 but unfortunately this comes with its own set of problems. There is a render crash deeply embedded in the engine code that seems to only effect VR, and we have spent a considerable amount of time debugging and making workarounds, but crashes might still happen when loading from one area to the next, although rarely. If this happens to any of you just fire up the game and try again, all your latest character data will be intact. Apologies in advance to anyone encountering the render crash. We will continue working on a solution to this problem.
NEW STUFF
- Changed melee combat. Monsters will no longer stay rooted to the spot, they will instead stumble when hit. There is also a chance that parrying a player's attack will make a monster stumble. Stumbling monsters are unable to defend against attacks.
- Added chance of dazing monsters with a strike to the head with a melee weapon. When dazed they will be unable to defend and attack.
- Added stealth kill for ranged attacks. Hitting an unaware monster in the head will result in an instant kill. Bosses and mini-bosses cannot be killed in this fashion.
- Added several new information boards explaining game mechanics. Some are placed in the lobby where the training dummies are and the rest is placed at the beginning of level 1.
- Added patrolling monsters.
TWEAKS AND CHANGES
- Changed how monsters make parry decisions. This was done to plug parry dead zones and to reduce the teleport parry issue. Monsters can now parry from any angle and are not using canned animations for parrying.
- Changed how monsters make attack decisions. There is no longer a standard delay between attacks, instead the time between attacks will vary depending on difficulty. Keep your guard up.
- Changed how monsters make decisions on closeness to player during close quarter combat, this especially effect instances when there is an elevation difference between player and monster.
- Added a face stab shield breaker attack to the spear wielding goblin.
- Added a leg bite shield breaker attack to the wolf.
- Added proper limping and crippled animations to monsters.
- Added a "sell all" bag to shop interface. This will sell the whole stack that an item came from.
- Added a proper idle animation to the shield wielding goblin.
- Added possibility to hit water with a melee weapon.
- Changed the shield block effect to be more visible.
- Changed the parry effects to be more visible.
- Added forward momentum to ragdoll.
- Added possibility to hit dead monsters.
- Added random antics to monsters that are not engaged in combat.
- The shield wielding goblin may sometimes actively use its shield to block incoming arrows.
- The knife wielding goblin may sometimes actively use its weapons to deflect incoming arrows.
- Changed how long dead monsters stay, they will now dissolve after a few minutes.
- Added velocity to banging own weapons against each other, both sound level and size of particle effects will vary depending on velocity.
- Combat effects caused by a melee weapon will now show on impact point instead of the weapon tip.
- Remade weapon parry and shield block sounds.
- Tweaked difficulty on Hard and Impossible. These modes should now provide a more balanced challenge through the levels.
- Added terrain rotation to spiders and wolves.
- Separated metal and wood on the training dummies.
- Striking environment will always result in haptic feedback. How much depends on the velocity of the strike.
- Size of blood effects when scoring a critical hit have been increased in size.
- Reduced walking speed of roaming monsters.
- Reduced sound level from mosquitos, firing crossbow, and using teleport.
- Moved starter gloves higher to make them easier to pick up.
- Optimized player inventory, this should result in less hand jitter when inventory is full and open.
GENERAL BUG FIXES
- Fixed several issues that was causing goblin melee weapons to sometimes ignore parries and shield blocks performed by the player.
- Fixed an issue where haptic, audio and visual feedback was not always playing upon successful parries and shield blocks performed by the player.
- Fixed an issue causing arrows to sometimes pass harmlessly through monsters.
- Fixed an issue causing pots to not always break when hit by an arrow. Now they should always break.
- Once triggered, the horn on level 3 should no longer sound again upon re-entering the trigger area.
- If the Eye of the Dwarves is not picked up and the player later comes back searching for it, the crystal containing it will again levitate down from the ceiling. Once this quest item has been picked up the crystal will never again appear.
- The arrow trap in level 1 should now remember it has been switched off when a player returns to the level.
- Fixed an issue where 0 was displayed above monster health bars when their attacks was parried and shield blocked by player.
- Fixed an issue where monsters would not cause damage if hitting a player's hand.
- Fixed an issue where player belt would prevent monsters from causing damage if it was hit.
- Fixed an issue where melee weapons would sometimes go through a goblin spear without showing any parry effects.
- Fixed an issue causing monsters to suddenly freeze.
- Moved a few loot drop locations that were unreachable.
- Fixed an issue causing sleeping wolves to sometimes be standing when spotted by a player. They should now be in sleeping state.
- Fixed an issue where it was possible to teleport on top of the ship frozen in ice.
- Fixed a few issues with the spiders. They should not attack empty air anymore and generally be a bit better at hitting the player.
- Fixed an issue where using a town portal scroll close to the Spider Queen would cause her to reappear even after being defeated.
- Fixed an issue where using a town portal scroll before breaking the crystal in level 3 could cause some goblins to start porting in again.
- Fixed an issue where the town portal location in a dungeon would become the respawn location of the player after dying.
- Fixed a visual issue when selecting save game in the Lobby.
- Fixed an issue that was sometimes making a health bar appear in front of the player's face when entering a dungeon.
- Fixed an issue that was making some monsters roam across an entire dungeon. They will now roam within their pre-defined area only.
- Knife wielding goblin has learned to pee.
- Fixed an issue where the rope in the tutorial did not always cut on first try, even if the weapon velocity was high enough.