I was originally planning to have one of the new maps out around now but I have found myself backtracking slightly. There are several smaller elements that previously were brought up but aren't meshing together as well as they should.
So, let's talk about some of them:
Your main goal throughout Zofia is to stop the blight - There was kind of a vague goal of following areas overrun with blight would eventually lead you to the source, but this doesn't seem to click very well.
(Can I get away with calling that a blightsaber?)
A solution has been to add a unique enemy who acts as a 'boss' that, once defeated, clears out the blight. The boss should be marked with these pinkish embers. This should be a better short-term goal as you're on your long-term hunt for the blight source.
Another issue you may have noticed is you have a kick button, but not a lot of objects to kick. This mostly due to online multiplayer, where physics like to do weird things. Fortunately I think I got some kinks worked out and I have been going back and various objects with physics-enabled versions.
(Take that, casual and tasteful modern lobby chair!)
Enemies have been updated so you can kick these items into them and do damage. You can also grapplehook and pull these objects along, but this mostly results in a very unreliable wrecking ball. (But a neat potential puzzle mechanic)
An issue you probably didn't notice was the dialogue. Zofia has a relatively basic dialogue system that you have probably seen before. Some of the dialogue options are gated behind stat/knowledge checks, and will show up as [Attribute/Knowledge] if you've passed them.
(I also lowered this menu so you can see the NPC's face)
Having all the possible options listed but inaccessible if you don't pass the check might be cluttered, so I'm looking at (potentially) doing this the other way: If an NPC throws a skill check at you, you can answer regardless, and the NPC's answer will show if you've failed or not.
Not for knowledge checks, however, because if your character doesn't know about something, they can't take a shot at using it as an answer.
This leads me to the next point...
I'm going to split up attributes and 'skills'.
(Maybe this should say 'Rapier skill is now level 7'?)
I originally intended to have only basic attributes, like 'Strength' and have it as something you slowly increment over time throughout the story. My problem with it ended up being progression was very minimal but also easy to abuse. Since there are only 6 attributes, power leveling any of them would greatly slant the game's balance and kind of break the game. (Except Charisma which isn't currently useful)
Doubly so in multiplayer, where you may be deprived of XP depending on your party, and where things are easier to break.
The skill system should be less game breaking, allow for some character specialization, and make some less-than-useful-attributes (Charisma) to be tied to skills that can be much more useful.
Last notable change!
There are difficulty options hidden away in the HUB, marked on gravestones. Didn't find them...? Well that's ok, it seems not a lot of people did - These are going to be moved to a much more obvious location. Then if you're running into a particularly hard section or trying to level break but keep dying, you can set the level lives to unlimited.
I know I keep saying this, but the new levels should be soon, I got caught up with all these other things above, as well as fixing some weird issues I keep getting bug reports on. You'll likely see the combination of all of those and these things above in one big ol' patch.