(For the best viewing experience, please read the original copy of this post on Shatteredpixel.com) Hey everyone, happy Valentines day! Back in December I estimated that v3.0 would be gearing up to release in late January or early February, so it's time for a little update! While I have missed that estimate, v3.0 is very close to being ready. I now estimate that it'll be releasing around the end of the month, maybe the very start of March. This delay isn't for any one specific reason, every little thing for the Cleric has just ended up taking longer to design and implement than I expected. Currently the Cleric is almost totally playable in beta, and I expect to be releasing their final armor ability (Power of Many) in the next few days. This is actually going to put the Cleric's total development time at almost exactly the same 5.5 months that the Duelist took! I do think that the Cleric is going to launch in a better place than the Duelist though. While there will always be things to improve post-launch, gameplay analytics and player feedback are both notably better for the Cleric than they were for the Duelist at this stage. v3.0 is also launching with a little more side-content than v2.0 did! There's some pretty big balance changes to several trinkets (Clover and Censor are actually good now I promise!), and new game visuals! Firstly, the new title screen I teased last time is now in-game!
There are also improvements to the older hero splashes! It's been about 5 years since these splashes were added to the game and Aleks wanted to revisit and spruce them up a bit. The Warrior's improved splash isn't quite ready for primetime though, but v3.1 is going to focus on him anyway so that works out. Here are some GIFs comparing old and new. Note that because of GIF compression these splashes look a bit different than how they appear in-game though:


If all goes well then v3.0's beta should be content complete in another week, and then it'll be time for final polishing before release! [hr][/hr] If you'd like more frequent incremental updates on Shattered's development, you can: - Subscribe to the Shattered Pixel Newsletter - Follow me on Mastodon - Follow me on Bluesky I've actually been posting about The Cleric's development incrementally on these places for the last couple months. You can discuss this Blog Post here on the Steam Community, or on the Pixel Dungeon Lemmy Community.