Over the course of the last few weeks, we've gotten a lot of comments, feedback and ideas. It's been crazy seeing something that we kept so close to our vests for so long be out there in the real world! We're in the final week before officially releasing the game, and thought we'd share our latest set of updates that should be live at the time of writing (in Cathedral version 1.0.21 - you can see the version number in the lower left corner of the main menu) Based on the feedback we've gathered (plus various bugs that have been discovered). Let's go through them, one by one:

Icon toggling

Pressing the left thumbstick (by default on Xbox controllers) now toggles all icons on/off, except user-placed marks.

A few checkpoints moved or realigned

We had a few checkpoints that we had placed in such a way that you had to take them when reaching the end of a certain route, forcing you to backtrack. A couple of these checkpoints have been removed completely, and a few of them has been moved out of the way, so that you can enable them if you want to (and simply leave them alone if not)

New icons for the map

We've updated the map with a new set of icons to make them more coherent! We've also changed the checkpoint from a dot to a "C" (the dot has been reserved for something else. More on that soon!)

The map now has a legend!

Wondering what all the icons in the map mean? Pressing the right thumbstick will bring up the legend:

Improved item collection experience

This is the larger piece of the update, which in turn spawned the other ones. If you look at the map legend, you might see a few icons that you haven't seen before. The feedback we've seen is that finding all items is simply too much work since we've left very little clues about where they can be found. We've wanted to balance this out to not make it impossible, but still have it be a challenge to find everything in the game. You might have already seen the "Book of books" which we snuck in with another patch a while back. It can be found in the library:
This book allows you to see how many books you have collected in each area of the world. Moreover though, collectible items such as hearts, ammo upgrades, armor augmentations and bottles are represented by a dot on the map. You still have to visit the room to see the dot, but if there is something hidden in a room, you will see it on the map. After collecting the items, the dot disappears. We also gave maps a special symbol (a capital "M"), showing if a room contains a map when you enter it:
Note that finding absolutely everything will still be a challenge (as we think it should be!), especially since some items are placed in areas where there simply isn't any map! This has still moved the item collection from "close to impossible" and pushed it into "challenging" instead! :)

Other fixes

There's been a few minor fixes. The most notable ones are: * The portal achievement did not unlock for all users even if they unlocked all portals. If you should have gotten the achievement, it will be given to you retroactively when you start the game with that profile the next time * The map in the jungle didn't disappear after picking it up, but kept respawning. * We added a new achievement that unlocks when finding all augmentations in the game.

In conclusion

We've kept this update to ourselves for the last week or so and decided to play through the entire game ourselves to give it a try, and see if we wanted to tweak anything or if we felt that we took anything away from the experience by providing item hints on the map. Our personal feeling is that the game only feels better this way. We had more fun exploring than before, and felt that the challenge was still present. We hope you'll find the update to be for the better of the game! Thank you to everyone so far who have played the game and given us feedback!

[ 2019-10-27 21:03:29 CET ] [ Original post ]