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Practice Makes Perfect update lands with training room & ease-of-use features

Hey everyone,


A new update has landed! This time there's no balance changes or new weapons, instead we're focusing on improving the ease-of-use and learning curve for everyone (particularly newcomers & occasional players), without altering the overall difficulty of the game.
All the new features are entirely optional and designed to allow you to improve your skills with no ragequits! OK maybe you'll still have a couple...


TLDR
  • Training room - hone your skills against all the mobs and bosses you've seen
  • Aspects - extremely strong powers to make your run easier (but you can't win the next Boss Cell if you beat the game)
  • World map - see the paths you can take through the island
  • When you pick up a scroll you can see the change to your overall damage for each colour
  • Multi-binding moved to Custom Mode
  • Lots of smaller quality-of-life changes
[h3]The Training Room[/h3]

Before you reach Prisoner's Quarters you'll see an entrance to a new training room where you can practise against any enemy that you've already faced. The mobs will start as statues (like in Slumbering Sanctuary) and re-animate only when you press the button at the entrance of the room.
We've even given you presets that reflect the bestiary of each biome to make your life easier, because we're just that kind.



You can also train against all the bosses in their own environment, just go through one of the doors at the back of the main room to train against the big guns.

Weapon tubes and a training Guillain are also there to provide you with all the tools you need to train, so get cracking!


[h3]Aspects[/h3]

To help players reach new biomes and discover more of the game, we're introducing the Aspects - optional super-strong buffs equippable at the start of a run that make the game a lot easier. There are a couple of catches though: you can only equip one, and you can’t unlock a new boss cell or flawless boss achievements while an Aspect is equipped, so you still need to rise to the challenge if you want to get to the next level.



Aspects provide a specific buff, centered around a core synergy element such as fire damage or speed boosting. The update features 13 Aspects and new ones could be added in the future, if we manage to have any more ideas that is...


[h3]World map[/h3]
Probably the most self-explanatory part of this update, the world map features all the biomes you've already discovered and displays the connections between each level, but again only the ones that you've seen will be displayed. You can find it in the map screen of your current biome.


[h3]Other features[/h3]
  • Reminder after killing the Hand of the King to use the Homonculus rune to exit the run (except in 5BC or after the first 0BC kill). No more panicky posts to answer for me, woohoo!
  • Total damage change is now displayed when picking stats from a scroll, time to retire the calculator...
  • Incentive (cell drop buff) for picking your least visited biomes. Yep, it's time to go back to the [insert your most hated biome here].
  • Return stones now teleport you outside their relative Z-door.
  • A few tidbits of lore hinting at something coming in the near future, found in High Peak Castle and Undying Shores.
  • Multi-binding is now properly removed from Normal Mode and available in Custom Mode.


We hope you enjoy the additions, let us know your thoughts in the comments or through the social media links below!


Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT


Community Highlights:

the G


cobyanstly


Nicolas Pertini


Mori_Mosu

Hotfix for the Practice Makes Perfect beta

Hey everyone,


A fresh hotfix for the current beta has just landed! Here are the changes...


Important features
  • Everything is translated!
Quality of life
  • Added Outfits descriptions in the Tailor selection menu.
Bugs that have been fixed
  • Saving and reloading in a biome drastically decreases mobs' HP.
  • Giant drops loot in Training Mode.
  • Training Armory weapons scale with the player's BC.
  • Tentacles sweep attacks hitting a player turret will hurt the player instead.
  • Killing the Concierge at the end of the Daily Challenge doesn't end it.
  • Slow-motion instances don't get skipped when the 'Disable Gameplay Slow-Motion' option is on.
  • Some old, old typos in the French translation.
  • Spoiler boss softlock should be fixed.

So there you go, now everyone can understand what's going on in-game and some annoying issues are sorted :)

We'll be back soon!

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT

Practice Makes Perfect update moves to beta!

Hey,

Back with another quick post to let you all know that update 25 is now in beta phase!

Thanks for all the feedback from the alpha, we'd made some smaller changes already and have put the Spoiler Boss in the training room as many requested.

Here's the main changes for the beta:

Important features
  • Two Flawless Outfits : Gardener and Tick.
  • Incentive for picking your least visited biomes now makes mobs drop more cells and gems.
Quality of life
  • Changed colors of the frames of the World Map to improve readability.
Bug fixes
  • A lot of small bug fixes, including spoiler boss issues, translation issues, Training Room problems, and crashes.

If you want to leave feedback (or bug reports) for the beta, please fill in this short form.

We've had several reports that the Spoiler Boss won't come down from the cage after killing the surrounding enemies, but we can't reproduce the error... So if anyone can give us detailed information about this (e.g. operating system, items, seed number, where you went before the fight etc), please send it to us with the form :)


Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT


Community Highlights:

@iseikaino

@HumanIsPink1

u/heronvitorsb93

Dead Cells is adding new optional features to reduce ragequitting

Dead Cells is about to officially celebrate its third birthday, and the roguelike platformer isn't done growing yet. The latest alpha adds some new features meant to help ease the difficulty curve for new and lapsed players alike. Oh, and difficulty sticklers can remain calm: these are all entirely optional.


The first new feature is a training room, where you can "hone your skills against all the mobs and bosses you've seen," with the exception of one certain spoilery boss. You can just hop straight in, do some zero-stakes practice fighting, and then head back into a proper run once you've warmed up.


Another new feature is called Aspects. These are "extremely strong powers" that will make runs much easier. They'll allow you to get a feel for new biomes, for example, without having to fight every inch of the way through. The tradeoff here is that while using aspects, you won't be able to earn the next boss cell if you wind up beating the game. However, you can use aspects to reach new areas and, Motion Twin hopes, discover more of the game - and possibly ragequit less often.


Read the rest of the story...


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"Practice makes Perfect" update in alpha phase - training room & superpowers!



Hey everyone,

We're back with another alpha! This time there's no balance changes or new weapons, instead we're focusing on improving the learning curve for everyone (but particularly newcomers & occasional players), without altering the overall difficulty of the game. All the new features are entirely optional and designed to allow you to improve your skills with no ragequits! OK maybe you'll still get a couple...

TLDR
  • Training room - hone your skills against all the mobs and bosses you've seen, except the spoiler boss of course
  • Aspects - extremely strong powers to make your run easier (but you can't win the next Boss Cell if you beat the game)
  • World map - see the paths you can take through the island
  • When you pick up a scroll you can see the change to your overall damage for each colour
  • Multi-binding moved to Custom Mode
  • Lots of smaller quality-of-life changes
How to play the alpha

If you want to jump into the alpha without any more detail, back up your save first (if the worst happens then there’s a save restore hack detailed here), then follow the instructions below to access the alpha:
  • Go to your Steam game library.
  • Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
  • Select the tab "Betas".
  • In the first dropdown box select "Alpha - Not for the faint hearted".
  • Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
  • Start playing.

Bear in mind that everything is still being tweaked according to feedback, so some things may break, have strange interactions or just straight up crash the game.

If you want to leave feedback (or bug reports) for the alpha, please fill in this short form.
This lets us collect all the feedback in one place rather than spreading it over Steam, Discord, Reddit etc. If you really don't want to fill in the form then please continue to post in the usual places, we're not going to stop checking them out, but just be aware that we may miss things that are posted there.

[h3]The Training Room[/h3] The Tutorial Knight returns to help you reach your potential. Well, she'll try at least...

Before you reach Prisoner's Quarters you'll find an entrance to a new training room where you can practise against any enemy that you've already faced. The mobs will start as statues (like in Slumbering Sanctuary) and re-animate only when you press the button at the entrance of the room.
We've even given you some presets that reflect the bestiary of each biome to make your life easier, because we're just that kind.



You can also train against all the bosses in their own environment, except for the spoiler boss. Just go through one of the doors at the back of the main room to train against the big guns.

Special tubes and a training Guillain are also there to provide you with all the tools you need to train, so get cracking!

[h3]Aspects[/h3]
To help players reach new biomes and discover more of the game, we're introducing the Aspects - optional super-strong buffs equippable at the start of a run that make the game a lot easier. There is a catch though: you can’t unlock a new boss cell or flawless boss achievements while an Aspect is equipped, so you still need to rise to the challenge if you want to get to the next level.



Aspects provide a specific buff, centered around a core synergy element. The update features 13 Aspects and new ones could be added in the future, if we manage to have any more ideas that is...

[h3]World map[/h3]
Probably the most self-explanatory part of this update, the world map features all the biomes you've already discovered and displays the connections between each level, but again only the ones that you've seen will be displayed. You can find it in the map screen of your current biome.

[h3]Other features[/h3]
  • Reminder after killing the Hand of the King to use the Homonculus rune to exit the run (except in 5BC or after the first 0BC kill). No more panicky posts to answer for me, woohoo!
  • Total damage change is now displayed when picking stats from a scroll, time to retire the calculator...
  • Incentive (cell drop buff) for picking your least visited biomes. Yep, it's time to go back to the [insert your most hated biome here].
  • Return stones now teleport you outside their relative Z-door.
  • A few tidbits of lore hinting at something coming in the near future, found in High Peak Castle and Undying Shores.
  • Multi-binding is now properly removed from Normal Mode and available in Custom Mode.

That's it for now, feel free to leave feedback or suggestions and we'll be back soon with the beta!

Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT


Community Highlights:

@Zyphexis

u/BoostedButter

@teeparkss

@BizarreRayi