First Major Patch: Enhancing Gameplay, Graphics, Co-op Stability, and More
Download: 14.5 GB due to heavy changes to graphical assetsFollowing the initial three hotfixes, we are excited to present the first major patch, addressing gameplay quality of life features, graphic improvements (including new lip-sync and some fixes to the animations), increased co-op stability and introduction of new mechanics in co-op, and additional bug fixes that should have significantly limit experienced issues. We've also incorporated the first set of quality of life features and gameplay changes based on your requests.
This significant update has been made possible largely due to the extensive feedback received from our player community, and for this, we express our immense gratitude. As a small studio, your input has been invaluable in shaping Dark Envoy into a more polished and enjoyable experience.
In response to your reports and reviews, both negative and positive, we are meticulously reviewing and actively working to enhance various aspects of the game. The journey doesn't stop here—our team is already hard at work on the second major patch, scheduled for release in early December.
It's important to us that you know
we are creating Dark Envoy with your satisfaction in mind, not for ourselves. Please continue sharing your feedback as we are committed to making Dark Envoy as close to perfect as possible.
Thank you all for being an integral part of this journey! We look forward to your continued support and input.
[h2]Gameplay Quality of Life[/h2]
- Companions no longer have preassigned specializations so that you can now specialize them to better accommodate your party’s needs.
- Added a slider in the settings for adjusting game speed in Tactical Mode. Note: In multiplayer host’s setting will apply for both players. (you can go for between 1% - 200% slow time, where going above 100% will accelerate the game).
- Added an adjustable limit for the amount of quick saves - old quick saves will be safely moved to a backup folder.
- Added tab for saves, that filters between auto, quick and manual saves.
- Added context tooltip with descriptions for stats in the player menu and enemy popups.
- Improved visual feedback when the currently selected unit is unable to move and/or use skills - red marking around the HP bar and portrait - should improve general responsiveness by a lot.
- Improved controls on the world map. It will now adjust accordingly when zooming in/out near the outer bounds instead of getting stuck. Reaching locations placed near the map’s edges should no longer cause any issues.
- Various tall objects will now dynamically fade instead of obstructing the player's view to improve visibility.
- Reworked Gamepad Pointer.
- Added different icons for enchantment rarity, so they are easier to shop for at merchants.
- For multi-monitor setups, you can now change your current display in the game settings.
[h2]Balance Changes[/h2]
- Some Enemies changed to create a unique identity to the whole family, e.g. Manaless are overall slightly weaker, but have Mana Burn. Hybrids are weaker to elemental damage but have strong lifesteal. The aim was to vary the gameplay more between different enemy families. Changes should not affect your current run significantly yet, we plan more comprehensive rebalancing with the next big Patch planned for early December.
- Encounters at the end of random dungeons have been rebalanced to pose a greater challenge.
- Hard and Insane difficulty should be now more challenging, some stats were not scaling properly (e.g. enemy skillpower). Critical Damage builds are still too strong, as we did not dare to ruin present runs. Overall: with Insane difficulty we are still not there yet, we are working on major rebalancing patch.
- Experience for killed enemies is increased, especially at 10+ levels.
- Wounded Health is now capped and can no longer reduce Max HP below 30%.
- Certain status effects and abilities are no longer affected by Tenacity to increase their effectiveness against Bosses and other powerful enemies. These include: Armor Strip, Resistance Strip, Armor Shatter, Resistance Shatter, Taunt and Marked statuses as well as Immolate and Mana Virus skills.
- Added 2 new types of hackable turrets for increased variety and increased number of places where turrets and other tactical environments appear (e.g. barrels).
- Signet of Balance now reduces cooldowns by 0.5s per hit instead of 1s.
- Crafting levels - we simplified the rules here; each Researched level of crafting will always give better crafting stats on items.
- Boss mana pool and mana regeneration stat were greatly increased so you should no longer be able to drain their mana completely.
- Damage dealt by Ruga’s summoned eyes was greatly reduced.
- Inquisitor’s Apostle skill no longer generates stacks from damage over time effects.
- Fixed the Ricochet Weapon Skill where number of bounces were scaling with Skill Power (it now bounces 2 / 3 / 4 times per Skill level, with increasing bounce range per level).
[h2]Graphics[/h2]
- Lip-sync - redone lip-sync generation system resulting in a major improvement
- Various Armor and Clothing updates addressing clipping and rendering issues.
- Improved lighting in top down cutscenes
- New Icons for Unique items
- Reworked Bandit Chief unit model to make it more distinguishable.
- TAA no longer causes various decals to flicker.
- Material dither rendering was fixed on spider webs
- Fixed occasional issues with units being able to move through solid objects.
- Improved visuals on the Ancient Sentry boss arena: VFX, lighting and level art.
- VFX Updates for: Grenades, Statuses, Black Holes, Explosions
- VFX Motion Blur Glitches Fix on various skills or weapons, and statuses
- Various VFXs shaders were updated to higher quality rendering, on skills and fire explosion
- Lots of smaller graphics changes across all dungeons
[h2]Co-op[/h2]
We have enabled crafting, research and enchanting on the client side. We had to do some extra long testing to detect edge cases caused by network communication delays and we are sorry that we haven’t managed to ship these features on release.
Note: At this time, crafting can be only done by one player at a time - same as with trading. We will look into improving these features as soon as they’re thoroughly tested.
Known issue: In the ‘learn crafting’ quest, right after entering the City of Bones for the first time, you have to craft an item after buying 3 pieces of iron. The host has to craft this item in order for the quest to be completed.
Known Issue: Client’s weapon attacks sometimes can stop registering correctly. One solution is to reconnect again if that happens. We are working on it and will hotfix it asap.
- Improved latency reporting between connected players. It will no longer get stuck showing 0ms if there is any delay.
- Fixed client-side skill tree modifications and synchronization. Removed lag and reduced processing costs and data usage on client and host. Players no longer risk losing skill points when the skills are reset by the client.
- Fixed an issue that would cause passive abilities to still be active on client units after resetting the skill tree.
- Fixed an issue that would sometimes prohibit the client from using waypoints on procedural dungeons.
- Fixed various issues causing desynchronization of interactable objects for the client
- Fixed a bug that would allow the client to load a save game while connected, potentially breaking the game until restart.
- Hide headgear` option is now correctly synced between units
- Fixed a bug that would cause client units to repeatedly play the ‘damage received’ audio events while they were assigned certain passive abilities
- Fixed a bug that would display a ‘Companion has joined your party’ popup on the client’s side each time they exited the player menu. This was temporarily disabled and it will only show up when the host ‘sees it’ in the next patch.
- Fixed a bug that would assign non-controllable units to the client when joining the game in a hub area.
- Fixed a bug that would sometimes cancel ability orders issued by the client, causing desync between client predicted actions and host’s game state, as well as various other desync/lag issues caused by casting skills.
- Fixed dialogue choices not showing up on the client’s side. The client can highlight which choice they prefer and the host will see it on their choice panel. Note: illustrations for choices are not visible for the client. It will be addressed in a hotfix.
[h2]Bugs[/h2]
- Fixed a bug that caused the game to glitch if a save was loaded during some dialogue cutscenes.
- Fixed saves for players who started Leon’s companion quest before hotfix 3.
- Fixed an issue with critical, dodge, evasion and cover occasionally not working until a save is loaded.
- Enemies health and mana difficulty is updated immediately when changing difficulty. This also fixes an issue with some bosses not using their skills correctly on difficulties other than normal.
- Fixed an issue where you couldn’t scroll merchant inventory.
- Fixed overlapping UI texts in the English language. We’re working on addressing this issue in other languages as well.
- Fixed an issue that caused a few high-level enchantments to never appear in the Relics merchant’s inventory.
- Unit Popup will no longer flicker when the cursor hovers on another unit.
- Shield will no longer affect the main hand weapon’s range.
- Blademaster's Honor Duel skill will now finish correctly when either the caster or its target is defeated.
- Fixed a bug that caused helmets to remain hidden after cutscenes when the Hide Headgear in Cutscenes option was turned on.
- Fixed an issue that caused some skill markers to be removed too early.
- Fixed an issue that caused some skill markers to remain even after the caster died, causing the skill to be interrupted.
- You can now revive characters using colossus skill safely. Characters no longer go on top of each other when reviving.
- Characters in the autonomous mode can now transform into the Colossus and won’t exit its form immediately.
- Story units (e.g. bandits in the first mission) now drop loot when killed.
- Fixed healing staff applying negative statuses on allies when combined with some buffs, such as the Fire Weapons skill.
- Fixed the Guardian Flag skill not applying buffs correctly.
- Fixed the Judgement skill marker.
- Fixed the Shield Bash weapon skill to correctly apply a Magic Shield buff.
- Fixed issues with the Defensive Stance skill not regenerating Magic Shield correctly.
- Fixed a graphic issue causing some projectiles used by the Manaless units to occasionally hover above the caster indefinitely.
- Fixed an issue that caused Titan (both for enemy units and player summons) to occasionally target allies with their abilities.
- Fire Weapons skill autocast fixed.
- Blood Nova skill animation fixed.
- Sharpshooter skill icons were slightly differentiated to improve clarity.
- Fixed issue with weight capacity not being updated properly when learning skills that affect it.
- Fixed an issue causing the player to be unable to replace enchantments even after unlocking the corresponding Research node.
- Fixed Unknown Visitors side objective not failing in one instance.
- Fixed side objectives not displaying correctly in The Blue Hand quest.
- Fixed duplicated lore notes on several quests.
- Fixed placement of a turret in Untouched ruins so that melee combatants do not get stuck on trying to reach it.
- Fixed issue that occasionally caused unlocked waypoints on random dungeons to be incorrectly restored upon loading the game.
- Fixed an issue that could lead to an auto-save made after defeating Bob (the boss) to be corrupted.
- Fixed an issue that could cause a cutscene to glitch in the Project Terminus quest if the player killed units involved in it immediately before triggering the dialogue.
- Fixed issues that could prevent a few enemies from the spider family from spawning on random dungeons.
- Player units will no longer be automatically deselected when inflicted with Fear, Taunt or Berserk.
- Fixed an issue that caused cinematic subtitles to get stuck on the first line when approaching Free Phoenicia.
[h2]Miscellaneous[/h2]
- Fixed some missing strings in the language versions. Remaining issues will be addressed in following hotfixes.
- Volume of character barks was standardized.
- Increased the reward for finding a secret room in the Forbidden Fortress
- To increase random dungeon diversity, each of them will now only include units from a single enemy family, randomly chosen from a pool fitting its theme.
- Saves can now be manually attached when reporting issues through the in-game tool
[h2]Performance[/h2]
- Added a script for improved culling of quests assets on dungeons.
- Improved rendering time for certain enemies.
- We are aware of still existing problems: 1) occasional memory leaks that cause the game to slow down considerably the longer you play and require restart 2) the game sometimes not shutting down properly. This is our focus for the next Patch.
[h2]Known Issues :([/h2]
Players currently undertaking the quest: "Predator turned prey" in Secret Hideout location may encounter a game-breaking bug where the story fails to progress after defeating the boss (Ruga). This issue stems from previous changes and is being addressed promptly. We are working on a hotfix to resolve this issue as soon as possible.
In the meantime, we recommend one of the following solutions:
1) Load the game from a save point just before entering the dungeon.
2) Please kindly send us the broken save game to [email protected] or join our Discord, and we will manually fix the save for you.EDIT: Solved in a hotfix released now.
Next patch (early December) will focus on rebalancing the game (this will be a major change), changing/upgrading skills which are deemed as not useful enough, adding DPS testing arena and hand-crafted challenges and score of other requested changes -- as well as -- fixing remaining performance issues, fixing translation errors, further improving animations and visual upgrades to the locations.
Please continue to share your feedback with us. Best way to do it is via the in-game Report Issue option or by joining our Discord https://discord.gg/eventhorizon and sharing it there.
We're committed to make this game as perfect as it can be,
Event Horizon team
