By Antonela Pounder @AnimatedAnt (Community Manager – 505 Games)
Hi everyone! Today’s an incredibly exciting day for the team here at 505 Games and Keen Games. We’ve just gone and launched our Portal Knights Adventurer’s Update on Steam, which is crammed full of incredibly exciting new content, most of which has been requested by our wonderful community. Want to know more? Keep reading…
Features
* Island “Fort Finch” (1-03) is now a town filled with quests, new NPCs, merchants and details to discover
* A new type of merchant sells mannequins. They can be placed anywhere and equipped with the player character’s armor and weapons to show off the equipment crafted and found during the journey. The merchant can be found in “Fort Finch”.
* A new NPC type allows changing the appearance of the player character.
* Some NPCs can be picked up and be relocated to any location now.
* Several new props for home decorations have been added, including bath room furniture, cage doors, potted plants and awnings.
* A new “sit” emote has been added to the emote menu.
* Furniture can now be interacted with. The player character can sit on chairs, thrones, benches etc. and lie down on beds etc. When lying down on a bed, the time will speed up.
* A Water pump and a drain are available now.
* Pets can now be placed in pet homes. The pet homes can be purchased at Funny Jongo and once placed the pets can be allocated to the new home. The pets will freely roam about in the vicinity of the home.
* Several new weapons and weapon variants have been added.
* Enemies now take more damage when being attacked from behind.
* Crystals now have seedlings just like plants and can be grown in their correct biomes.
* Dedicated servers are available now. Players can setup their own, self-hosted servers to play asynchronous together with friends.
* Steam cloud saving is available now.
* A new type of epic chests spawns at the end of dungeons, containing special weapons which are unobtainable in any other way.
* NPCs can now be found in the island information on the map. They will list name and type as well as display whether they are relocatable or not.
* Loading screens now show gameplay tips.
* The tutorial now uses NPC’s in addition to info boards and quest texts. This should help new players getting all the info they need for a smooth start into the game. In order for the new NPCs to appear, the island needs to be regenerated.
Changes
* It is easier now to escape from dangerous combat if the player chooses to do so. Enemies will give up the pursuit and return back home after some time.
* The player should be less likely to get mobbed by enemies (aggro distances have been reduced).
* The weapon progression has been re-worked. Players now have more choice of weapon type per player level and the progression is now better aligned with the player progression through the islands and the crafting materials found on the islands.
* Flying enemies are now closer to the ground, making it easier to fight them, especially for melee players.
* Combat with water enemies has been polished. Some situations have been made a bit easier, especially dealing with groups of Rumble Jelly and the Bub-Utan mages. Rumble Jelly have less health now and deal less damage. Self-heal has been nerfed for the Bub-Utans. All water enemies have been slowed down to match the walking speed of the player underwater.
* Enemies with ranged attacks rotate more clearly into the direction of the attack now before shooting the projectile.
* Attack and evade queuing has been improved. Additional attacks, using of consumables or evasion moves can be queued earlier now. When several different actions are queued, the evasion move will be prioritized before other actions.
* When evading, you can now roll up 1-block elevation changes
* The UI has been reworked on a technical level which improves the overall performance and stability of the game.
* Dungeon chests, bosses and enemies have been reworked to drop more interesting loot.
* Object highlighting shows more clearly now which object on the island can be interacted with. The type of interaction is now specified as well.
* The jump and fall animations of the player character have been improved.
* The island generation now makes sure that there are no holes on the tutorial island where player fall into caves.
* The building cursor turns red now when the end of the world has been reached.
* The flying enemies react better to shouts now.
* Loading times have been improved.
* Shell enemy spin attacks are now easier to evade.
* Projectile speeds for many ranged enemy attacks have been reduced.
* The character health and mana is no longer reset when switching islands or reloading the game.
Fixes
* Island generation has been improved and should now cause fewer instances where buildings look out of place.
* Some sound issues have been improved.
* Water bombs work reliably now when thrown at water sources.
* The player character no longer blocks the projectiles from attacks of the Astral Totem scroll.
Developer comment regarding the weapon progression changes
In this patch we have reworked the weapon progression and the loot drops. Our goal was to give you a more meaningful reward after completing a dungeon or a boss fight. At the same time this also clears up the crafting lists and gives you more personal choice when deciding what weapons to craft and use next.
When finding the deepest rooms in the dungeons or after a boss fight you are now rewarded with a special weapon instead of a weapon recipe.
The remaining weapon recipes have been restructured. Whenever you reach a new range of resources and you are able to craft a new weapon, you are no longer forced to use a specific weapon but instead you have the choice among up to three equally powerful weapon types. The three weapons you can choose from are matching the three different character talent lines available for each class.
In order to make all weapons useful and give you a real choice we had to rearrange nearly all weapon stats and all character level requirements of the weapons.
This change made the previously dropped weapon recipes redundant and we have removed them from the game! Any weapon you had crafted using those recipes will remain in your inventory, though.
Your weapon recipe lists will be shorter but instead of having less weapons in the game, we have actually more thanks to the weapon drops! Over 20 new weapons including a whole new type of weapons for the mages have been added to the game.
Together with this big change, we also took a look into all loot drops in Portal Knights and changed them to make loot more meaningful. The enemies, bosses and destructible objects no longer drop a large amount of different items which fill up your inventory quickly with sometimes quite unneeded items.
Instead it is clearer now which items you will get from which source in the game. This change will notably decrease the clutter of different items you will get from one island and therefore will help you with your inventory management.
We have also re-balanced the amount of gold coins you get from different sources in the game. The reward you get after a dungeon run or a boss fight and by solving quests feels more satisfying now.
In the future, we also plan to rework the armor progression in the same way.
We hope you like the new system as much as we did in our testing sessions.