Hello!
The "Clean Cut" update is here! 'Tailored' (wink wink) to improve the whole Dead Cells experience with a bunch of trims and cuts for every part of the game, as well as adding some new toys to play with!
TLDR
- 2 new weapons
- Change your head to Bobby with most outfits
- Speedrun mode
- Boss Rush now has customisation options and Return to Castlevania bosses (including upgraded versions)
- Training Room has a ton of new customisation
New items
First up we have the two new weapons, the Sewing Scissors and Giant Comb, both indispensable tools for a clean cut. Head to the Tailor's room to discover them both.
Sewing Scissors: a huge pair of scissors that scale with Survival. Will instakill all enemies that it hits, if one of the enemies is killed by the attack's standard damage. Gotta target those rats.
Giant Comb: a Brutality weapon that launches enemies upwards on the first hit and deals critical damage to enemies that are not on the ground.
New NPC
Turns out, the Tailor was hiding a daughter all along, and by some coincidental massive stroke of fortune, she has just the skills to replace your head with the flame "Bobby version" on most skins. Crazy world...
New Speedrun mode
Finally, we have the brand new Speedrun Mode with in-game time tracking for speedrunners, or anyone else who wants to know how much time they've spent trying to make it to Hand of the King and failing. Activate this mode to track and display the completion time of each biome and track your previous best times.
On top of all that we’ve also done a ton of upgrading, reworking and rebalancing...
Upgrades
- We've added a new “DIY” mode in Boss Rush. With this mode, you can choose whichever bosses you want to face in a run.
- The 3 bosses from Return to Castlevania have also been added to Boss Rush and Training Room.
- Enhanced bosses have been tweaked in the Boss Rush.
- Training Room has multiple new options for you to practice your skills:
- New UIs to spawn a specific weapon with a set Level, Quality and Legendary-ness.
- New UI to choose a certain number of scrolls
- New UI to choose the overall scaling level of the Training Room, based on the values of a selected biome.
- Added the mini-bosses to the mob spawners
- Added a bunch of different traps to the mob rooms.
- Added the Return to Castlevania Bosses.
- Bosses aren't scaled down to level 1 anymore! (no more 20 minutes fights)
- Changed the UI to select mobs to a grid-based one.
- Added a Training Dummy for DPS calculation.
There are now no excuses left to not get good.
Reworks
Mutations:
- Combo: there is a true combo meter now! The mutation has been changed to enable a damage increase with every melee hit in a 2.5 sec window (of course the window refreshes after every hit). It scales exponentially, go crazy with it!
- Tainted Flask: it can recharge even if your flask is not totally empty. We also added 1 more elite into every biome when the mutation is equipped.
- Networking: you can just mark enemies with ranged attacks now, there doesn't need to be an actual projectile stuck in the mob's body.
- Berserker: it now stacks and renders you immune to stuns.
- Necromancy: It scales with the max health of the mobs you kill, which means you can get more healing by killing a stronger enemy. The cap of up to a “maximum 50% HP” is eliminated, but healing power is less effective as you get closer to max health.
- Frostbite: now stacks with slow effects and acts as a full stack on frozen targets.
- Dead Inside: now doubles your life but prevents ALL healing sources except healing with recovery.
- Disengagement: there is no longer a cooldown but can only trigger once per biome. (I know, I know…)
Other:
- Slow effect stacks up to 5 times. Each stack has a greater slowing effect, then the affected enemy is frozen at the fifth stack.
- The Mimic can now appear randomly in shops outside of the Bank biome. Mwahahaaaa
- Switched the Dracula Castle (Hard) Cursed Chest chance to 10%.
- Added a new Petrification affect icon (when you're frozen by Medusa).
Rebalancing
Return to Castlevania
Weapons:
- Whip Sword: whip form now passes shields.
- Whip Sword's transformation attack hitbox tended to bug, it should now be consistent with its visual FX, which means it won’t only hit one single target anymore.
- The ghosts gathered by Death Scythe's have a slightly smaller explosion radius.
- Bible is a heavy weapon.
- Throwing Axe can no longer roll Fire Bullet affix.
- Alucard's Shield has better parry windows, and the whole combo instead of “the next hit” crits.
- Rebound Stone: it deals slightly more damage and has a smaller but longer window before being able to "catch it" (i.e., trigger the crit). Its cooldown now starts upon its destruction.
- Holy Water has a bigger vertical hitbox and deals damage in a more logical way. By logical, we mean the flame itself can cause damage now.
- Medusa Head deals more damage and bumps further.
- We added some security measures to prevent the Cat from being targeted by enemies. There is also a long cooldown when the Cat is killed by the Queen.
Mobs:
- Medusa's flurry attacks should now have a small pause after the end of the attack.
- Haunted Armor (the one with an axe) should now activate at a slightly longer range.
- Elite Merman should now fire 2 big fireballs instead of a big one and a normal one.
Bosses:
- Dracula (Humanoid)'s fire pillars are now slightly easier to avoid (in terms of intervals) but are not rollable anymore.
- Dracula (Demon) is now a beast, along with Buer, Werewolves and Medusa (Crowbar wise).
And loads of bug fixes! For all of these check out the full patchnotes here.
Boardgame Kickstarter coming soon
The Kickstarter for the upcoming 1-4 player roguelite Dead Cells boardgame is going live on 16 May!
It just so happens that we received a prototype at the office literally 2 hours ago so we have some sneaky photos to share below. Bear in mind that this is a prototype so nothing you see in the photos is definite!
If you want to follow the Kickstarter campaign to support it or just to get more information, follow this link.
Cheers,
Matt, EE & MT