This major update introduces passive skills for player characters, an item and spell quality system, new masteries earned from zone bosses, a whole new roster of enemies for the Horizon Paths, and Endless Runs as the game's toughest challenge yet, featuring a brand-new final boss.
Character Passive Skills
All characters in bonfires now appear with a random passive skill based on their attributes, these are meant to be somewhat close in power to ancient items, so they provide a decent amount of power by themselves, but to truly shine you'll have to build synergies around them.
Some superior combats now also reward a new consumable to reroll a character's passive skill in case you want to look for a better one on a particular character.
Item and Spell Quality System
All items and spells can now have increased quality, which makes them more powerful, and some even gain new effects. To add quality to items or spells youll have to look for a couple of new consumable rewards from superior combats.
Reworked Horizon Paths
Previously the Horizon Paths zone reused the locations and enemies from the prior 3 zones, so we wanted to add an entirely new roster of enemies here to change that, including new custom visuals for the zone.
The Zone Boss at the end of this zone was also nerfed a bit in terms of maximum health for all enemies and the burning damage across all 3 phases. This was mostly to allow more players to unlock the new endless runs, which are now intended to be the hardest challenge in the game instead.
Boss Masteries
You can now unlock a new type of mastery from beating Zone Bosses after picking each of their locked dialogue options, which now doesn't need you to have previously won a run in the zone to unlock, so you can start getting these new masteries on your first win if you meet the attribute requirements.
Unlocking and picking dialogue options at Zone Bosses now doesn't make the fight harder, it just gives you the extra lore and the new masteries. But don't worry, you'll now be able to fight much harder versions of these fights by playing endless runs.
Endless Runs
After beating all 4 zones you'll now unlock endless runs via a secret 5th zone. These runs are intended to be the new hardest challenge in the game, where you'll need all the power you can get.
These runs allow you to continue exploring new maps after you beat your first Zone Boss, and you can keep going as much as you want, but the difficulty will rise from multiple angles as you continue to explore, so you'll have to keep making your team stronger if you want to go far.
Once you reach the maximum spells in hand, and the maximum team size, items and spells will begin to drop as items you can hold in your inventory, and you can then swap them with your current spells and characters as you please.
Your inventory is bound to get full now, so we added a way to scrap items you don't want anymore, you'll notice something strange just under you inventory while playing endless runs. Sometimes you might even want to scrap items to get something else back, like recycling an item with quality you don't want anymore to get some quality consumables back for example.
Endless runs can be played for as long as you want, but we do wanted a difficulty benchmark to feel satisfied after a long run, so we added a difficulty cap with a new unique Zone Boss you can challenge if you get there, but beware, this is intended to be the hardest content in the game.
Other Changes
Maps only have 2 bonfires now (from 3). You still get your starting character as an exception to this.
Characters are now leveled up to level 3 by using Experience.
Level 3 characters are now evolved with Potential, granting the active skill upgrade from before, but also an additional stat boost.
Hope can now be used on items and spells to grant them Influence.
Added a new Trait consumable that can be used on characters, items and spells to reroll their Influence.
Now that we have endless runs in the game we want to look for new and exciting ways to keep expanding the game, but with such a big new feature we're expecting to be in maintenance mode for a bit.
Let us know anything from bugs, balance issues, quality of life requests, localization errors, general feedback you want us to hear, etc. We'll focus on patches to fix any issues. You can easily reach us here in the Steam discussions or in our Discord server.
Also, thanks to all the Russian gamers that supported the game, we now officially have Russian localization in the game! Hope you guys like it.
That's it for now, consider leaving a review if you like the update, that would help the game a ton.