The Spine and The Core were re-tuned on every difficulty - The Core asks for far less XP at every gate, The Spine's later gates rise to meet it, and the old x24 wall between them is now a gentle step.
Blood Feast and Full Flood are Easy-only. The Vampire's empowered blood and The Ball's pre-flooded board now exist only on Easy - Hard and Insane play them straight.
The Legendary and Mythic planners doubled. Pearl grants +20% spawn speed and Feedorb +20% crosshair size per extraction checkpoint (were +10%), and Maxuble compounds +10% total XP gain per checkpoint (was +5%).
E-Pass finally shows its work. Picking it sends the pass flying to the required-XP readout, stamps it, and counts the toll down before your eyes.
The game pauses when you alt-tab. No more bubbles popping and the crosshair drifting while you are in another window - focus loss freezes the run, refocus resumes instantly.
Right-click no longer opens the menu at an extraction checkpoint. Spam-clicking for powers could carry into the gate and pop the options menu mid-decision. Choose Extract or Continue first; the menu is one ESC away after.
The Vampire's run tracker and info card tell the truth. The tracker shows only its boss marker - no phantom 1/2/3 pins - with the bar climbing the whole run, and the info card's single gate marker sits at the end of the line.
The location card behaves. It hides completely when your mouse leaves the monitor, and the difficulty buttons and PLAY answer your cursor with a soft hover chirp.
The stats screen's Highest XP Gain record no longer snaps styles mid-count.
The game menu opens smoothly after loading. All shader compilation happens under the loading screens now instead of spilling onto the freshly opened menu.