Speaking to Eurogamer, The Blood of Dawnwalker game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz has discussed several game improvements coming in a "big patch" currently scheduled for early October - including a brand new difficulty option, combat targeting changes, and making it easier to escape from battles by running away.
Tomaszkiewicz also told me in an interview that the studio is exploring a New Game Plus mode - "Yes, we are," he said smiling but not saying anything more - and potentially adding new enemies to improve variety. "There is a chance but I don't want to speak about it yet," he said. "We will have the proper beats with our publishing team and if I tell you more, they will kill me."
The game's new difficulty is not a harder difficulty, by the way - Rebel Wolves feels Duelist difficulty, without directional attack indicators, is challenging enough. Instead, it's an easier one - the easiest one. It doesn't have a name yet but it effectively replaces the game's current easiest difficulty, Story mode, and takes that name. The existing Story difficulty will be renamed as a result, so Dawnwalker will have five difficulty levels: Story, Story-renamed, Fair, Challenging, and Duelist.
"We will introduce an additional difficulty level," Tomaszkiewicz revealed, "but an easier one, because many people are asking for a more easy difficulty. The Story mode which we have right now will be a different difficulty - we will call it Demanding or something like this - and we will add a new Story mode which will be even easier for people who don't want to experience the combat, they just want to learn the story and go through the game without this gameplay challenge."
Where combat is concerned, targeting and the camera are being worked on, as is that annoying quirk whereby Dawnwalker switches your target when using a stun-like crowd-control ability. Surprisingly enough, this wasn't a bug, but rather something working as Tomaszkiewicz personally intended it. "That's my fault," he said, "because it changed. It worked differently.
"When I was playing in some of the gameplay reviews, I wanted to stun an opponent and then switch to the other one, but because I was locked on him still, I hit him by mistake and took the stun from him, and that's why we made it switch for the other character. But people complain about it, and in the newest patch we will lift off and we will see.
"There will be three hits you need to take off this stun," he added. "We will see how people will react to that because, as I said, it can create another bad feel, but we will see. Maybe people will switch between targets fluently and if they want to just stun, it will be fine, and if they want to stun and hit a few times, it will be also fine. We will see."
Gameplay performance is being addressed - it being a major area of feedback in player reviews on Steam - though there have been incremental hotfix patches already to improve it (as well as things like problematic controller support). As to why it didn't work brilliantly at launch, Tomaszkiewicz cited there being "a lot" of PC hardware combinations, too many to test. But he said: "We're observing this, we're trying to ask people about the hardware, and we are trying to do the fixes."
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.eurogamer.net/blood-of-dawnwalker-difficulty-combat-patch-update
