Welcome to Alpha 4.0 - Our biggest single update yet!

Introducing the Black Rogue

It’s been a loooong time coming, but we’re finally shipping the Black Rogue in 4.0! The Black Rogue can use the all new Dual Handed Daggers and Dual Handed Short Swords weapon types, as well as throw grenades, use Stealth and throw poison daggers.

The Black Rogue is fast and can deal hits quicker than other classes when using dual handed weapons, but they are all super close proximity attacks, so the risks are greater.

Rebalance and Level Cap Lift

We’ve raised the level cap! Only to 35, but once we’re happy with the balance we will start raising the cap in small increments pretty regularly.

We’ve spent a lot of time working on game balance for this update, and we’re pretty happy with what we’ve come up with. There were a lot of areas we touched, but the key differences you’ll notice are staggered enemy growth rates (different enemies scale differently as you level up), reduced XP drop rates and altered loot drop rates (should now receive much a higher proportion of armour compared to previous builds).

The changes to the XP system were so dramatic we unfortunately need to reset your XP to the start of your current level. This means that while you won’t lose any levels, you might lose some progress on your current level. We hate to do this, but it was the only solution we could come up with that let us make the deep changes we had to make without stomping your characters.

We encourage all adventure creators to go back and reassess their adventures, as player experience may have greatly changed.

Changes to Combat

We’ve made quite a lot of changes to the general feel of combat for 4.0. Enemies now receive much less knockback, and your character will move less during combos. We’ve also reworked a lot of combat animations for the player, hopefully giving them a bit more weight and giving you more feedback during combat.

Combos are now preset, meaning that the 1st, 2nd and 3rd attacks per weapon type will always be consistent . This makes combos more reliable and less reliant on randomly getting a certain attack.

Overall, combat has been slowed down a tiny bit. Nothing that reduces the urgency of combat, but enough to make your characters move and feel a lot better.

New Adventure Details page in Creator Dashboard

This update brings an updated Creator Dashboard that integrates our new web based creator leaderboard as well as allowing creators to drill into their published adventures to get extra info on what players are doing with them

When a creator clicks on a published adventure, they are now shown a new display where they can see extended play stats and read the feedback and reports that the community have left them.

Lots of Audio FX work - Lots more to come…

We’ve spent quite a bit of time adding and improving on our audio feedback in game, mainly during combat and though we are happy with the direction we are going, we acknowledge we have a lot more to do with audio to really make FTD shine.


Alpha 4.0 change list

New

• New Black Rogue class
• Added 9 new armour sets
• Skeletons now don’t bleed blood!
• Some enemies can now run
• Added ACK First Play window with a link to the help page and ACK video overview
• Stacks of new Audio FX - Far from complete :(
• Added XInput controller support on WIndows - Should now support a wider range of controllers, legacy controller mappers and Steam In-Home Streaming. If it works in Big Picture mode, it should work in-game.
• New ZOMBIE enemy
• New EYEBALL enemy
• Lifted level cap to 35 - We will start lifting this regularly now
• Adventures in creator dashboard are now scrollable and clickable
• Added new Creator Dashboard Adventure Details page
• New QUARTER height sculpting with new switchable UI in design mode
• Added new TAGS - DUNGEON, CASTLE, TEMPLE & CRYPT
• Added new and improved world map UI
• New sculpting heights including Quarter height sculpting

Changes/Improvements

• Major rebalance pass (not finished yet)
• We now clear the COPY & PASTE data in ACK when changing adventures
• Improved 2 handed Hammer damage and knockback
• Bolt and Staff projectiles do more damage now and staff projectile does some area of damage on impact
• Loot shrine donation scale has been made steeper - was too quick ;)
• Officially support XBox One (wired) controllers on windows
• Officially support XBox 360 wireless controller on OSX (must be on and ID set before game launch)
• Fighter berserk mode has new visual FX and lasts longer
• NPC Sign now has a new visual
• Lowered the power of a bunch of out of control loot modifiers
• Lowered the rate that item protection grows on modifiers
• Improved drop rates on armour pieces
• Reduced the zoom amount and radius on items of interest like chests
• Camera is now closer to player in single player and online games and slightly further out in splitscreen games
• Wraiths have new death effect - no more skeletons
• Keys & Potions now register properly to be picked up when character isn’t moving
• All GIB effects should collide against the world properly and not get stuck mid-air
• Can now use DPAD in all UI instead of left stick, not just ACK UI
• ACK TABS on toolbars now wrap!!! YES!
• Controller UI movement now ramps in speed! YES!
• Fighter lost ability to use crossbow - We will give the fighter a new ranged weapon in a future update
• Two handed Hammers now do increased damage
• Added new “INCOMING ADVENTURER…” message to chat screens in MP games when a new player is joining the party
• Character shield is charged to full on character re-spawn
• Revamped home level for stages 2 and 3.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug that would error if second player dropped out of splitscreen, then tried joining again
• Fixed being able to incorrectly access hidden UI elements in Enemy inspector
• Removed bug that was double rendering all of our UI - woops!
• Removed any characters on save that don’t have a class
• Fixed a bunch of UI that didn't fit on 1024x768 resolution screens
• Fixed a lot of foot slippage on characters between combat and movement
• Remove trailing carriage returns on NPC dialogue to prevent text from being tiny
• Fixed some text going off panel in character selection screen when player only has one character
• Fixed enemies being able to block when stunned
• Fixed enemies sometimes walking in a quick circle before moving into their paths
• Fixed a weird jump behaviour that would sometimes angle the character to the ground
• Fixed missing linux controller Big Picture hookup - If you open Big Picture, FTD should grab the controller mappings and make DPAD work again :-)
• Fixed world map being unresponsive after switching to controller from mouse
• Fixed hot swapping weapons while getting attacked would leave character in flash state
• Fixed being able to see the publish UI when clicking play test
• Fixed the character from being able to fly when opening UI when character on edge of a tile
• Fixed the names of some props
• Fixed being able to force climb up some props like vases, tables etc.
• Fixed the Loot Shrine Stash area being clamped at 15 for some people
• Fixed *some* cases where ACK Toolbar UI would shift up when opening the palette
• Fixed *some* cases where Inventory UI would shift when opening items in a category
• Fixed issue where re-publishing an adventure would mark it on your map as not your own - If you have adventures like this on your world map, please re-publish them. *** If after a republish they are still not marked as yours please contact us immediately.