Hyper Light Breaker might not have loved the smoothest early entry launch, however developer Heart Machine has been diligent in listening to suggestions and striving to replace the sport since its preliminary launch final month. The studio issued quite a few hotfixes within the wake of launch, addressing gamers’ most grievous complaints, and offered a extra thorough roadmap of its future plans for the motion roguelike final week. Now, it has debuted the primary “month-to-month replace” for the sport, which amongst different issues introduces a complete new playable character.
According to the replace’s patch notes, this new character is known as ‘Ravona’ and could be unlocked on the character choice display. Like most characters, Ravona comes with two completely different ‘SyComs’—floating robots that help her in fight—which gamers can select between when getting into the fray. The ‘Reaper’ SyCom is a “high-risk, high-reward” perk which has “excessive harm potential for each rails and blades”. Meanwhile, Ravona’s ‘Ranger’ SyCom is seemingly designed “for Breakers who wish to shoot quick and shoot quite a bit”, which speaks to me on a deep and intimate stage.
Alongside Ravona, the replace provides three new weapon ‘affixes’, all of which enhance harm to targets stricken by particular circumstances like rot, burn, and stagger, in addition to two new enemies, a “bullet leaper” variant and a “croc brute” elite. Coupled with these additions are some vital changes to play, with Heart Machine rebalancing the “hazard meter” in order that it now “triggers much less commonly however drops extra highly effective compositions with extra waves” and tunes “assault magnetism” to prioritise enemies in entrance of you (presumably so that you get ambushed from behind much less).
The most vital change exterior of including Ravona, nevertheless, is a surgical overhaul of the parry mechanic. The parry’s unreliable, hard-to-read nature was one of the vital frequent complaints amongst gamers on launch. In response, Heart Machine has adjusted its design in a number of methods. There’s a brand new visible impact to exhibit that the parry is omni-directional, (i.e. it should parry an assault no matter the place the enemy is attacking you from). Moreover, parrying one enemy now interrupts assaults of all close by enemies, with an ideal parry rising the length of the interruption.
These main modifications are accompanied by a for much longer record of stability tweaks, particular bugfixes, and efficiency optimisations, the latter of which was one other sticking level for the neighborhood. To tackle efficiency points, enemy spawns have been capped so the sport will not buckle your GPU by overloading it with critters, whereas Heart Machine has additionally fastened a number of jarring digital camera hitches and improved level-of-detail transitions for “a big quantity” of environmental belongings, which ought to make the sport smoother and cut back pop-in.
You can learn the complete changelog right here. From rocky beginnings Hyper Light Breaker is rapidly turning into a first-rate instance of how you can deal with an early entry launch. Let’s hope all this effort culminates in a wonderful recreation at any time when Heart Machine feels it is completed.
