An Early Beta | Patreon Weekly #222

Hey Patrons, in this weekly I’m going to talk a bit about an upcoming beta for v2.2.0, and summarize where we are currently.

What’s Done, and What’s Left?

Currently v2.2.0 includes a bunch of miscellaneous content, in addition to the planned headline feature of the blacksmith quest rework:

• Almost 20 minutes of new music, including intense tracks, finale tracks, and extensions to the existing region tracks.
• A soft rework to the prison quests, with the goal of making their mechanics more engaging.
• A rebalance to the hostile champions challenge, which should reduce difficulty spikes.
• Redesigns to all of the potion and scroll based T2 talents, with the goal of making them more generally useful.
• 15+ misc. changes, including more forgiving shopkeepers, smaller sewers quest changes, better crystal path rooms, better retreating enemy AI, and more.
• 20+ bugfixes
• A few buffs and nerfs, most notably the sneak ability on dagger weapons has been partially reworked to give more mobility utility.

Unfortunately, August has turned into a very busy month for me for a variety of personal reasons (not all of them are bad at least), which means development in v2.2.0 has been delayed.

Because of this, the new blacksmith quest isn’t ready for testing yet. I’ve got a bunch of partial work done, but it’s not playable in its current state.

Releasing an Early Beta

So, as we’re at just about 3 months since v2.1.0 and the blacksmith quest is still a little ways out, I’ve opted to start the beta for v2.2.0 a little early. This way players can get access to all of the finished content that is in v2.2.0 so far, even if it doesn’t include the blacksmith quest yet.

This will start with v2.2.0-ALPHA-0.1, which is going to get posted here for Golden+ Patrons very shortly. I’ll then hopefully roll the beta out more widely later this week.

I’m also eager to make a new blog post on Shatteredpixel.com to go along with this beta, as I’ve got one other thing to announce that’s unrelated to v2.2.0. Partly in response to all of the turbulence on social media lately, I’m starting up a Shattered Pixel Newsletter! Expect to hear more about that soon, it’s not quite set up yet.