Fresh from a packed Developer Update Livestream, the team provided an overview of the Season of Blood and a trove of quality-of-life updates. For a quick top-level preview, we are adding more Endgame activities, significantly increasing Experience gains to reduce the journey to Level 100 and increasing the ability to specifically target Uniques and Uber Uniques.

Associate director of community Adam Fletcher sat down with members of the development team to siphon the details of the upcoming Season of Blood with Patch 1.2.0, arriving on October 17th. With so much information to share about Season 2, we’re following up with a Campfire Chat to talk about Class balance, new Unique items, sweeping changes to Resistances, and a great deal of other quality-of-life updates and bug fixes. Visit this article on October 10 for more information.

In the Season of Blood, Players will have to harness the power of the vampiric scourge to successfully defend themselves from its originators including the Blood Seekers that shadow your every move. If you’d like more details on our upcoming Season of Blood, visit this article.


The Echo of Duriel Boss fight will prove to be a formidable test of ferocity.

During the Developer Update Livestream, the team dove into many community-requested features coming with Season of Blood. The following quality-of-life features arrive with Season of Blood:

• Five Endgame bosses have been added across Sanctuary to increase the variety of Endgame experiences offered, providing better opportunities to obtain specific, Unique and Uber Unique items.
  • The new Boss fights are unlocked based on succeeding in different tasks across Sanctuary, with different resources required for facing each Boss, and each new fight becoming available as you progress through World Tiers III and IV.
    • Specific details to encounter each boss can be found in our Season of Blood article.
• The reward pools for these Endgame bosses have been significantly improved:
  • Each boss drops specific Uniques, exclusive to each individual boss fight.
    • The Duriel boss fight has significantly increased the chance to drop Uber Uniques, making the process of accessing these coveted items more achievable.
  • Each individual boss also has a chance to drop unique cosmetics specific to each boss, making the access of specific cosmetics in-game more targeted.

• The time between Legion Events has been reduced from 30 to 25 minutes.
  • Legion Event warning timers increased from 5 to 10 minutes.
  • Fixed an issue where the Legion Event pin would not display at the edge of a player’s mini-map if a Whisper was active for the Legion Event.
• The World Boss fight is available more frequently to players on all World Tiers as the Spawn Times have been reduced from 6 hours to 3 hours and 30 minutes.
  • World Boss warning timers have increased from 30 to 60 minutes.
  • Fixed an issue where the World Boss pin would not display at the edge of a player’s mini-map if a Whisper was active for the World Boss.
  • For increased visibility, a message is now broadcast to all players when the World Boss is 15 minutes away from spawning.
• Gold and Experience rewards have been increased from the following activities:
  • Helltide Chests
  • Cashing in Grim Favors
  • Completing individual Whispers
• To ensure enemies constantly give experience relative to the current player level, the Nightmare Sigils rewarded from Whisper Caches will now always be within 5 Levels of the highest-level Nightmare Dungeon the player has completed.
• To improve readability, Helltide Chests now have specific icons on the map to indicate their type.
• Whisper Caches adhere to the item slot of the cache.

• Decreased the time spent to reach level 100, making the journey about 40% faster. The experience gained from killing monsters at level 50+ has been significantly increased and rises steadily as you level.
• Prevent Monsters from being less powerful as character level increases by making Monsters in World Tier III and IV match the current player level at a minimum after Levels 55 and 75 respectively. This increases the overall experience of levelling, making it much smoother.
• Incenses now grant a bonus to Experience and persist after death.
• Increased the potency of Experience bonuses (Elixir, Season Blessings) by making them multiplicative with the World Tier bonus.

• Expedited the demon slaying process as Nightmare Sigils now teleports you directly into the Nightmare Dungeon.
• Avoided some players not getting Nightmare Sigils from Dungeons that have no final boss, Nightmare Sigils are now rewarded upon completing a Nightmare Dungeon instead of final boss defeat.
• Objectives have been removed from some Dungeons, only defeating the boss is needed to defeat the Nightmare Dungeon.
• Multiple Nightmare Dungeon Afflictions have been updated.
  • Backstabbers
    • Close Monster attacks from behind cause you to become Vulnerable. Vulnerable damage taken is increased by X%.
  • Monster Critical Resist
    • Monster attacks reduce the damage of your Critical Strikes by 3 seconds by X%, stacking up to Y%.
  • Death Pulse
    • Prevent death pulses on monsters that have explosions on death.
    • Prevent death pulses from spawning repeatedly on top of each other.
  • Lightning Storm
    • Being ‘shocked’ while in the protection dome grants 35% bonus Movement Speed for 5 seconds.
    • Only starts when players are in combat.
    • Only starts if the protection dome caster has a direct path to its targeted player.
  • Drifting Shade
    • Duration reduced from 5 seconds to 3 seconds.
    • Respawn time increased by 2 seconds.
• Massively reduced backtracking by placing all Dungeon objectives on the critical path of a dungeon, making them much harder to miss by taking a wrong turn.
• Many dungeon layouts have been redesigned.
• Improved the overall readability of Traps by enhancing their overall visual effects and reducing their crowd control.
• Endcaps have been added to ensure Dungeon layouts don’t feel too linear.
• Paragon Glyph experience has been increased.

• Made Dungeon Events more worthwhile and enticing to players by increasing their monster density.
• NPC’s should no longer be killed with one-hit in World Tiers III and IV.

• Significantly freed up inventory space by making Gems a crafting material. Gem materials can now be taken to a Jeweler for crafting.
• Prevented players from losing their progress on a Hardcore character from connectivity issues, Scrolls of Escape are now consumed if a Hardcore player disconnects while in combat, teleporting them to a safe location.
• Reduced the chance of being locked into certain stats on a Legendary item by reducing their overall enchanting costs.
• Reduced overburdening inventories and causing unnecessary trips into town:
  • In World Tier III: Normal, Magic, and non-sacred Rare items will drop as crafting resources.
  • In World Tier IV: Normal, Magic, and non-ancestral Rare items will drop as crafting resources.
    • Gold drop rates in World Tiers III and IV have been increased to compensate for this.
• Higher level monsters in World Tiers III and IV drop Sacred and Ancestral items of greater Item Power potential.
• Normal Whisper cache rewards now provide +10 Item Power. Upgraded caches now provide +20 Item Power rewards.
• Helltide cache rewards now provide rewards of +20 Item Power value.

• Reduced the time spent having to regain renown each season, all earned renown rewards persist between seasons and characters (this does not include experience or Gold).
  • Earned Skill Points, Potion Capacity, Max Obols and Paragon Points earned from Renown will persist between each character. Renown Experience and Gold must be earned on each character.
    • For example:
      • Character 1: earns Renown Tier II in a region
        • Gains 1 Skill Point, 1 Potion Capacity
      • Creates Character 2, earns Renown Tier I in a different region
        • Gains 1 Skill Points
      • Creates Character 3:
        • This Character automatically receives both renown rewards from Characters 1 and 2
          • 2 Skill Points, 1 Potion Capacity available
  • This also applies to Hardcore characters. If renown rewards were earned on a Hardcore character in Season of the Malignant, those earned rewards persist for a new Hardcore character in Season of Blood regardless of whether your previous Hardcore character died.
    • For Hardcore characters, Altars of Lilith and Map Discovery progress still carries over within the Hardcore realm. Similar to Season of the Malignant, Altars of Lilith and Map Discovery progress for Hardcore characters that died before Season of the Malignant will not persist for Season of Blood.
• Coveted Items can now be marked as Favorite, and cannot not be sold or salvaged.
• 2 additional character slots have been added.
• Eased the ability for players that haven’t completed the campaign to access Seasonal content earlier, by adding the option to skip the Campaign on character creation if any character on your account has completed the Prologue.
• Prevented wasted Minion and Companion attacks by ensuring Minions and Companions no longer target invulnerable enemies.

• Improved the horse-riding experience by improving the overall responsiveness of mounts. They are less likely to get stuck on barriers or slow down unexpectedly.
• Reduced the time it takes to travel across Sanctuary by increasing spur duration, which now breaks barricades.
• Base speed increased by 15% (this does not affect top speed.)
• Removed the need for Players to place their cursor on the edge of their window for max speed, general speed has been improved relative to cursor placement.
• Improved combat and mount versatility by reducing ability cooldowns by 50%.
  • Manual dismount cooldown has been reduced from 10 to 5 seconds.
  • Forced dismount from damage cooldown has been reduced from 10 to 4 seconds.
  • The delay between a dismount combat skill becoming available after mounting (ex: the Barbarian’s Bounding Slam) has been reduced from 10 to 3 seconds.

Stashes are now available in all small towns with Waypoints.

• Additional Stashes have been added to all Capital Cities near important vendors.
• Reduced the need to travel to Capital Cities by adding Stashes to all small towns with Waypoints.
• Reduced the need to travel to Capital Cities by adding an Occultist to the Tree of Whispers Waypoint.
• Reduced the need for additional walking, Purveryors of Curiosities have set up shop closer to the Waypoint in several Capital Cities:
  • Kyovashad
  • Zabinzet
  • Ked Bardu
  • Gea-Kul
• Improved Navigation through Sanctuary following character creation by adding 10 Waypoints to the list of automatically unlocked Waypoints for those that skip the Campaign.
  • There are 2 Waypoints in each Region.
  • Note that for players that choose to skip the Campaign and haven’t unlocked these 10 Waypoints on any character, they will not be automatically available.

Stash search and Stash filter functionality has been added.

• Improved item sorting and overall organization by adding Stash search and Stash filter functionality.
• Improved Streaming functionality by adding Streamer Mode, which hides sensitive information such as Character names or Battle.net usernames.
• Improved organization by displaying Item affix tooltips in a more intuitive and consistent order.
• Improved organization by grouping Extracted Aspects with the same Legendary powers together when sorting in your Stash and Inventory.
• Improved navigation functionality by adding the ability to auto-run. When moving in a direction, the player will continuously move in the direction faced or where the cursor is placed until another movement is activated or a skill is initiated.
• Improved navigation by adjusting the zoom level of the Mini-map.
• Added an option for hiding all Combat text (ie. Vulnerable, Dodge, Fortified)
• Improved Unique item visibility.
• Improved access to the Screen Reader option by enabling it by default.
• Improved cursor contrast colors and options for versatility and customization.

This is only a top-level list of the improvements included with Season of Blood—to take a more in-depth look watch the recap of our Developer Update Livestream below.



The team also discussed the Season of Blood Battle Pass and shed light on the improved rewards from the Free Tiers.

Don’t miss our next Campfire Chat on October 10 that will cover class balance changes, updates to damage resistances, changes to Unique item acquisition, and more. If you’d like to read our article that provides a look at the upcoming Season of Blood, see this Article.

Significant performance improvements, faster NPC pathfinding, and new debugging tools.

Save files from v0.5.1 are compatible.

We've revamped our game draw loop for incredible speed gains.

• The ground layer is now recreated as needed, instead of every frame, yielding a massive ~200-220% FPS boost.
  
• Information about how on-screen entities should be rendered is now cached and recreated only as needed, boosting FPS by another ~10-15%.

• Smarter handling of turn-based updates, which were a significant cause of slowdown when many entities are loaded. These events don't run every frame, but could be a cause of jitter while moving.
  
• Optimized redundant code that ran on every frame for a ~2-4% increased FPS.
  
• Entities with animations or timers are now managed separately for minor (<1%) FPS gains.

NPCs are smarter and more efficient in how they find their way.

• Reduced frequency of NPC path requests, relying on cached paths, or using alternative faster methods if it makes sense to do so.
  
• NPCs now stop pathfinding early if the attempt is taking too long, given the expected distance, and will instead rely on a faster method.
  
• A* pathfinding algorithm - we now use a hashmap to check if a node has already been visited, for far faster performance.
  
• A* pathfinding algorithm - updated main heuristic used for node selection, for up to 10x performance boost on long paths (Closest Heuristic -> Manhattan Heuristic).

While providing generally faster performance, these changes should also address the lag sometimes felt in towns or crowded areas, where many entities are blocking each other and attempting to path-find at the same time.

New game option for those who like to troubleshoot or are facing performance issues.

• Added option "Performance Log".
  
• Enabling this creates a 'performance.csv' file in the game folder to track resource-intensive tasks. Use with caution as it could impact game speed.
  
• If you are having performance issues, please enable this setting and send your files to doorsoftrithius@gmail.com.

Sprydite main menu!
*not final version


Character customization in multiplayer survival mode
*not final version

The gates of the Burning Hells have opened once more, welcoming more of Lilith’s children home.

Diablo IV is a game about slaying nightmarish creatures and acquiring powerful gear, but also about forging memories with new and old friends. We want to break down barriers to make it easier for wanderers everywhere to defend Sanctuary.

Which is why we’re honored to announce…Diablo IV will be available to play on Steam starting October 17! The Diablo IV Steam page is live now, and the game is available to wishlist.

Diablo IV’s presence on Steam is in addition to Battle.net, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4, so wanderers playing the game on any existing platform need not make any changes. Those wanting to play on Steam will need to first purchase the game on that platform, then connect Diablo IV to a Battle.net account (as we require for all platforms). This enables cross-platform play and more. Players using Steam will have access to features specific to that platform, such as Steam achievements, their Steam friends list, and the option to invite those friends to play in-game. We’re looking forward to seeing more defenders of Sanctuary band together and welcome any feedback you may have.

The timing of Diablo IV’s launch on Steam couldn’t be better! It coincides with the release of Season of Blood, our second Season, which introduces a new Questline for you to uncover, Vampiric Powers to wield with terrifying lethality, 5 additional endgame bosses, and more. To get a full overview of the upcoming Season of Blood, visit this article or catch up on our Developer Update Livestream that occurred today.

Hello everyone!

It's been almost a week since Gynocracy launched in Early Access and I'm very humbled by the response so far, thank you all very much.
I'd like to take this opportunity to clarify some frequently raised issues.



Each chapter takes about two months to produce. Chapter 4 was completed in August. Chapter 5 is currently about 50% done, so you should expect it to be available in late October/early November. Please keep in mind that this is a single-dev project and things outside my control can happen, so don't take this as set in stone, but this is the general idea.


Will the game be translated into [insert your favorite language]? I can't say yet. I would like the game translated into as many languages as possible, but only after it comes out of Early Access. The reason for this is that localization would complicate the release of new chapters at this stage + I want to be able to easily tweak existing chapters as needed.


The first three chapters are fairly linear to establish the game world and story. In chapter 4, things start to diverge based on your choices. These divergences revolve around the main couple, the protagonist and his wife. The changes are subtle at first, but the idea is to make them deeper and deeper. From the feedback I've gotten so far, there are a lot of different expectations for how our heroes' relationship should evolve, so I want to let the players decide.


If you have played the game, please, please, please consider writing a review ːsteamthumbsupː ːsteamthumbsdownː. So far, only a tiny fraction of players have left a review. In addition to providing feedback to the developers, reviews affect the visibility of the game on Steam and are therefore extremely important, especially for small indie games like Gynocracy.


I want to hear your feedback! Tell me what you liked, what you didn't like, what you'd like to see more of (or less of). Even though I have the whole story outlined, I'm not afraid to change things based on player feedback :)

Thank you and have fun!

• Improve ingame performances
• Add Inputs touch event
• Remove F12 shortcut to quit game (use alt+F4 instead)
• On level up, don't display statistics that doesn't apply to the hero
• Level up window: diplay window always at the same Y position
• No more wait when status effect doesn't apply in battle
• No more wait when effect common reaction is instant commands in battles
• Don't display affected status icon if it doesn't have any picture
• Fusion status message into just one for every target affected

• Engine crash if model hero map object set to none
• Poison, burnt status should at least inflict 1 by default
• Example game chest in tent not giving a potion
• Weird camera small behaviour
• Skills/Items description: no display decimals on damages
• Centered Picture2D with reverse is not centered
• Status effect skip only apply when trying to remove status
• Battles miss damage repeated visually if several enemies target
• Correct error message when wrong element res ID
• Battle for ennemies selection, left and right arrow are reverted
• Status issue when missing or not first effect
• No sprite object cannot be triggered at 0,0
• Try fix battler move not always correct on final position
• Switch texture command: problem with empty textures

Greetings members of the Accord.

This report will be cut into two pieces, the first will be about the upcoming patch, and the second part will be about our experimentations done on Unreal Engine 5.

In 3 days we will be releasing a small patch to Penkura, it will contain fixes, code performance improvements, widget (3D interfaces) performance improvements, a lot of quality-of-life additions, new music, new sound effects, and minor content additions. This will most likely be the last patch we will release on Unreal Engine 4.27.2.

Now, let's move on to the next part of the report. Unreal Engine 5 experimentation and transfer.

For the last 5 months, we have been experimenting with the Unreal Engine 5, but unfortunately our project "AS IS" was losing around 60-80% of its performance when moved to the newer engine.
We of course consider this an unacceptable loss, and we didn't want our community to lose so much performance.

We are looking to move to Unreal Engine 5, not only is it a high-end engine capable of doing incredible things, but we wanted to be up to date with the tech and use some of the tools that can be only found in engine 5.0+. Those tools will greatly speed up our workflow, and who knows what else Epic Games will add to the Engine that could possibly help us with the development of the game.

This is the screenshot of Penkura on our test machine within our Custom Unreal Engine 4.27.2.


In the heaviest part of the game to render with all settings on max we were getting a stable 105+ fps.

In Unreal Engine 5.0 with the project "as is", we were getting roughly 35+ fps in the same area.



This does not mean that Unreal Engine 5 is incapable of getting the same performance as Unreal Engine 4. It just means that we would need to do a lot of work to get that performance. We will not move to Unreal Engine 5 until we are sure that our community will get a similar performance at the very least.

To provide players with better performance we created our own in-house tools and systems that not only boost performance but also simulate certain high-end features at the lowest cost possible.

Those systems are:

• LionsMat (our octahedral mesh painting system)
  
• LionsNav (Long-range navigation system for NPC, Bots)
  
• LionsLight (our non-ray trace Light and shadow system that allowed us to create pitch-black rooms and caves even when the outside of the entire level is fully lit by the sun).
  
• LionsHide (our occlusion system for 3d widgets, shadow quality switch based on hidden objects)

and dozens of other minor systems that each improve performance by 0.5 to 1% but add up to a bigger effect when working simultaneously.

We knew that all of these systems needed to be moved to Unreal Engine 5 in order to get better performance.

After reading the documentation and testing out our project with various solutions, we are now certain that we WON'T be using the Unreal Lumen system, Nanite system, or Virtual Shadowing system. No matter how amazing they are (even though we have to admit it is one of the best techs we have seen). The reason is very simple, people with graphics cards lower than RTX GeForce 20 series will just suffer.

We are happy to report that we were able to move the LionsMat system, LionsNav system, and LionsHide system without major issues (as only a few systems were changed in Unreal Engine 5).
Unfortunately, the LionsLight system was almost completely broken. It took us some time and heavy coding to fix this system to an "acceptable" rate.

After all the experimenting on Unreal Engine 5, we are happy to showcase the performance improvement we have been able to make since the first transfer.



We still need to fix many minor issues but already we can see that it not only got to the level of Unreal Engine 4, but we actually achieved a little bit better performance! We got to roughly 110+ FPS.

Because of this, we want to inform everybody that we will spend the next month not only moving the entire project to Unreal Engine 5, but we will also clean and streamline a lot of background code. Which will make our work A LOT easier going forward. All of the code has remained untouched because any major code that we wanted to make to assets could potentially break the saves files of the player.

After all of this, we need to talk about the negative side. We want to inform all of you that it is very likely this will be the last patch where your current saves will work. We spent over a week creating a system that would allow us to smoothly transfer saves from the 4.27 to 5.3 engine, but the metadata difference between files made on Unreal Engine 4.27 and 5.3 are very different. This means the current saves would be unreadable on the new version of the game.

We will use this opportunity to change and most of all improve the entire code in the game that needed to be improved a long time ago. Since we were able to prepare for this for quite some time, we expect to complete this in a single month.

Lastly, because of the request made by some players, we will start to place our Dev-Coms on Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/Penkura/ Steam and of course Discord. We were also requested to make a classic-style forum on our website, but since our community is still very small, and we have a lot on our plate already, we will do our best to improve our Discord by adding forum-style channels.

Till the next Dev-Com over and out.

- Completely overhauled the movement
- Updated textures

- Completely overhauled the movement
- Updated textures

Performance

• Applied the performance enhancements from projectiles to souls and trinkets
  
• Improved the performance of all artifacts

Balance

• Decreased the number of souls needed to level to 20
  
• Increased the number of souls needed to level past 30
  
• Fire Sprite: Projectile Life 75 -> 300
  
• Porcupine: Projectile Life 45 -> 60
  
• Adjusted the enemy spawn rates
  
• Basic slimes no longer spawn after 5 minutes
  
• Soul Base Pickup Range: 60 -> 80

Fixes

• Fixed Eldritch Cascade not working
  
• Fixed Player’s bullet doubling hitting enemies