Blightbound

• Adjusted assassin ultimate description to remove reference to secondary skill, since different assassins can have different secondary skills. • Fixed Malborys' lifegoal not progressing when playing with a local friend (player). • Changed Malborys’ goals to now progress whenever the player plays Malborys with any other human players (local or online), regardless of platform or if the other player in the party has been befriended. • Removed enemy encounters in the puzzle in Western Heights in The Hemomancer level when there is a bot in the party. (*See below) • Fixed an issue where boss enemies would be vulnerable during their spawn introduction. • Fixed an issue where players would spawn into a level with less than full health. • Fixed an issue that would cause the game to crash when changing rooms after a disconnected player has been replaced by a bot. • Fixed an issue where the game would automatically disband a local co-op party after completing a level. • Fixed button prompt not being localised to specific player inputs. • Gave bots more priority to target the bells in the Writhing Oracle boss fight. AI Puzzle Difficulties The puzzle in Western Heights was a set-piece that was very difficult for us to get right. When the AI gets instructions for different tasks which all have high priority, it finds it very difficult to perform multiple high priority tasks at the same time. In this case, the AI is tasked to kill enemies and stand on pressure plates. However, there are other variables, such as altered map geometry due to boxes being moved onto pressure plates which makes path-finding more difficult and finicky, as well as needing to balance the priority of completing the puzzle and defeating enemies, where the logic gets even more muddled if there is a hero down and requires rescuing. We tried many iterations and combinations of this puzzle since patch 1.1.1 in many different builds with tweaks and changes to AI priority in each of these builds, but every internal playtest gave different critical feedback, which lead us to believe that the player experience with the Western Heights puzzle remained unsatisfactory. Ultimately, we decided the best solution was to remove enemy spawns when there is a bot in the party. The puzzle still functions as intended when all 3 heroes in the party are players. Known Issues Issue: game un-readies party after entering map select. This issue seems to be most prominent when in a party with 3 players, each on a different platform. During internal testing, we did not encounter this issue when playing as a duo regardless of it being on the same platform or cross platform. Cause: the room code is invalid. Workaround: leave group and re-join again, either through matchmaking or room code invite, repeat until the game no longer backs the party out after selecting a map. During internal testing, this was usually resolved after 2-3 tries, but it did take up to 5 tries once. This was an issue we encountered throughout Blightbound’s development, we tried to fix this issue, as well as add fail-safes in many of the previous patches and updates, but we were never able to pinpoint the specific issue(s) causing room codes to become invalid. Issue: when switching from different console generations (Xbox One and Xbox Series X, for example), players might lose progress on their saves, even with cloud save enabled. We are not able to fix this because we don't have next gen dev kits. Without PS5 or Xbox Series X dev kits, we are not able to find the issue causing this problem, so any fix we would want to implement would essentially be guesswork, as there are no debug settings or error logs on commercial consoles. Furthermore, any fix would also need to be tested in a live build of the game, which is not an option. Issue: if a player disconnects after the boss spawn animation/introduction. The game could potentially soft-lock. Cause: After the player disconnects and is replaced by a bot, the party restarts at the beginning of the room. However, the boss animation/introduction has already been triggered in that session, and does not trigger for a second time. Unfortunately, there are no workarounds to this issue and players will have to quit to the Refuge and abandon the run. We have implemented fail-safes to prevent this issue from occurring and this is an especially rare issue to occur, it’s also not guaranteed to occur every time a player disconnects in a boss room after the spawn animation has played. Issue: using Death From Above (assassin skill) still has a small chance of putting the player out-of-bounds in the elevator in The Descent and during the Blightmist sequences in The Hemomancer. We have added multiple checks to prevent this, but if triggered at very specific moments in specific parts of these sequences, this bug can still occur. Cause: this skill is both a teleport and a movement, so sometimes, it goes over the invisible walls around the play area. Workaround: Sometimes, it is possible for players to use the Death From Above skill to get back into the playing area. However, it might take many tries and it’s not guaranteed that players can go back into the playing area by using the skill. We have implemented many fail-safes to prevent this from happening. Most recently, we added a check when using this skill where the skill would only go off if the player has selected a valid location for the skill to take place. Looking Ahead In the coming few weeks, the studio will look back on and evaluate the ins and outs of what went well, and what did not during the 4+ years of developing Blightbound, and make the decision if we want to continue making content and working on the game. We will post a studio update in the coming month.