Rogue Legacy 2 – v0.3.0 – The Arcane Hallows Update
We feel another big one coming. With the Arcane Hallows, our second major content update, we have officially surpassed Rogue Legacy 1 in terms of raw content (excluding NG+). In nearly all aspects we have either met or exceeded what was found in the original, and there’s at least two more content patches planned! We have more biomes, more bosses and more everything still in the pipeline, and we hope you stick around to see what’s in store for the future. Here’s a brief comparison between the original RL and its sequel.
BY THE NUMBERS
| Rogue Legacy 1 | Rogue Legacy 2: The Arcane Hallows Update | |
|---|---|---|
| Biomes | 4 | 4 (+ more to come) |
| Classes | 8 base (+2 secret) | 9 base (+ more to come) |
| Traits | 37 | 44 (+10 disabled, maybe another day) |
| Relics | 7 (+4 obols) | 29 (+ more to come) |
| Runes | 11 | 15 (+ more to come) |
| Enemies | 69 | *62 (+ more to come) |
| Boss Fights | 6 (+5 special) | *6 (+3 special, more to come) |
| Minibosses | 6 | 3 (+ more to come) |
| Spells | 10 | 15 (+ more to come) |
| Weapons | 1 | 9 (+ more to come) |
| Talents | 9 | 9 (+ more to come) |
| Room Layouts | 350+ | 650+ |
*Some content is locked behind NG+ and the Drift House (update 3)
With this patch we’ve also spent a lot of time working on things outside of pure content. Along with really digging deep to boost game performance, we also shortened loading times and added a huge swath of quality-of-life improvements based on user feedback. Some are big, like Fairy Room Triggers, while others are small, such as tweaks to spells, but all are aimed at enhancing the game. Thank you for all your feedback, and please keep ‘em coming!
**IMPORTANT**
Just like with the Far Shores Update and probably all future content releases, your Skill Tree will be reset upon loading your save file for the first time. But worry not, the majority of your gold will be REFUNDED. Please don’t forget to SPEND IT! Charon sucks!
All your runes, blueprints, ore, and souls will remain.
GAME UPDATES
Broader Horizons – With the release of the Arcane Hallows Update comes the Stygian Study, the fourth biome in the world of Rogue Legacy 2. While this matches RL2’s content to the size of the original, we’re not stopping there. The Study is the beating heart of the kingdom, acting as the epicentre of research and progress. Within its faulted halls lies a domain full of mystic illusion and wizardry, and not everything is as it seems.
Players who prefer a more open experience will be glad to know that the Stygian Study can be entered out-of-sequence. This means it can be explored at any time – just be sure you’re equipped to handle what it has in store.
New Challengers Have Arrived – Two new classes will be lending their talents to conquer this shape-shifting world - the Gunslinger and the Assassin. The Gunslinger is our wildest class yet. Get into the thick of and unleash a rapid volley of bullets that turn your foes into Swiss cheese. Meanwhile, the Assassin is a vintage class that is high-powered yet fragile. Weave in and out of danger with your cloaking ability, while doling out enormous damage with a rapid three-strike attack.
Architect – As the world expands, so too does the complexity of conquering it. To help address this, we are bringing back the crackpot Architect. Those familiar with Rogue Legacy will recall that this loony character can lock down your previous world to play over again. Practice against bosses, take a second crack at Fairy Room Challenges, or just go for 100% map clearance. The Architect grants the ability to try, try again, but remember, crazy doesn’t come free. This time around his fees increase with every attempt in a locked world.
Curio Shoppes – Players can now randomly encounter Curio Shoppes when traversing the world. These shops give players an opportunity to try a different set of skills for their hero. Swap your weapon, your spell, and even your talent to become a master of all. Those who are adventurous will also be rewarded with bonus stats. These shops are hugely experimental so they might be available only for a limited time.
Hubba Hubba Hub – The Docks are getting a slight facelift so that there is more space to stretch your legs. Things have been feeling a little claustrophobic ever since the Architect showed up, so the starting area is expanding upward and outward. This will give the characters that have already settled there more room to breathe.
Difficulty Rebalance – When it comes to game balance, we generally veer towards the more difficult side of things. For Early Access we tried to make RL2 not as hard as a previous games, but it’s still super hard. We’ve done a big pass on overall difficulty and made things generally easier, while making some more bespoke changes to certain trouble areas, like Heirloom Challenges. In conjunction with characters like the Architect, whom intrinsically reduce the difficulty, we may have swung too far in the other direction. As always, we’d love to hear your feedback.
Fairy Room Challenge Triggers – This addition came in last-minute, but it is a fairy-ly large change to how Fairy Room Challenges have worked from the original. Rather than blindsiding players with a surprising challenge the moment they enter a Fairy Room, there is now a lever that must be pulled before the action starts. This should address issues where players would jump in a no-jump challenge and fail before even noticing, or where a timer-would-suddenly-appear-and-you-have-to-go-go-go!
Armor Redesign – One of the most important (and unspoken) rules of Game Design is that “Numbers Should Always Go Up”. While we were happy with our Armor System (it did what we wanted it to do, which helped boost weak classes more than strong classes and made early game consistently impactful), it was demoralizing to a large user base. We rehauled the algorithm entirely so that armor goes up, and rarely goes down. Now your armor blocks a flat amount of damage (up to a maximum). This will make early game more inconsequential, but we have future changes in store to resolve this. This is another one that’s marked down as “highly experimental”.
RELICS REHAUL
So much has changed with the way Relics work that we’ve created a separate section for it.
Resolve System – Relics have always been low-key overpowered, but most people avoided them due to their drastic costs on maximum health. Players should not feel obligated to use them nor should they feel out-of-reach – we want relics to always be a choice. We’ve made a few smaller changes to help, but ultimately decided a bigger solution was in order. With this update, the usage of relics now cost RESOLVE.
Resolve is a new stat that lowers with each equipped relic. If your resolve drops below 100%, you will lose maximum health by an equivalent amount. However, resolve can also go above 100%, and it can be modified based on things such as what kind of equipment you’re wearing, what runes or traits you have, and so on. This adds more fidelity when choosing relics, since players can now build themselves in a way that reduces those inhibitive costs (or vice versa).
Twin Relics – Relics are a great way to add variety in the middle of a run. So to help speed this up, Relics found in the world can now have ‘twin’ modifiers on them, which doubles up how many you get. Of course, along with twice the advantage comes twice the resolve cost.
Relic Additions and Changes – We’ve got the data, and we know what relics people like and which ones are avoided. It’s a tough balancing act, but we want each relic to be an interesting choice for the player. That means no must-haves and must-avoids, so we’ve gone back and tweaked a bunch of relics (along with adding more than a dozen new ones). For a list of all relic changes, check out the bulletpoints at the end of these notes.
Encumbrance Update – Making a higher encumbrance reduce mana gain worked pretty well, but we felt it could be better. A lot of people did not bother to manage their equipment weight and simply stopped casting spells if encumbrance prohibited them. We’ve changed things so that encumbrance now reduces resolve instead of mana gain. Since resolve is a stat players can manipulate in other ways, this provides more control over how much encumbrance affects your playstyle.
CLASS REBALANCE #2
The Far Shores content patch gave us our first look at the power balance between classes. Clearly some are doing too well (Barbarian, Valkyrie, Chef), while others have been struggling (Mage and Duelist). Some tweaks have been made to get them closer to an equilibrium.
Knight – Regular blocks now ALWAYS reduce damage by 50%. Perfect blocks ALWAYS reduce damage by 100%.
Ranger – Ivy Platform is now Ivy Canopy. The talent now has a longer duration, a larger platform, and blocks small projectiles. Cooldown also resets over time.
Barbarian – Given more health but lowered damage on ground strike and spin attack. Can now dash while doing an air attack.
Mage – Class now has more health and their attack causes a bigger explosion. Mages are also incidentally more powerful due to the massive buff to spells overall.
Valkyrie – Increased the hitbox on the height of their swings, sped up their attack speed, and given more health. Damage down and Spin Talent duration reduced slightly. Their Spin talent can now also only counter small projectiles.
Chef – Was far too reliable and caused many other classes to be ignored. Grabbing meat no longer restores health unless the player has max stats of their talent, and the frying pan can now only deflect small projectiles.
Duelist – Is hidden OP but still no one is using them. Wording of the class description changed to clarify how this hero is expected to be played. Health has gone up and so has attack damage. Attack collision radius massively increased and attack speed has been raised. Also added a bunch of quality-of-life control tweaks so that ground combos can now be easily performed.
As well, one BIG change made to all classes in the early-game is the ability to dash while on the ground right from the beginning. This means it no longer needs to be obtained through an heirloom. This added mobility should hopefully reduce immediate frustrations with slower classes like the Barbarian.
OPTIMIZATION
With the Far Shores Update we spent our time performing surface-level optimizations to the game. We searched for answers that would give us the biggest gains to quickly get the game running better for those with slow machines. For this content patch we focused on improving more fundamental systems, such as asset management and the post-process stack, to give a greater experience to all gamers. We believe we have finally addressed the inconsistent performance and hitches that happened on even the most powerful hardware (surprisingly it was not a memory leak), as well as improved overall FPS in all scenarios and reduced loading times.
ADDITIONAL GAMEPLAY CHANGES
Added Vsync toggle to options.
Community: Added Set Primary Display to options.
Community: Added PS4 and Nintendo Switch icons. Controller icons can be changed in the settings.
Community: Added ability to retire a player from a run. Retiring is available in the pause menu.
Community: Added option to disable cursor lock to window in Graphics Settings.
Community: Added ability to disable pressing Down + Jump to execute a spinkick in the game options.
Community: Rune Ore, Equipment Ore, and Soul resources are now tracked and displayed on the death re-enactment screen.
Added the final Golden Door.
Player can now always dash while grounded.
Overall enemy health and strength scale slower.
Lamech and Skeleton Bosses HP and damage lowered.
Bonus health stats have been awarded to all classes to help with the early and mid-game.
Added Armor Break status effect. Enemies take X% more weapon damage.
Added Magic Break status effect. Enemies take X% more spell damage.
Freeze status effect now lasts 6x longer. Hitting frozen enemies now shatters the freeze effect.
Frozen enemies can now be passed through without taking damage.
Enemies with Freeze Immunity now get Armor Break applied to them instead when frozen.
SporeBurst status effect now takes 0.25 seconds longer to detonate. Damage, and radius increased.
Added Suave status effect. A percentage of your Intelligence is added to your weapon damage.
Added NPC dialogue animations to Pizza Girl, Blacksmith, Enchantress, the Docks Dummy, and Charon.
Added skill level requirements to the Skill Tree.
Community: Added speech bubbles that appear when an NPC has something important to show.
Changed the following spells:
Gravity Well mana cost bumped up to 100. Now destroys up-to large projectiles.
Searing Shot is now an aimable spell.
Fungal Spread is now an aimable spell.
Wind Wall is now an aimable spell.
New Spell: Freeze Strike – Short distance spell that freezes enemies.
New Spell: Tesla Spike – Aimable spell that creates an electric field on the first wall it hits.
New Spell: Lightning Storm – Instantly strike foes above you.
New Spell: Prismatic Spectrum – A spell that applies Freeze, Burn, and SporeBurst to all enemies within an area.
Added the following skills:
Crit Damage Up
Crit Chance Up 2
Dash Strike Up
Ore Find Up
Weight CD Reduction
Equip Up 2
Rune Equip Up 2
Randomize Children
(Community) Charon Gold Bonus
Rune ore Find Up
M. Crit. Chance Up 2
M. Crit. Damage Up
Potion Recharge
Resolve Up
Relic Cost Down
Relic Reroll
Architect
Architect Cost
Unlock Assassin
Unlock Gunner
Added or changed the following relics:
New Relic (Community): Pandora’s Bargain.
New Relic (Community): Diogenese Bargain.
New Relic (Community): Skeleton Key.
New Relic: Pandora’s Reward.
New Relic: Lotus Petal.
New Relic: Hermes’ Boots.
New Relic: Antikytheria.
New Relic: Cosmic Insight.
New Relic: Broken Key.
New Relic: Blessings of Strength.
New Relic: Blessings of Magic.
New Relic: Blessings of Talent.
New Relic: Vanguard Banner.
New Relic: Clotho’s Spindle.
New Relic: Atropos’ Scissors.
New Relic: Lachesis’ Measure.
New Relic: Steel Toed Boots.
Buffed Relic: Amaterasu’s Sun – Now applies and EXTENDS burn status effect of weapons.
Buffed Relic: Poseidon’s Mantle – Increased Invulnerability Window.
Buffed Relic: Rage Tincture – Damage increased while invulnerable.
Redesigned Relic: Gnawed Bone – Now has a max stack and only grants max HP if meat is eaten while at full health.
Redesigned Relic: Fate’s Die – Can now be stacked. Every 6th enemy you kill will instantly die.
Buffed Relic: Catalyst – Damage increased.
Buffed Relic: Final Pact – Gold gain increased.
Changed Relic: Hyperion’s Ring – Now restores 50% of your missing health.
Added or changed the following runes:
New Rune: Resolve Rune – Gain Bonus Resolve.
New Rune: Amplification Rune – Increase status effect duration.
New Rune: Trick Rune – Gain mana from spin kicks.
Redesigned Rune: Quenching Regen – Gain bonus armor.
Redesigned Rune: Lifesteal Rune – Now scales with Vitality.
Added new Traits:
Masochist
Compulsive Gambling
Expert enemies now only drop ore, and drop more of it.
Bouncy Spikes now always move away from the player upon entering a room.
Beating a boss now makes the player invincible while they are in the room.
Bridge boss now displays a different objective complete text when beaten.
Boss, Gold, and Fairy chests now auto-magnetize their contents.
Critical hits now perform a different text animation.
SkillTree now hides icons while animating in a new piece of the manor.
Game now pauses when losing focus.
Game now pauses when primary controller is disconnected.
A small relic graphic now appears when certain relic abilities kick in when damaging enemies.
Spells and Relics now need to be used at least once before their description is visible.
Added limit to how many item drops of one type can appear on screen at once to address scenarios where too many items spew from a chest and the frame rate drops. If the item drop limit is exceeded, fewer items of higher value are dropped instead.
Relic icons in the HUD in the bottom left now have borders.
The stacking value on relics is now displayed in Relic HUD.
Added Resolve Unity.
The pan speed in the Map screen now scales with the zoom level (zoom out to pan faster).
The Death Recap map animation now has a capped zoom and will pan to follow your progress through the castle.
Added the ability to manually zoom on the Death Recap map screen once the animation has completed.
The game now uses compressed asset bundles for its content, which should result in smaller patch sizes in the future and less hard disk space being used for the game.
Content is now asynchronously loaded during the Splash screen, so startup time should be significantly faster.
Optimized post-processing stack to reduce CPU workload.
Enemies will now be knocked back farther if you dash-attack them.
BUG FIXES
Changed player movement logic to fix issue with player jittering, resulting in choppy camera (which looked like game slowdown).
Fixed bug where players could move during the Lily Door cutscene if the cutscene was triggered by teleporting to the room.
Fixed bug where, in very rare cases, the game would crash if you entered a room with a TallSpike hazard.
The Magnesis rune will no longer magnetize Meat or Mana to you.
Added audio for FreezeStrike spell.
Fixed bug where dashing off a platform would not reduce your number of available jumps.
Community: Fixed bug where the Aerodynamic downstrike would not bounce off resonant objects.
Community: Attempted fix of bug where the keyboard text in a keyboard input icon would sometimes be misaligned when initialized for the first time.
Fixed bug where the Burn status effect's hit effect position would 'attach' to the player if they ever touched an enemy that had the status effect.
Community: Fixed bug where the Backup Window was not displaying the list of backup files in a proper date-descending order.
Community: Fixed bug where save manager would not correctly detect a corrupted save file if the save file did somehow properly load (but was of the wrong type).
The culling of physics on props is now handled differently to address scenarios where gravity would not trigger when desired.
Community: Fixed bug where walking between two snow mounds would result in the snow effect constantly playing even if you were not moving.
Fixed bug where Enemy PreKnockback velocity was not being reset upon enemy reset, resulting in some enemies zooming across the room when entering a new room.
Fixed bug where blocking while on the ground would result in player only being knocked back on the Y axis.
Fixed bug where controller input glyphs would not update when enabled if the controller was switched while the glyph was disabled.
Fixed some breakables in the Kerguelen Plains that had incorrect hitbox sizes.
Fixed bug where status effect icons were appearing behind terrain.
Hermes' Boots will now protect you from damage against spikes at any angle.
Fixed bug where player could kill themselves at the Docks if they had the vampire trait.
Fixed jitter bug whenever enemies try to walk into walls.
Fixed bug where pausing while jumping would retain jump force when unpausing.
Community: Fixed bug where ability ammo was not being saved or restored upon loading.
Fixed bug where player could die at the Docks if their health hit exactly 0.
Fixed bug where if you casted TimeBomb and then spoke to Charon, the bomb explosion could knock you off the boat.
Tweaked NPC Shop trigger hitbox sizes.
Fixed bug where exiting out of the pause menu using a button assigned to cast an ability would trigger certain abilities the moment the game unpaused.
Fixed bug where teleporter window would not have the correct room icon placement the first time it was displayed.
Fixed bug where free look would not work at the Docks.
Fixed bug where screen/room transitioning effects would sometimes behave unreliably.
Fixed bug where free look stopped working after watching the bridge or forest boss entrance cutscene.
Fixed bug where dashing into a new room while your character is in slow motion after getting hit would keep the game in slow motion.
Fixed bug where the colour of an enemy could potentially be permanently changed when certain status effects were applied to it.
Community: Fixed bug where flamer enemies would stop moving after unfreezing while attacking.
Community: Flamer enemies now stop and restart their flame attack if frozen/unfrozen in mid-attack.
Fixed bug where Panic Attack trait was not displaying properly if the effect was active during player death.
Fixed bug where entering a room was not resetting special platforms to their initial state.
Community: Fixed bug where props, enemies, and hazards would occasionally pop-in the moment you entered a room.
Fixed bug where the game would crash if you swapped spells while FlameBarrier was active.
Fixed bug where game would crash if you quit to main menu while the relic selection window was open.
Community: Fixed bug where player would stay as a dot if they teleported into a new room while they were still in a leyline teleporter tube. (What a bug!)
Fixed bug where disabling the camera shake effect rather than properly stopping it would result in the shake happening forever.
Fixed bug where special props like the relic selector would only update to the correct state a frame after player entered a room.
Community: Fixed bug where Diva trait was not applying to summoned enemies.
Community: Fixed bug where Associative Agnosia was not applying to summoned enemies.
Community: Fixed bug where Synethesia trait was not applying to summoned enemies.
Community: Fixed bug where Puritan trait was not applying to summoned enemies.
Community: Fixed bug where some props would get stuck in a mid-animation state.
Community: Fixed bug where heirloom entrance rooms were not saving the state of objects inside them.
Community: Fixed bug where breakables in an heirloom would sometimes be unbreakable.
Profile card now displays how many relics you have equipped.
Community: Fixed bug where Breakable Spike hazards would appear extended for one frame after entering room.
Fixed bug where Orbiter hazard chain would appear fully extended for one frame after entering room.
Fixed bug where exiting game while in a fairy room would result in a crash if you re-entered the world.
Fixed bug where re-entering a world with a failed or passed fairy challenge would not update the Fairy Challenge HUD correctly.
Community: Fixed bug where Cartographer trait was revealing Fairy chest actual locations on map.
Community: Fixed bug where disabling a sentry hazard during its attack animation would permanently prevent it from attacking you.
Fixed bug where projectiles that spawned from another projectile's on Death/Collision would not have its parent projectile's status effects.
Fixed bug where ricochet logic was not working for a number of weapons.
Community: Ricocheting off enemies will no longer knock you out of a room when being pushed through a doorway.
Fairy Rules with timers now properly count down in the Fairy Rule HUD.
Community: Fixed bug where going through a leyline teleporter while passing over interactable objects would display the Interact icon.
Community: Fixed bug where flying enemies would sometimes get stuck between the wall and outside boundaries of a room.
Fixed bug where the state of objects inside certain rooms would not save correctly.
Fixed bug where controller settings were not being applied when booting the game up.
Fixed bug where dead zone settings were affecting the shoulder pad axes of controllers.
Fixed bug where the Chef's cooking talent would say 5 meat drops would need to be picked up to be reset its cooldown.
Targets and Bouncy spikes no longer reward XP, HP, or MP on hit or kill.
Pausing after a Death Defy screen will no longer cause the player to keep blinking during the pause screen.
Coeus Shells will no longer shield you from taking damage from an apple in the Healing Room.
Fixed miscellaneous visual sorting issues with projectiles.
Pressing jump just before landing while performing a Barbarian spin attack will no longer immediately start another jump + spin attack without any landing lag.
Improved collision checking accuracy for jumping/flying enemies to prevent them from clipping through sloped terrain.
Rolling while dashing will no longer freeze you in place for the duration of the roll.
Aqua Brace enemies will no longer get into a bugged state where they constantly spray water.
Flying Hammer enemies will no longer have their projectiles bug out if there are multiple hammers attacking in the same room.
The transition from the death screen to the lineage screen will no longer occasionally flicker.
Faceless dummies no longer play Lady Quinn's hit sound effects.
Using a teleporter no longer leaks memory.
Fixed bug where heirloom entrance rooms were sometimes missing flame/lantern particles.
Tall Candelabra props no longer snap to the top of nearby furniture.
Switching between 16:9 and non-16:9 resolution aspect ratios will no longer distort the screen.
Enabling/disabling the 16:9 aspect lock now immediately takes effect instead of requiring a restart.
Dropped items will no longer spawn above room bounds and get stuck in the ceiling.
Stool props will no longer slide around on their own.
Fixed a few cases where mana/health gain text popups were different in different circumstances.
Ball-and-chain hazards now always display a color trail with the Synesthesia trait.
Getting the Future Successors Bargain relic with Hyperion's Ring equipped will now correctly update the UI to display the amount of gold you have.
Rubble doors in the Forest biome will no longer drop items when destroyed.
Attacking for the first time as a new heir will no longer sometimes play the opposite gender's sound effect.
Both Axis Mundi music tracks will now loop properly.
The player portrait on the Profile tab in the pause menu will no longer draw in front of the Submit-o-tron UI.
Fixed bug where movement logic for flying enemies was still running even when their logic was disabled.
Fixed bug where disabling enemies would force them to run their idle state even if their logic was disabled.
Room Cleanup #2. 50 more rooms cleaned up (about 550 to go).