Requiem For a Lost World v2.0

It's been a moment, and I'm quite a bit past the deadline I set for myself, even longer since the last version.

As per usual, before we get into the changelog, let me talk to you guys~

So, over the past month or so I barely got any work done on Requiem For a Lost World - burnout, real-life issues, and laziness all combined. For that I apologize.

I still managed to get some things done, but not nearly as much as I had planned, which is a bit disappointing. However, stalling any further doesn't seem reasonable, especially considering how far behind version 1.9 already is. I even considered changing the version number to something lower, but I think we can stick with 2.0

As mentioned, it won't contain everything I envisioned and, as such, it won't be the planned release version either; at least not until all achievements, stories, and wiki pages are done.

So for now I think we're kind of stuck in EA until my motivation comes back.

Anyhow, now that I've complained, we can get into the changes. It should be fairly long, so grab something to drink before continuing!

In Game Stuff

New Character - Clara

Clara is a hybrid between a DoT and single-target DPS, allowing her to build either or both, as these two stats contribute to each other.

Her passive grants her a significant increase in damage dealt to targets in close proximity, further leaning into her duelist background.

Last Waltz is Clara's ultimate ability: she stops all timers and, after a brief delay, performs a series of slashes dealing dark damage.

New Stage

Forbidden Zone is finally being released as a playable area. It's BIG and fairly empty. Hopefully I can fill it up with new achievement locations as they come.

Being a corrupted area, it has a special affinity with DoT, significantly boosting that damage type!

There are also no elite enemies, which makes acquiring weapon upgrades much trickier.

New Location

The Capital Outskirts also got a new location: a small pond with a curious book stand.

New Weapons

• White Hole (Light DoT)

• Raging Star (Fire AoE)

• Prism Ray (Light on-hit Follow-Up)

• Dissolving Strike (Wind)

• Corrupted Katana (Dark AoE)

• Eclipse Edge (Dark)

• From Lost World (Unstable)

• Dying Star (Fire)

• Echo Anchor (Cosmic, Follow-Up)

• Reaper's Call (Dark, Summon)

New Songs

• The Abyss Within - Nyxaria's Theme

• Child of Dawn and Dew - Kaware's Theme

• Shattered Mercy

Character Reworks

Working toward my goal of bringing old characters up to speed with the current design philosophy, two characters are getting a rework in version 2.0

Alice

She was supposed to be the lightning-wielding beast hailing from the Previous Era; however, not much of that transferred into her kit. Hopefully the new design will lean more into that fantasy.

Her new kit emphasizes Lightning damage: each instance of lightning damage now grants her a special resource called Judgement, which increases her stats and is required to cast her new ultimate.

Her ultimate scales off Judgement stacks and provides stronger effects if it's maxed or even overflowing.

Nishi

Base Nishi has also gotten a rework. I had an idea with the black flames before, but in the end the Disintegration elemental reaction filled in what I wanted him to do perfectly, so his kit now leans toward it.

In the new version of his kit, Nishi prefers a build containing a mix of Lightning and Dark weapons. Attacking enemies with either of these elements will apply a stack of Cycle Mark to them, which can be consumed to deal additional max-health damage.

He's also gotten a new weapon, which now deals Dark damage by default.

Double Sided Character Sprites

I'm just going to reuse the gif from the previous post.

Characters now have back and front views as well as walking and idling animations (both scuffed, but hey, I tried (￣y▽,￣)╭ )

Screen Space GI and Reflections

Steam post imageAlso reusing old screenshots, but not much has changed here.

Honestly, I was comparing screenshots, and the new Global Illumination method doesn't seem to have as much visual impact as I thought it would - at least not on the existing maps.

Fingers crossed for actual Ray Tracing implementation for Unity in the near future!

Reflections are pretty nice, however~

New Environment

Steam post imageWe are also getting a new environment for open-world maps. It includes a day-night cycle, volumetric clouds, god rays, fog, dynamic weather, and so on. High settings can be pretty heavy, so if you experience performance issues you may want to tone the Environment setting down

To add to this, enemies and characters now interact with the light in the environment so they shouldn't stand out as much

Also, grass has been darkened and should react to changing light in the day-night cycle

3D Chests

We now have 3D chests!

These are more sturdy, so you won't break them; however, no key is required to open them - just approach, open, and leave

Chests can now reward relics upon opening! If you die during the run, there is a 50% chance to keep the relic you found; if you win, it's all yours.

These rewards replace the flat relic reward for winning the game

Affected Weapons Indicator

When picking items, the game will try to determine which weapons would be affected if the selected item is picked

Pickup Numbers

When picking up experience shards, gold or gems a number will be displayed next to the character showing the cumulative amount.

This can be disabled in the settings

Dash Indicators

It's hard to show with a screenshot, but each Dash stack now slowly charges back up after being used, which is a nice touch

Difficulty Adjustments

Deep difficulties have been adjusted. Instead of providing straight enemy buffs, those difficulties will now provide randomized buffs that can help the player or buff the enemy. Each level of Deep difficulty will increase the number of buffs/debuffs for the run

I hope it will make running harder difficulties a bit more interesting

Oana's Ultimate VFX

I went back and changed the VFX of her ultimate; it looks much cleaner now

Enemy Pathing

Enemies should now pathfind properly in the Capital Undergrounds map. It's pretty cool to see them actually navigate the stairs

Menu Stuff

Ultra-Wide Support

Requiem For a Lost World has always tried to be presentable on all kinds of displays (not 4:3, I'm sorry)

After getting a wide monitor, I finally got to tweak all the menus to look presentable on such screens, up to 32:9 aspect ratio

New Main Menu Theme

As per usual, new version means a new main menu background.

I've heard on at least two occasions that the old one scared players into thinking their GPU was dying. This one won't glitch to avoid those scares :^)

Feedback and Tutorials

I've removed the feedback form from the bottom right. I think it served its purpose, and the preferred method now is to voice your opinions, concerns, or report bugs on the Steam discussions or if you want to reach out directly you can contact me via requiemforalostworld@gmail.com

The tutorials from the bottom left have also been migrated to the online wiki that any of you can contribute to: https://requiem-for-a-lost-world.fandom.com/wiki/Requiem_For_a_Lost_World_Wiki

Custom Settings Preset

Until now presets were a bit confusing: you could set a preset, then modify it, then change the preset and if you go back all your modifications were gone.

In version 2.0, any changes made in settings will be saved into a Custom preset. If you swap to any other preset to test it, you can always come back to the Custom preset to restore your previous settings

Settings Performance Impact Color-Coding

Settings are now color coded based on my observations. Green means little performance gain/loss, while red means a big performance gain/loss

Of course, many of these settings will have different performance costs depending on the map and which features are used. For example, the Environment setting is marked as red, but the underground map does not use it, so it won't affect performance there. Similarly, shadows will have a much higher performance cost in the underground map compared to the open-world maps

Compare View

Settings are also getting a compare window!

Sometimes it's not clear what each setting changes and how it affects visuals, with the compare view you can inspect precisely what changes and tweak the visuals to your liking

Shard Screen Changes

Locked shards will now also have the corresponding background grayed out.

In addition, players will now have to manually unlock character shards (this can be changed in settings)

I just felt like manually unlocking shards is more satisfying than having them passively unlock in the background

I even added a bit of a notification for doing so

Highest Finished Difficulty

Highest finished difficulty has been changed to text format instead of stars; it's more readable and allows me to expand it without worrying about the number of stars clogging the character card

New Gacha Results

Gacha system for Requiem For a Lost World got a bit of an overhaul both for visuals and mechanics

I've been a bit unsatisfied with the gacha aspect so here are the tweaks

• Players will receive character fragments for the active banner character in the form of 50 fragments, which can then be converted into a character unlock or a shard

• Off-banner rewards will include character fragments for any character instead of direct unlocks

• Gold and Gem rewards have been removed from the pool

• Lowest-tier rewards are now guaranteed to be relics of any rarity

Additionally, on the result screen you will be able to see the relic stat, character fragments, and shards available for unlock

Leaderboards

Players can now filter the leaderboard scores to only include top scores (the default so far), scores around the player scores in case the list becomes too long, and scores only set by your Steam friends

Additionally Leaderboards will now also include the stage background for selected leaderboard

Character Tuner

When hovering over the weapon type icon, it will display the text variant too

Relic Changes

Relic color coding

Lets get into the Relic QoL changes

Sometimes it wasn't obvious which relic fit into which slot. From version 2.0, players will be able to tell by the background of the relic

The color corresponds to the slot

Relic filtering

In addition to the advanced filtering that was available until now, a text search function has been implemented. Players can search the stat name, relic name, or even relic slot title to quickly filter relics

Relic list default sorting

Relics in the inventory will now be sorted by slot type first, which should group all offensive, defensive, and utility relics together

Discard warning

Players will also be warned when attempting to discard a relic to avoid accidental deletions

Relic Loadouts Improvements

Similar to relic list, the entries in custom loadouts are also color coded now

Additionally, the same filtering has been applied to the stat selector

And to make automatic selection less annoying, loadouts can also take a minimum rarity so that the system will no longer force-equip low-rarity relics whenever you run out of higher-rarity ones

Balance Changes

RES-PEN

If an enemy is weak to an element, RES-PEN will significantly increase damage against that enemy. If an enemy is resistant to an element, RES-PEN will instead reduce that resistance by a set percentage

This change is intended to help RES-PEN be more effective in scenarios where enemies have their resistances significantly buffed by higher difficulty modifiers

Life Steal

Life steal effects now apply every second, cumulatively healing the character over that time.

This change prevents immortality due to high life steal. The character will be healed every second, which leaves a small window for the player to die

Disintegration

Nerfed the base execution threshold of the Disintegration reaction to 50%, but the threshold now scales with Elemental Reaction Effect. Every 100% of Elemental Reaction Effect pushes the threshold by 5%

This will allow Disintegration to benefit in the same way as any other elemental reaction

New Save File Format

Requiem For a Lost World will now use a different save format.

I would normally list it under minor changes, but I think it's better to let you guys know. In case something goes wrong with the conversion please reach out via Steam forums so we can work any issues out.

Anyhow, this format should save and load much faster, especially with large inventory of Relics, AND should take significantly less space

Minor Changes

• New skill tree node with a slowing effect upon afflicting enemies with DoT

• A default game cursor

• Setting for multiplayer port configuration when self-hosting outside of Steam

• Added achievement descriptions to the achievement pop-up

• Added support for HDR-capable devices

• GPU Instancing is now on by default on supported hardware

• Minimap is now enabled by default on new installations

• Moved to DirectX 12 on capable devices; older devices will continue to run on DX11

• Octi's attack indicator will now stick out of the ground

• Equipped relics will no longer display an Equip button if the relic is already equipped by the current character

• Added a close button to various submenus of the Relic screen

• Using a Dark-damage weapon will no longer play the damage sound

• Enemies should no longer spawn on top of other players in CO-OP

• Menu windows will now fade in and out when switching between them

• Added hover animations for settings and collection entries

• Separated shadow quality and shadow distance settings

• Errors when saving configuration will now display text in a popup for the user

• Improved the quality of David's skin card

• Added LOD support to 3D+ grass (only works with GPU Instancing enabled)

• New post-processing pipeline that can be enabled in settings

Bug Fixes

• Incorrect behavior of Relic Loadout menu when no Loadouts are present or when the last loadout has been deleted

• Incorrect back button placement on the result screen

• Incorrect layout for relic synthesizer UI scaling on ultrawide screens

• Sand Storm projectiles will no longer prevent other VFX from rendering behind them

• Fixed slowdowns caused by an error in projectile code when playing CO-OP

• Star Fall weapon missing its projectiles

• Bug that caused the game to end prematurely when the player died in CO-OP

• Adjusted scroll speed on some lists that moved too fast or too slow

• Disintegration damage now counts towards damage dealt by weapons instead of being a simple execute

• Fixed a bug that caused Relics to duplicate upon unequipping them after the relic page has been saved

• Fixed a bug that caused GPU instanced objects to not disappear when Yami-no-Tokiya's ult was activated

• Fixed enemies not spawning on elevations higher than the player's

• Projectile created by the Key of Despair would not fully despawn, which could lead to performance issues

• Game will no longer attempt to load, leaving the player in the void, if the port is occupied by another application when using a Self Hosted CO-OP option

• Blood Dept weapon could be missing the VFX

• Saves containing an incorrect resolution will now correctly fallback to the last viable resolution when opening the game or saving the configuration

• Stage effects would not apply in CO-OP

• Fixed Luck relic rewarding health regeneration instead

Afterword

So that's about it. I will continue to release updates for 2.0 before I commit to a full release. The story is coming along nicely, albeit every time I look back at my writing I can never quite give it a pass — one time I'm satisfied, the next time I trash it completely (┬┬﹏┬┬)

Per-character achievements have stagnated due to my current implementation, which needs deeper improvements to facilitate something more interesting than 'do an action X times'

CO-OP is also holding me back in terms of design in some places. I wonder how important it is for all mechanics to sync between players?

Anyway, depending on my motivation, it may take some more time until the release version is ready. I just wanted to push what I have so far since it should be stable and improves the experience significantly

As for the future beyond 2.0, I have a few things planned, but no work will go into actually starting development until 2.0 is ready. A new map for the Capital itself is planned; it will most likely take place around Adam's invasion, and since it's planned for somewhere in 2.x I have plenty of time to work on it.

Another thing I might have mentioned before is a partner system also planned somewhere in the 2.x cycle. Players will be able to pick a secondary character to help in the expedition; what that will entail is yet to be decided — definitely an additional skill, but perhaps I will also let the partner roam and attack nearby enemies alongside your active character

And a third planned feature is some sort of character keystone or whatever I'll call it—essentially a second upgrade path for a character that players will have to grind a bit for, perhaps requiring map-specific resources. To help players gather them, new means of transportation may be introduced

However, these are all just ideas I had that may come in the future (●'◡'●)

Right, and before I go