Hi, Everyone!

We’re here to talk about the first small Content Update that’s just been released for Engine Eternal, if you’re only here for the patch notes, they’ll be right here at the top of the page, but below them we’ll be going a bit more in depth with our decisions regarding the balancing of the game and the monsters themselves. 

We’re really thankful for all the support we’ve had so far, and we really hope you keep enjoying the game as we continue to release more content for it!

Patch Notes:

Additions

• Added the Bestiary in the Train to provide information on each monster in the game

The information in the Bestiary will be based on which monsters the Host has encountered in previous games, and information is added when any player in the lobby encounters a monster.

The Bestiary is not retroactive; any monsters encountered before Patch 1.1 will not be included in the list of monsters until you encounter them again. 

Adjustments

• Bouncy the Clown has been slightly reworked in order to make him feel significantly less oppressive for newer players

• The Faceless has been slightly reworked in order to make him feel more fair and less frustrating.

• Performance has been optimised on Very High and Ultra graphics settings

• Adjusted some difficulty scaling so that the game starts out slightly easier at D Rank and C Rank maps on Normal Difficulty (the rest remains the same).

• Decreased the opacity of the Scanner in order to reduce eye strain.

• Slightly increased the lighting in the Manor dungeon.

• Updated some Achievement Icons

Bug Fixes

• Fixed some issues with Collision across several maps and dungeon rooms.

• Fixed an issue where survivor animations would occasionally display incorrectly to other players.

• Fixed an issue where the Fuel Door in the train would occasionally not open after the train stopped.

• Fixed an issue where players, monsters and landmines were taking on the visuals of certain textures when walking over them.

• Fixed an issue where monsters in the Manor dungeon would occasionally get stuck on doors.

Known Issues

• Occasional performance issues in Verdant Grove

• C.O.L.I.N. animation occasionally displaying incorrectly when first encountered

• Extremely rare disconnect may occur when restarting a game

• Rare bug where death achievements may not trigger when conditions are fulfilled

Now, a small talk about balancing in Engine Eternal, as, understandably, it has been brought up a few times in regards to the game.

Engine Eternal is a difficult game. It is designed to be that way, and any additions or updates we make to the game will sculpt it towards the challenge that we envision for the game; that being a high pace, intense experience that hasn’t really been seen in this genre yet. Since not only is it a new game, but our first large project, we will be adjusting things quite regularly for the foreseeable future, as with so many more people playing the game, there are situations we weren’t able to see unfold during testing, and monsters’ strengths and weaknesses we weren’t able to fully consider without the growing player base we’re getting now. That being said, while the game is supposed to be difficult, it’s also supposed to be fun, so any game mechanics that we learn are much more frustrating or unfair than we had intended, we’ll be patching them as soon as we learn about them and figure out a way to fix them.

Since release, we’ve been somewhat tracking how deadly each enemy appears to be, and we’ve come to a couple of conclusions regarding that; most of the enemies are exactly where we’d like them to be: deadly if you’re first encountering them, but relatively simple to deal with when you understand them. That being said, there are a couple of outliers that we’d like to talk about.

The first, very large, clown-shaped elephant in the room: Bouncy.

Bouncy is our most complicated enemy by quite a large margin, and with that, there comes the issue of balance being quite difficult for an enemy like that. Our vision for Bouncy was for him to be a constant looming threat that teams had to work together to deal with, and while we have achieved that vision in some regard, the result is quite a bit more frustrating than we would have liked. Bouncy the Clown is currently by a mile the most deadly monster in Engine Eternal, which isn’t really the position we’d like him to be in, so while the Bestiary will assist teams in learning how to deal with him, we’ve decided the best course of action is to include a small rework to him in this update: After killing a player, Bouncy will now revert to his stalking mode, however with the trade-off that he will then take significantly less time to enrage. This rework will make him far less dangerous, as he will only kill a single player at a time rather than hunting down the whole team if enraged. Perhaps one day Bouncy may return to his former glory in some way, but for now, we think this is the best place for him in the game.

Next up, the other really frustrating monster: The Faceless.

The Faceless is a purely audio based monster, he is attracted to the sound players make. In that regard, Faceless is actually working perfectly as intended, however there is a small issue with him, where if he unfortunately happens to path through a player while on patrol, even if they’re completely silent they will still feel the full force of his attack. This is completely unfair, and a very frustrating thing to deal with, while also making it significantly harder to understand how he works; to remedy this: we’re introducing a small rework to how his damage works. Before, the Faceless would simply damage you whenever he ran into you, which understandably created some very frustrating and pretty unfair moments, as well as making him much harder to understand as an enemy.

Now, the Faceless will now only damage you by his full damage amount if he has heard a player, and if you happen to collide with him while he's running around the dungeon, he will do significantly less damage.

These changes will make him significantly less frustrating to deal with, and a lot less punishing if you simply happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, that being said we will still be monitoring him, and if he still turns out to be a frustrating monster, we’ll rebalance him accordingly.

As always, your support and feedback is incredibly valuable, and we're super thankful for everyone so far who's played, shared and streamed the game!

If you have any feedback for us, please don't hesitate to let us know in our Discord Server

Oscar & Brellario

Absolutely Cookage