Hey Everyone,
Welcome to our first (of many, hopefully) pre-patch thread! This is more of an informal thread to give you an idea of what we're working on for next patch, without giving the exact numbers and details normal patch notes would have. We're doing this because we're piloting a new system this patch to try to help out the community content creators by giving them access to the changes early, so they can show them off to you guys. Hopefully this will be beneficial for everyone as it should drive traffic to their videos/streams, and generate hype for the patch!
What's Coming Next
As you know, we've been working on 2.0 primarily for a while, and work on that is still ongoing. However, every now and then we might release a quick patch to help spice things up for you guys while you wait, and that's what this patch is. We've deliberately held back a few patches of quick changes that will help keep the game fresh for you guys, for times like this. These changes don't require much development time, but should give us good bang for our buck in terms of replayability and entertainment for the players.
Loot Rework
A lot of our inspiration for changes to DBOG comes from ARPG games like Diablo and Path of Exile, because these games tend to have very robust endgame content, which is necessary for a game as old as DBOG. You can see those influences in the Upgrade Kit and Gemstone systems, where you can get plentiful weaker items and craft them into stronger, more expensive ones. One of the biggest things in the way of having a lot more variety and replayability is that in DBOG, there is a mechanic to limit the power of any one item. If you roll an item with one really high stat, that stat will occupy most of the power budget of the item, and all the other stats either won't roll, or will roll low numbers.
While this is probably good for balance, a side effect of this system is that it's very easy to get a perfect item. You basically only need as many boxes as whatever the max value is for the stat you want. Being able to get a perfect item that quickly tends to kill the late game replayability of the game, and it makes new level caps very hard to design because players can stock enough boxes by then to just have perfect gear within minutes or hours of the level cap becoming available.
Therefore, we have removed this limitation. Now, dropped and boxed items can have up to four max stats. The kinds of stats you can get on each item won't change, just the available values. This should introduce a ton more stat variety, and a ton more replayability, because the chances of getting a fully perfect item are now extremely low. This will likely make the balance of the game more chaotic than it already is, and that's calculated on our part. We're choosing to do this now because it's a fast change that will introduce a lot of gear diversity, and because we need to make these chaotic moves before we have fine tuned the balance in 2.0.
Box Drop System/2x Box Event
We're aware that with this loot rework, the boxes currently in the game are going to deplete fairly quickly. With that in mind, we've designed a new drop system for boxes, and rolled bonuses for it into all the systems you're used to for the existing drop systems. Things like farming in CC, farming near your level, farming while the world boss is on cooldown will increase the drop rate, the same as other drop systems for things like Wagu Coins and Upgrade Kits. Similarly, we've created a new 2x Box Event that will enter the rotation of events after the upcoming patch.
Classic CC/CC150
Speaking of CC, this patch we are bringing back Classic CCBD, and implementing our version of CC150. We were planning on waiting until after 2.0 to do this for UI reasons, but while I was working on the loot rework, an easy way to bring back Classic CCBD occurred to me, so we're doing that as well. The removal of Classic CCBD has been a bit of a pain point for us, and you have been very clear and persistent in wanting the old mode back. We've implemented the old mode as it was, alongside the new Dynamic CCBD. We've also beefed up the difficulty and rewards, and brought back titles with stats as a reward for clearing floor 150.
Additionally, alongside the improvements we made for the Dynamic CCBD rework last year like the reconnect feature, we've also implemented a way to save and break up runs. If you cover more than 50 floors in a run, and choose to take the reward, your party leader will receive a ticket to restart the run at the next floor up, so there's no pressure to finish an entire run in one session or one night. Accordingly, some of the floors between 100 and 150 have been tuned to be more difficult than you likely remember from TW.
We've rolled many of the other improvements from Dynamic CCBD into Classic, but not all. You'll get points toward your CCBD title track for each boss floor, which will increase the drop rate of CCBD materials and coins inside. Classic also has a tweaked version of the same drop system as Dynamic, so you'll see things like CC materials, gear, and coins dropping, along with the standard fare like Wagus, Boxes, Upgrade Kits etc. The mob and party buffs of Dynamic aren't in Classic, as that would have added a bit more development time than we were willing to commit, on top of changing the balance and feel of Classic.
The boss floor capsules have been changed to include the new CC materials and coins, as well as Zeni per floor. Clearing 150 will also give you a title, and some of the endgame gear you'd get from a Dynamic boss clear. We've tried to stick as closely as we could to how Classic was, but crank up the difficulty and rewards a bit. We hope you enjoy it! Please take this as a token of our gratitude, and we apologize for having removed the mode. We will do our best going forward to be more careful when we change/remove things to try and keep to the spirit of the original game as much as we can.
Conclusion
Hopefully this has given you a bit more insight into what we've been up to the past few weeks. This patch will also have the Halloween event and the usual shop rotation and new Halloween outfits, we're finishing up our run on Megaman from last Halloween. Work on 2.0 is underway, but I'll try to pepper in a few more quality of life features like this if they're quick. As always, thank you for playing and supporting us, and have a happy Halloween!
