Hopefully, you haven’t been sleeping on Motion Twin’s massive indie success Dead Cells, a Metroidvania-inspired roguelike with crisp combat, fantastic exploration, and brutal traps that released on August 8, 2018. Dead Cells is arguably still one of the best Metroidvania roguelikes that continues to be supported by the developers with a consumer-friendly monetization scheme, constant communication between fans and the developers, and balancing and updates coming fast-and-free to players. They’ve released one paid DLC in the year and a half since its release out of Steam’s Early Access program, where it garnered massive support with transparency behind decisions, and open communication.
That paid DLC came with the caveat from Motion Twin that is was primarily to support further content updates that will inevitably come for free to users, as all of the other updates (some staggeringly large, others more balance patches and tweaks) tend to. Motion Twin reported a surprising amount of support for the paid DLC, called Bad Seed, which added two new regions in the early parts of a run.
Now Motion Twin has just recently released a brand new update for free, called the Bestiary Update which sat briefly in open beta for users to explore and help balance.
The Bestiary Update is live on #Steam, introducing 6 enemies, 10 affixes, 3 outfits, new achievements and some balancing/quality-of-life changes. As usual, we're bringing it to consoles ASAP.https://t.co/9izzLUMplP#gaming #indiegames pic.twitter.com/mcHaG9FJ7x
— Motion Twin (@motiontwin) April 22, 2020
The Bestiary Update focuses on balancing existing enemies within the title, tuning their numbers to a standard of difficulty that the developers have envisioned for Dead Cells. Small tweaks to behavior, as well as the layout for levels introduced in Bad Seed, are also present in the patch.
Further, six brand new enemies have entered the fray; three are relatively generic in regards to their spawn zones occupying multiple biomes, and the other three only spawn within specific biomes. The enemies were added in an attempt to introduce a stronger variety of enemies within pre-existing pools. Eleven new affixes have also been added with the idea of creating further diversity within the item pool.
Motion Twin has stated that this smaller update is planned to set the stage for the next larger incoming content drop; the date for which is currently unannounced.
Speaking of the next incoming update for Dead Cells, the developers at Motion Twin are reaching out to the people that brought the title this far already; the fans. Motion Twin is asking fans to fill out a brief survey, a relatively simplistic Google Docs form that asks players what difficulty they prefer to explore, the highest difficulty boss defeated, and even favored weapons of players.
By helping tune into what players are experiencing the most, Motion Twin can get a solid idea of what to beef up, proverbial speaking, to offer the greatest range of content in the next update. The survey in its entirety takes only a few minutes, and it’s in your best interest to fill it out so the developers can craft content tailored to your style. You can reach the survey here.
