The game can be downloaded by visiting the LBKR website’s download page. A full update/release log can be found here.

The UI has been more or less completely overhauled with new layout and look. Furthermore all UI elements are less opaque to avoid the game environment bleeding through, making some texts nearly impossible to read.

The UI initialization behaviours have been optimised and more detailed tooltips and easier navigation has been implemented.
Most visual fx have been improved along with all gore visuals, including a new splatmap texture used by all monsters that will paint blood stains on their meshes when killed. (Requires gore to be enabled in Game Settings.)

Overall optimizations done to most in-game particle systems, shader used for nearly all in-game nature / foliage objects now receive lights and the water shader has been replaced by the standard Unity engine water shader. While this water shader does not look as awesome as the previous one, the z-depth bug that made particle systems and transparent materials flicker if rendered above a water surface has disappeared.

4 new story chapters have been implemented, you may now continue your characters adventure by entering the escape pods found at the end of chapter 5 (The Bridge).
On top of this more than 150 new world chunks has been created, new secret areas and 13 new (randomized) world events and 7 new missions.

The Procedural item generator has been greatly optimised, now consuming only 50% of the memory it required in previous versions, all item generation members have been improved and balanced, weapons now go through additional stages before dropping to further randomize its properties.

A new game mode has been implemented called “Badass”. Characters created for badass mode still play through the storyline but opposed to the default game mode, death is permanent, better loot is dropped and game statistics are saved up until the time your character drops dead.

On death the game will calculate an overall “Badass-score” that will be saved for your scoreboard, aswell as a summary of your character’s set of skills and inventory by the time you died.

– 5 new monster attacks
– Champion monsters now form packs that work together in combat
– 8 new unique monsters (ultra-rare)
– 2 new bosses
– 6 new common monsters
– 1 new wandering merchant (Baal’no Tanuk)

Exquisite items ( ie. the most rare ones ) now have a “super modifier”, the super mod is unlocked by purchasing all common item modifiers attached to the item. Super modifiers provide you with powerful effects that can have both passive and active effects.A new (equipable) item type has been created, called “Runes”.

Your character hold 3 rune slots in which runes can be equiped. An equiped rune provide your character with a variety of skill and vital buffs, but can also give your character passive bonus-attacks.
The runes can be generated in three states: Corrupted, Adequate and Ancient.
Adequate runes are the most common and have relatively balanced properties, Corrupted runes are slightly more powerful than adequates, however atleast one of the corrupted runes properties are reversed and will instead of buffing be debuffing your character.

Ancient runes provide the best properties but require a sacrifice to be used, ie. reduced health, inflicting damage on the user over time, reducing your armor rating etc. etc.

– 20 new common runes implemented
– 6 new exquisite rated runes implemented
Apart from runes there are,
– 2 new consumable items: “Tier Chip” and “Property Modifier”, both used to upgrade gear
– 1 new blueprint: “Property Modifier blueprint”
– 7 new armor pieces (where as 3 are exquisite rated)
– 5 new weapons (where as 2 are exquisite rated)

Overall, alot of optimisation’s been done, among other things numerous improvement’s been done to physics handling, world collision and geometry for all maps.
Lots of gameplay elements have been balanced and improved, also the algorithm calculating the monster level has been improved, and to this- item tiers are no longer determined by the players level, but has instead been nested into the monster level algorithm to make sure that the player can’t go to low-level areas and farm crazy-good gear.
Oh, right! I’ve also added 20 new achievments!

To start of somewhere, the UI has been further updated, this time with a new Loading screen and as the game is saved a hint will appear on screen to notify about it.

Some new tooltips/icons have been implemented for the inventory window, when an item repair kit has been selected a wrench icon will appear inside the mouse cursor and if items that can be used to upgrade other items a “+” icon will appear.

I’ve added some geometry to the main menu, now rendering an interior area of the IGCC station, all world chunks have been optimized regarding both collision data and rendering. Another three achievments have been added and the mission “Hunter’s Heritage” has been completely revisioned.

Also worth saying is that a bug that made the player character fall through platforms if the player was using an ability or weapon attack while standing on the platform, has now been fixed. 🙂 (Yay! It’s only been haunting me since forever.)

But in any case, 2.26 is closing in, I’m currently bug and play testing the game thoroughly and fix old and new issues as I go. New game mechanics are up and running and old ones have been and are still beeing updated! I’ve also spent nearly two weeks doing pretty much nothing else than optimizing world collision data and code optimizations for the game mechanics that consume the most memory. For the world collision optimizations I will probably need another few days to have fully optimized all world chunks/tiles.

Another thing I’ve fiddled with for 2.26 is game balancing, primarily regarding the game difficulty setting. Without going into detail I can say that it’s more adapted to the length of the game than it was before, also the item generator now calculate item tiers determined by the level of the monster or loot that was opened/killed instead of the player level. The new way of calculating item tiers ensure that the player can’t go back to the first map where monsters are of level 1 – 6 and still loot items of high-rated tiers.
A minor set-back with this approach did appear though, as the level of monsters in one map may vary individually I noticed that there usually is three item tiers that may drop within the same map. This turned into a headache when looting consumables that stack as I soon discovered that my inventory was full with health vials of various item tiers.

In order to get around this obstacle I added a small text on each item icon that present the item tier in roman numerals. I chose roman numerals in hope that the number should not be confused with the item’s stack size.

Some new visual updates has been made aswell, as I spoke of earlier, the character splatmaps that are applied to monsters as they get killed to splash some blood on their bodies- available if “Enable Gore” setting is toggled on.

Also pay attention to the strong light sources in the images, as the bloom image effect is now generating anamorphic lens flares.

There are also alot of world events and boss encounters that I have planned to modify for v2.27, but I’ve actually already begun to change a few of them. Just to spill some examples, the Necromancing mission’s boss encounter as mentioned in my previous article, and also the Machinist boss encounter has been redone. And as I felt that the Machinist model and animations were of too crappy quality I went ahead and created a new Machinist boss. The Machinist now also have the ability to jump into vent shafts to regain some health.

-Achievments-

There’s currently 12 new achievments implemented, I still have a few to add before the release though. Do note that for 2.26 achievments may now hold alot more restrictions than earlier. Previous versions of the game forced each achievment to have 6 restrictions or less, while it currently may hold up to 20 restrictions. (Restrictions are achievment goals/stages/phases.)

As mentioned in earlier posts regarding the 2.26 release lots of new game content awaits. I still need a few weeks to get done with all planned optimizations and update/implemented to remaining content of this game version and to ensure that everything works properly (aswell as make sure that old character profiles remain compatible.) But I dare to say that 2.26 is not far from done!

Another note, regarding the UI is that the game now gives a more clear hint of a character level up as can be seen below.

I think that I spoke about the update log in an earlier post and the fact that I was about to start posting it on LBKR’s website with more or less live updates but I can’t recall ever telling anyone about it beeing done. In any case, I have begun to post the updates on the website on a weekly-ish basis so if you’re interested to check out the log with all updates and bug fixes this far go on and check LBKR Update Log. (2.26 current progress: 401 Updates/Changes, 127 Bug Fixes)