Hopefully everyone who’d been hounding us about the earlier versions of Dead Cells has now been basking in the nostalgia of the Legacy Update. For those of you that have been looking forward to tearing through something shiny and brand new - the Bad Seed DLC now has an official release date of February 11th 2020 at 6AM PT.
If you can’t wait until the release date, you can check out some of the new content in the gameplay trailer and concept art below:
[previewyoutube="mdNovVWIPt0;full"]Please take care of your new babies
As previously mentioned we are introducing two new early-game biomes to freshen up your runs as well as a host of new enemies and weapons, some unseen mechanics and a giant boss, so there’s plenty for you to explore.
In case you really don't want to miss the release, you can hit the wishlist button on this page and you will get a nice Steam email when it's out and ready to be played.
Upcoming AMA:
Got any burning questions? Well, we’re running another AMA on Reddit on 11th February at 15:00 CEST, so pop in and have a chat if you’re around.
Bundles:
There will be a ‘complete the set’ option available if you already own Dead Cells, which will save you 10% on the DLC. If you haven’t bought Dead Cells yet (shame! shame!) or if you know friends/family/coworkers/random people on the street who haven’t played, there will also be a full bundle of the main game + The Bad Seed coming out, which will also save you 10%.
Twitch Extension:
Anyone who has streamed the game with viewers helping you out as the relentless Captain Chicken knows that the chat can get a bit… spammy. We have an extension coming very soon that will cut this out, so watch this space. There’s much more that we want to add to the extension in the future to make streaming the game a smoother experience for you and your viewers, and if you have any thoughts or requests then give us a shout through these channels:
So that wretched Comic Sans infested update that we launched into beta last Friday night at like 8PM, actually didn't turn into a dumpster fire, which is nice. In fact it seems that you all really like the changes that Noja and the GPPs cooked up for you.
However... We're not actually done with just that.
The Legacy Update:
The Legacy Update is something that we’ve been wanting to do for a long time. As we moved towards regular updates and iterations on the game, we were always bugged by the fact that we were drastically changing the experience that a lot of people had come to love (something that you all have vocaly reminded us of on occasion).
From here we always wondered whether it would be possible to dig up the old versions of the game and store them somewhere, so that interested players and future generations of developers could look back at how our little game developed and grew into the Action Game of the Year 2018.
So, now you can load up every major iteration of the game from the first build of Early Access right up to present, and we will of course make sure that we stock all of our future major updates in there too. This way, the nostalgic, the ragers and the “it was better before” crowd will always have the option of playing the version of the game that they loved.
How do I access these mythical branches? - Go to your Steam game library. - Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties". - Select the tab "Betas". - In the first dropdown box select the version you'd like to play. - Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading. - Start playing.
On top of that everything that you got in the beta of the "Christmas Update" which was just us being tired and hungover, is included for everyone in the Legacy Update right now. So here's the breakdown:
Steam Cloud Hack
I won't go so far as to call it a "fix" but we've now made it so that there is regularly a backup of your saves to a folder that SteamCloud can't get to and delete (which is how so many people have lost their saves up until now). So from here on it, you should, if you lose your save be able to find this backup folder and get it back... Emphasis on the should...
Here's how it all works:
Dead Cells now backs up your save files daily. This reduces the chances of losing your game in case of issues with Steam Cloud, crashes, accidental deletions, etc. Shall you ever lose your save, don’t panic, we’re going to walk you through restoring backups!
TL;DR for experienced users: The game now keeps daily backups of your saves. It creates backups as zip files in the “save” folder. To restore a backup, you must turn off Steam Cloud temporarily, and then you can extract one of the backup zips directly into the “save” folder.
Detailed step-by-step guide:
First, quit the game and turn off Steam Cloud for Dead Cells. This is necessary so that you can restore your save files. In your Steam library, right-click on Dead Cells, click Properties, click Updates, then uncheck “Enable Steam Cloud synchronization”.
Open the game’s local files. In your Steam library, right-click on Dead Cells, click Properties, click Local Files, then “Browse Local Files”.
Go into the “save” folder. In it, there’s a series of files named “backup”. Those are the ones that we need. More on those in a minute. You might also see a bunch of “user” files – those are your local save files. We’re going to replace them, so keep a copy of them somewhere else just to be safe! If you’re not seeing any files named “user”, no problem, that just means you’ve only ever used Steam Cloud, so your games had never been saved locally.
In the “save” folder, pick the backup file you want. In the save folder, you will find a series of zip files named “backup” plus a date code, such as “backup-2019-12-04-1.zip”. Try to remember the most recent date when your saves were still OK, then pick the corresponding zip file.
Unzip the backup file directly into the “save” folder. Right-click on the appropriate backup, click “Extract All”. In the window that opens up, make sure the path ends with “save” (if it doesn’t, you can delete the end of the path): Then click “Extract”. If Windows says that there’s already a file named “user_0.dat” (for example), pick “Replace”.
Start the game and check your saves. If the game asks you if you want to use Steam Cloud, it’s important to say no for now – we want to force the game to use the save files you have extracted locally. Then, look at your saves, make sure they’re the ones you expected. If they’re not the ones you want, go back to step 4 and try another backup.
When you’re satisfied, you can turn on Steam Cloud again if you wish. If the game asks you whether you want to transfer your local saves to Steam Cloud, it should be safe to say yes.
New weapons:
We’re adding in 2 new weapons/skills to the game, they are; the Ice Shield and Ice Armor. Crowd control and panic reduction are our main objectives with these weapons and we hope you’ll appreciate being saved right at the last possible second by your brand new panic button.
Weapon reworks:
Game feel and being able to choose your playstyle has been a core design element of Dead Cells from day one, but let’s be honest, there have been times when the ideas that we had for weapons sounded great… But turned out to be total crap (I’m looking at you Spartan Sandals).
Because of this we’ve reworked the 3 least used (*cough* most *cough* hated *cough*) weapons, with the idea of bringing a lot more balance to the game.
New Mutations:
We’ve added in two new mutations, which for the initiated is kind of a big deal as they have some very interesting impacts on game play for Survival players, allowing more synthesis with ice effects.
Christmas Skin:
It’s Christmas, and why the hell not? So we added in a Santa (jolly fat drunk man) skin. Ho ho ho.
It's 7:30PM the day after our office Christmas party (and Friday!) and I for one, am feeling a little worse for wear. As such we're breaking all the rules and doing something incredibly stupid!
Today, for the brave beta testers... You can test a new update that has not even been through alpha testing! On a Friday night!!!!
Ohhhh yeah!
BACK UP YOUR SAVES!!!!
What's in it?
- New items. - Item reworks. - Other stuff I'll do a real news about next week.
TLDR: - Announcing a new DLC with two levels and a boss over here (please wishlist it). - $4.99 paid DLC will help us continue building more Dead Cells and MT’s next game. - AMA on Reddit right now over here. - We’ve got two years of Dead Cells content we hope to build. - MT are finding the outlines of their next prototype. - HD wallpapers available here. ------------------------------------------------------------------
Hey all!
Today we’re super excited to unveil The Bad Seed DLC, which brings two new early game biomes and a big #$&%-off boss for you to bash your head against, at least until you’re steamrolling it to death in 3 seconds flat and back to demanding more content…
Here’s the link to the Steam Page, if you could spare the time to hit wishlist, that would be a big help!
Anyway, we'll release a lot more info as we get closer to release, but here's a little teaser trailer, a few screenshots and some provisional biome names for you to look at in the meantime:
[previewyoutube="SBtfG1R8_OY;full"]Noja, the sadist in video editing action... ːsteamfacepalmː
The Arboretum, a tranquil level, with nothing dangerous of note...
The Swamp, putrid, tick infested cesspool inhabited by spear wielding, blow dart firing jerks.
Boss tease...
If you want to get your hands on the HD wallpapers, they're available here.
Paid DLC:
The DLC will be available for $4.99 and comparable regional prices.
Paid content will help support the development of the game, allowing the team to go forward with all of the ideas that we’ve got in our heads, continuing to produce free content, fixes and updates, while also ensuring that Motion Twin have the time to build their next game at the level you’ve come to expect from them.
As usual we’ll be doing the development iteratively in conjunction with the community, so please do hit us up in the comments, head over to Reddit and Discord to let us know what you think.
However the real question is what’s next right? Well, if this DLC thing goes according to plan we’ll keep producing free content updates, be that systemic changes or playable content additions for the next two years at least.
You may have noticed that there is a “two handed weapon” in the DLC… This is a bit of a tease of the kind of content additions that we’re thinking of bringing to the game. On top of that there are glaring problems with the balancing of the game that we’ve been wanting to fix for years but just haven't had the time, the economy for example… These will be major systemic changes.
On the content front, anyone playing on the BC1+ difficulties will notice that we’re kind of at a moment where the monsters repeat themselves a little bit. We’re planning on changing this by building out a bunch of new creatures and replacing some of the more tired types with biome specific beasts, to keep you on your toes, you know… This will obviously mean new weapons will drop on each of these monsters, so stacks of content.
Secret areas and lore will also continue to see new additions, we’d like to make sure that you’re really getting the feeling of exploring and discovering new things (things that we might just have added to the game) with each run as you explore the world, so we’ve got stacks of ideas on that front.
The Next Update That We Didn't Plan But We’re Doing Anyway Because It’s Cool:
We’ll have a little present for you coming up around the holiday season this year, it’s not quite finished and we didn't think we’d be able to pull it off, even though we’ve wanted to do it for ages, but we think you’ll like it...
More on that as we get closer to the release.
One of the big ol ticks that lurk in The Swamp.
What else are you up to?
As mentioned, the Motion Twin team are plugging away on a new prototype (well technically two at the same time). They’re a long way away from having anything that we can begin to hype up, but I’m excited by the promise of what they’re working on. We will of course keep you posted as we know more.
Evil Empire on the other hand are really excited to continue working on Dead Cells, but also to potentially make new additions to the Dead Cells universe i the form of other DC based games, we’re quietly building a few prototypes to see whether we can pull something like that off, but we’ll keep you posted as we get to a point that the MT team are happy with and really get stuck into production.
Anyway here are some of the concepts (non contractual!) from the MT team:
Summing up:
So essentially we really hope that you like the DLC and that you think it’s a fair way for us to continue supporting the game and work on our next projects. We’ve been working on free content since August 2018 and we would like to keep doing that for as long as we can. We’ll continue to listen to feedback and work closely with the community on everything that we build, so please do stay in touch.
All the best,
The Motion Twin and Evil Empire teams.
Labour of love award?
Hey all,
Happy holidays!
We're kinda late to the party, but if want to vote for us in the Steam Awards, give it a blast.
Also huuuuge thanks to @Sombras for the cool image!
Cheers!
15th Corrupted Update is live!
[previewyoutube="JSh_8aUYUr4;full"]
Hello everyone,
We're super stoked to announce that our fifteen update has just reached live. You can find the full patch notes here, but I will give you a rundown of the main additions brought by the Corrupted Update.
Alternatively, if you prefer watching to reading, there is the 5 minutes vlog linked above showing the fancy new things in action and explaining our reasoning behind the changes.
New Content:
New challenge, optional, biome:
The Corrupted Confinement, which mirrors the Prison Depths. You can access it from the Toxic Sewers, and it will lead to either the Ancient Sewers or the Ramparts (BC1 door). This biome is very short compared to the others, and has a guaranteed cursed chest at the beginning. Prison Depths structure has also been updated to be similar. Beware of the blue birds, they ain't kidding around.
New Meta upgrade:
Given as a reward for beating the Hand of the King in BC1, the Recycling Tubes replaces the random starting gear. Instead, you will get the choice in-between 4 sets of 5 items (Melee weapon, Range Weapon, Shield and 2 skills). Choose wisely.
New Rune:
Explorer Instinct reveals the point of interests on the map once you've explored the majority of the level. It will help you if you're like us and can't stand to let a tiny bit of a platform unexplored, and regularly waste time backtracking only to find... nothing.
3 new Tactic Mutations:
Crow's foot allows you to let caltrops behind you when you roll, slowing and damaging the enemies. Tactical Retreat slows all enemies around you on a perfect dodge. They also won't be able to inflict you Malaise during a few seconds. Finally, Networking make all the mobs with projectiles stuck in them share damage.
Balancing:
While adding new content to the game is always great, The Corrupted Update is actually mainly an overall balance of the biomes and paths. With these new changes, we try to prevent a biome or a road to become a clear unquestionable better choice than its counterparts. To this end, all biome difficulty and scrolls count has been balanced.
We've also drastically reduced the amount of cursed chests in the higher difficulty levels, but we've also buffed the colorless weapons by making it scales with your forge tiers (no more thousands of golds wasted to improve it to S-quality) as well as making the bonus stats always be of your main color.
The decision to removed lots of cursed chests was mainly motivated by having to prevent the colorless weapon from making the color system irrelevant if they were too common (remember the 1.1 legendaries?) but also because we think too much cursed chests kinda spoil the uniqueness of what's supposed to be very tense moments. And it does encourages scouting, cheesing and backtracking, which can be cool but also break the momentum of the run and lengthen its duration.
We added fragments of scrolls to be found in biomes to make up for the loss of the stats points that were brought by the cursed chests, and adjusted the health of bosses to make sure you don't spend 10 minutes in a tedious fight against them. The curve should be more coherent now, with an easier beginning thanks to the new meta upgrade but a slightly more difficult mid game (compared to before where every mobs were one-shoted).
We hope that the changes will please you, but in any case, don't hesitate to let us know.
Now, a quick announcement to end up this news! We have partnered with Level 99 Games to add the Beheaded to Exceed, a super cool card game inspired by fighting video games. We really hope our little guy will be completely overpowered compared to the other fighters available, but Level 99 isn't bad at balancing its roster, so the hope is thin.
All the art was done by David Thor Fjalarsson, who also did the key art for the Corrupted Update!
If you're interested, you will be able to buy it here or here, although the page won't be up before one hour or so.
Cheers, EE and the MT team.
Corrupted Update is now on the beta branch!
Heya everyone,
The Corrupted update is live on the beta branch! Our fifteenth update comes with a new (optional) biome mirroring the Prison Depths. Both are now considered “challenged” biomes and are hence quite short.
It also comes with a bunch of new content, namely three tactical mutations, a new rune and a new meta upgrade, and a complete rebalance of the biomes and paths (scrolls, cursed chest, mobs, etc.). The goal is to prevent one road or biome to be always better than its counterparts.
Finally, you can’t take two of the same item anymore, unless you allow it in the custom mode, but that will lock the achievements. Achievements are also locked if you play with less than 20 items unlocked. These two changes may seem odd, but we really think it will end up improving the game and the experience on the long term. We’ve put a lengthy post explaining our reasoning on our reddit here.
We hope you’re excited to test the Corrupted update, which hopefully won’t be worthy of its name just because of the broken things and bugs that come with it. How to access the beta branch:
Go to your Steam game library.
Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
Select the tab "Betas".
In the first dropdown box select "beta".
Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
We just pushed the Corrupted Update in the alpha branch. Many new things in there, so for the ones willing to help us polish the whole through feedback, you're more than welcomed to jump in!
Just be aware that we're now giving the possibility of creating a 100% unlocked save to make testing easier, which means you could be spoiling yourself, both from a gameplay/ progression perspective but also lore-wise.
Here comes the traditional reminder on how to access the alpha branch:
Go to your Steam game library.
Right click on Dead Cells and click "properties".
Select the tab "Betas".
In the first dropdown box select "Alpha - Not for the faint hearted".
Click close and wait for the upload to finish downloading.
Update 14: Who's the Boss? Is out now for everyone!
NOTE: Console versions (including Switch) will come as soon as we're through certification, usually 2-3 weeks.
Hey all!
Today we’d like to present for your consideration update number fourteen: “Who’s the Boss?” I’d also like to mention that we’re doing an AMA over here tomorrow for anyone who has questions and such. Now, to business:
Here’s the VLOG version of most of this post:
https://youtu.be/GDLS0bNgTTo
Who's the Boss?
This update brings a bunch of new content to the game, in the form of monsters to kill and new weapons to unlock! The idea behind the update is relatively simple, bosses are challenging and killing them should be rewarding.
We find it frustrating when we fight our way through an hour long run, make it to The Hand and promptly get rekt in 10 seconds flat. To take the sting out of the injustice of it all we’ve added in some new monsters based on each of the bosses. You’ll find them in the levels immediately preceding the boss they’re based on and they’ll be equipped with one of the most deadly or uncharacteristic attacks of their master.
For example, here we have the Sweeper, whose main function seems to be viscera cleanup detail. You’ll find him in the ramparts tidying up, waiting to send you off to the bin or finally teach you about the flame attack of the Concierge...
One of my favourites is the Automaton, because I always get slammed by the Time Keeper’s dash. The Automaton will appear out of thin air, rapid dash across the screen and leave you wondering when the hell we added that to the game. Hopefully you’ll get good at recognising when she’s coming then rolling to safety or introducing a shield to her face. (and yes I’m aware my screenshots are rubbish).
Weapons:
Moving on to the weapons! Which is after all the fun bit… We like the idea of winning feeling good. You want the first time you make it past the Time Keeper to be special. So we’ve added a weapon based on one of the attacks of each boss, which you’ll of course unlock when you beat the boss in question.
The Pan:
This gets it’s own heading because it’s literally been a year since the requests started coming in, and you’ve been very insistent on the subject of the cooking equipment... “pan when?”, “can we have the pan?”, “when are you going to give us the pan?” and so on. So here it is! Note, the pan slap is pretty much the reverse of the dagger…
Mutations:
This update adds support for the glass cannon melee tactics build. It’s not as safe as a survival build or a ranged tactics loadout, but we’re really trying to provide a bunch of different ways to play the game based on what you like, rather than just having one meta that makes sense at all times regardless of the items that drop.
And theeeeen?
That’s pretty much it, except for the usual quality of life and bug fixes which you can see over here on the patch notes site.
What's next for Motion Twin and Dead Cells?
In other news, a lot of people have been asking what’s next for Motion Twin, so here’s the deal…
The majority of the Motion Twin team are working on the next game, or at least making a whole bunch of prototypes and brainstorming about what the next game is going to be. There’s no firm direction yet, but we’re testing new technology, weird and wonderful game designs and a whole bunch of different art styles.
(this was a proto that didn’t make it…)
Once we come up with something that keeps everyone up at night dreaming and scheming then we’ll get cracking and go through the whole process of building and releasing a game again.
Meanwhile… Some of the Motion Twin team decided it would be best to keep on keeping on with Dead Cells, for financial reasons (obviously) but also because we’re not done with DC… There’s a STACK more ideas we’d like to try and so far the community that has formed around the game is awesome and keeps wanting more, so that’s a very good reason for us to keep working on the game.
So, given that Motion Twin is a workers co-op and that this makes growing beyond 8-10 people quite difficult, those of us who wanted to keep Dead Celling decided to start another company to do just that.
And so Evil Empire was born. In fact it doesn’t really change a terrible lot, three of us have been working on Dead Cells since the beginning and we’re all still in the same office as the rest of the Motion Twin team.
Motion Twin retains complete creative control over the game and everything that we do is subject to their approval, though we’re obviously here to suggest cool new things and bring new levels, monsters and items into the game.
What this all really means is that there will be more Dead Cells, a second Motion Twin game and eventually a completely new IP from Evil Empire, so hopefully it’ll be a win win for everyone.
Will anything change?
Nope, the whole thing stays as it was, well hopefully we’ll get better at trying to sim-ship console and PC, gathering feedback and generally not pushing game breaking bugs into the game, but otherwise, you can still hit us up via Discord, Reddit, here on Steam or the other social networks.
Also we'll put out a road-map ASAP.
Fan art:
As usual we finish this broadcast with some most excellent contributions from the community. Enjoy!
New mutations and more available on beta. Feedback requested!
Hello everyone,
The 14th "Who's the Boss?" update is now available in the beta branch. It brings new enemies, new weapons, balancing, lots of QoL and bug fixing. Also three Melee Tactical mutations allowing a new kind of Assassin/ Glass Cannon playstyle on which we would love your feedback. Is it fun for you? Is it viable at the Boss Cell level you're currently playing? Do you have any suggestions to improve on it?
Well, if you have any feedback for us, we want to hear it. A thread on Reddit has been opened to centralize feedback and discuss the new content and balancing, but we're also often present on the #current-update-discussion channel on Dead Cells' Discord.
