Dead Cells, the rogue-like game by developer Motion Twin, has recently received a patch that will make the game a bit more balanced. In the past, without the safety of checkpoints, players would be set back with each death, which happens quite often due to the game’s increasing difficulty. Taking note of player frustration, a new Dead Cells patch has been released and targets the game’s balance while making extra adjustments to its difficulty settings.
The most significant aspect of the Dead Cells patch is the difficulty level which is raised by collecting ‘Boss Cells’ (BC). Citing a community suggestion, several of the BC levels have had their challenges raised or lowered for various reasons. For example, BC0 has been made more challenging in order to better prepare the player for what’s to come. Further, BCs 1-3 have been nerfed slightly to give less prepared players a more fighting chance, while all of the DLC BCs have been given increased damage output to several of their areas and bosses to give veteran players more of a challenge.
The best chance players have to survive the dangers of the Dead Cells update is to explore and collect as much useful loot as possible. To add to the balance, areas of the game have been tweaked to improve the quality and quantity of available loot. Both the areas of ‘Toxic Sewers’ and ‘Ancient Sewers’ have had their loot quality increased by one level while that of the ‘Ossuary’ has been decreased by one. Additionally, harder areas will have much more ‘Cells’ (XP) to collect.
The new patches also came with various small changes due to community suggestions in favor of more balance. These include reducing the stun duration of a weapon called the ‘War Javelin’, decreasing instead of resetting the charge amount of the ‘Giant’ boss when killing their hand, and preventing more than two iterations of “+XX% damage on _target” from appearing on items. Lastly, acquiring BCs was made automatic to ensure that the next difficulty level would be unlocked if a player’s run ends early.
The recent Dead Cells patch has done much to balance the game’s challenge and address player frustration. By adjusting the BC difficulty and being more generous with in-game loot, Motion Twin has shown that it cares about and listens to the community. While this is definitely a nice gesture, I think we can still expect a few rage quits.
