A little birdie told us the other day that we shouldn’t forget about the twenty or so very, very special individuals out there who put a lot of their hard-earned cash into the Desktop Dungeons beta project, and that we should probably start making good on our promise to include them a little more in the game.

Our initial reaction, of course, was one of surprise and amazement (“OMG! A talking bird!”). After we cooled down a little, we started working on these dues in earnest. We’re about halfway through the delightful little package of bonus references, a lot of them integrated with new and interesting subdungeon situations that have been spread across all of the game’s map regions. So we hope that these little shout-outs won’t just be cute, but actually valuable and interesting for the broader player base, too!

Thanks again to everyone who bought the Desktop Dungeons Exclusive Edition! We’ll be getting more of you sorted out over the next couple of weeks and possibly releasing a full list of the references when we’re done (or alternatively, just releasing them to individuals on request — spoiler concerns, ya know!). And to those of you who have bought the EE, but didn’t get a message from us about this in recent weeks: please check your spam folders, or the e-mail account that’s attached to your game login, or whatever! There’s a few of you who haven’t responded to us yet, and we want to avoid putting you into the game until we’re sure we can personalise it as well as possible! 🙂

And finally: AN IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT GAMEPLAY BALANCE (this is caps, so it’s basically triple important). We’re growing concerned about the trend towards over-exploration in the early game vs actual monster killing, and there’s a couple of tweaks we’ll be making over the next few weeks to see how we can adjust that and, er, *nudge* players towards a slightly more interesting approach. We’re changing the bonus XP formula, for a start, and seeing how heavily that affects players across all levels. You have been warned!

There’s several important things to chew on this week with content, balance and bugs. Changelog! Drumroll! Full post follows!

Fixes:

• Fixed Monster Class selection bug.
• Fixed crash when finding a new god.
• Quests can now be selected (double clicking a flag will also select a quest)
• Selecting a quest will pre-select a dungeon.
• Selecting a quest will grey out races/classes that cannot complete the quest
• Quest selection is cancelled by cancelling run, or selecting a different dungeon.
• Easy class quests, class specific quests concatenated into class challenges.
• Class challenges are available from class buildings (not all are done yet)
• Tooltips no longer fall off the screen in fullscreen mode
• New subdungeons and other Expensive Edition player references added
• Fixed bug where Hobbler’s Hold didn’t show completion stats
• Piercing Wand fireball cost increase removed.
• Dracul’s Blood Tithe always adds 5% Sanguine, costs rebalanced accordingly.
• Bloodmage starts with 20% Sanguine, mana potions more effective.
• Berserker damage bonus reduced to 20% starting and 20% extra against higher level enemies.
• Transmuters made slightly less squishy.
• Bonus experience curve adjusted.
• Crystal Ball now costs 5 gold to activate.
• Glowing Guardian no longer punishes plant kills.