Torchlight Frontiers Update 8 - Quality of Life
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The latest closed alpha update for Echtra Games' multiplayer action-RPG Torchlight Frontiers is primarily dedicated to quality of life improvements. Among those are the new difficulty settings, enhanced UI functionality, improved gamepad support, and more. The update also includes the usual assortment of balance changes and bug fixes.
The complete patch notes are fairly extensive, so here are just the main new features:
UPDATE 8: QUALITY OF LIFE
The team at Echtra has spent the last milestone almost fully focused on Quality of Life improvements and clearing out our bug list. Sometimes you just need to clean up all the dust in the workshop before you get back to expanding the frontier. Update 8 has a few smaller features like Difficulty Selection, a reimagining of a Dusk Mage skill, and major progress on the Gamepad experience - but mostly it’s just cleaner, more stable, and a lot more polished than before. With this work caught up for Update 8, the team is heads down on a fresh batch of features and content to put out in Update 9. Enjoy!
FEATURES
DIFFICULTY SELECTION
We have added a difficulty system for players who seek a more challenging and demanding combat experience. Difficulty is set on a per-character basis and can be changed at any time. When difficulty is set higher monsters begin to deal a lot more damage, and take slightly less damage from the player. Higher difficulty settings also grant the player a Luck buff which increases their personal item drop rate.
To prevent cheesing dungeons, private instance difficulty can only be lowered, never raised. Players who want to play a dungeon at a higher difficulty will need to change their character’s setting and enter a fresh instance. Private instances will be set to the lowest difficulty of any player who enters, so when playing in a party be sure to coordinate.
Players in the same public area will interact with monsters at their own personal difficulty setting, and receive loot at their personal Luck rate.
QUALITY OF LIFE IMPROVEMENTS
- Character Select screen now sorts characters by most recently played at the top.
- The Fort Build menu now goes back to the list view when the player changes the sub-category.
- Improved Skill Menu navigation when using Gamepad.
- Added gamepad support for scrolling on UI screens.
- Improved gamepad experience to better target enemies when non-enemy targets like breakables are in close proximity.
- Improved Skills menu navigation being difficult to control when using a Gamepad
- Items are now repopulated after leaving an area with items laying on the ground and then warping back.
- Player characters are now prevented from vibrating in difficult navigation situations.
- Player can now use a potion if their health is full but their pets is not
- Quests for another frontier shouldn't show outside of town in the tracker. This change makes all quests show in the fort too. Tutorial, weekly and daily quests show everywhere.
- Dramatically reduced the time for quest status to load after travelling.
- Trait display table cleaned up. This affects the player stats UI. Traits for health on kill, health on hit, summoning minions, and minion capacity all collapsed into fewer rows.
- Added friends context UI actions to chat widget.
- The welcome screen no longer shows more than once per session
