THQ Nordic and Gunfire Games' Darksiders 3 hasn't quite set the sales charts on fire, and has had mixed to positive reactions within the review arena. However, Gunfire isn't done with the game, and the development studio wants to keep courting gamers with core options that would see them returning to the post-apocalyptic world. This includes implementing a classic combat option.
The news came courtesy of a post over on the Steam community, where the community manager noted that a number of new features have been added to the second major patch for Darksiders 3. The changelog reveals that the top priority of improvements that Gunfire added to the game is the brand new option for Combat. This applies both to starting new games and reloading old save files. You'll be able to choose between the two different combat modes, including "Default", which is the standard combat mode that comes with Darksiders 3, and the "Classic" mode that hearkens back to the previous two games.
Now what the Classic mode does is enable Fury to dodge while she's attacking. This interrupts her current attack so that she can dodge out of the way. This also can interrupt item usage as well, so if you're in a tight bind you can pop the dodge while consuming an item to instantly interrupt the animation and get out of the way. Think of it like a cancel-attack dodge feature.
Obviously Gunfire considered that some gamers might be worried that this will affect the difficulty of the game or the achievements that you can earn, and promptly made it clear within the changelog that dodging does not affect or disrupt how you can earn achievements, nor does it change the difficulty of the game.
A few other improvements also arrived with the second major patch as well, including improved ledge-grab detection for when Fury has to scale walls or vertical surfaces containing cracked or broken ledges. It's now easier to scale these areas without worrying about slipping or missing the ledge. This was sometimes an issue in older 3D games like Tomb Raider, when the character would look like they would grab the ledge but somehow miss.
Another big fix -- and this affects more of the meta-culture around the game than the game itself -- is that optimizations have been added to help reduce the stuttering during streaming. For those of you who play the game via Twitch, to a broad audience of gamers who enjoy hack-and-slash adventure games, this should make it easier to play and smoother to stream.
Gunfire also decided to do something fairly cool, and that's raise the level cap to 200. This meant rebalancing all of the rewards and enemies past level 80 in Darksiders 3 to accommodate the massive level gains. Most gamers -- upon seeing the max level upgrade -- began begging for a New Game+. It makes sense given that a New Game+ for games like this and Marvel's Spider-Man or Dark Souls really adds a lot of flavor and replayability to the overall product. Whether or not Gunfire actually obliges the community is another story, but the developers really seem to want to win over any of the naysayers who may not have enjoyed the game due to a few nagging issues at launch.
Darksiders 3 is currently available for the Xbox One, PS4, and PC, and this definitely won't be the last patch for the game. Gunfire Games has openly asked for critical feedback so that the studio can continue to improve it.
