Dead Cells feasts upon 'Baguette' update

The splendid roguelikelike metroidvania Dead Cells--our favourite game of 2017, don't you know--has taken a big step towards leaving early access with the launch of the update codenamed 'Baguette'. It's a biggun, overhauling how persistent weapon upgrades work, letting us reroll the modifiers on particular weapons to shoot for something nicer, replacing the UI, adding new Legendary weapons... lots of good stuff.

For starters, Dead Cells no longer has persistent upgrades for individual weapons. Rather than make specific weapons drop at higher quality tiers, we now upgrade the chance that any found weapon will be of a particular tier. For example, depending on how much you've invested in each tier, you might have a 70% chance for a drop to be a +, 50% it'll be ++, and 10% of S.

"Turns out, the previous system of weapon upgrades was really kinda locking people into only one build and a few weapons..." developers Motion Twin explained in the announcement. "Since the variety and fun of the gameplay are mostly down to playing with different weapons, it made the runs feel a little too repetitive."

Also in is a new NPC who charges gold to reroll a weapon's affixes and to upgrade its quality. So if you find a type of weapon you want but its passive abilities aren't useful to you or it's too weak, you'll be able to have this fella rework it - hoping you get lucky on rerolls. It makes gold useful again, which is great.

Other stuff, let's see. Challenge rooms now aren't about killing enemies but surviving fiendish traps. Bosses are now guaranteed to drop Legendary-tier weapons, which are a bit like colourless items in that they scale off your highest skill but have more bonuses and don't have the drawback of taking extra damage. The UI has a new non-pixely font. Many things are polished, tweaked, fixed, and rebalanced.

See the patch notes for details. Baguette (or version 0.7.x, to be stuffy) has been playable on the game's beta branch since March but as of Wednesday it's actually, properly out on the main version of the game.

Dead Cells costs £17/€20/$20 on Steam Early Access and GOG. Developers Motion Twin say they now expect the full version of Dead Cells will be ready to launch "by August", though obviously that could change. Mac and Linux versions are coming too, and a "big juicy" bit of free DLC after launch.