Vampire Survivors, the popular game by Poncle, has just released its Chilling Update, and there’s a lot to unpack. Far from an ordinary patch, this update introduces various new features, including a new stage, a new character, and other gameplay improvements. The game is available on multiple platforms: Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, PC, iOS, and Android.
The most notable addition is the Whiteout stage. This 20-minute bonus stage changes the game’s dynamics by making enemies more susceptible to fire weapons and also slowing them down. To unlock Whiteout, players will need to collect 20 Orologions, which should be quite doable for those who’ve spent some time with the game.
Along with the new stage comes a new character named She-Moon Eeta. She starts off with a weapon called Glass Fandango and has high Armor and Movement Speed stats. Her unique feature is a 10-second time-freeze that triggers when her health drops below 25%. This freeze resets once her health fully recovers, adding a new layer of strategy to gameplay.
The update also introduces the Chaos Altemanna Relic, which allows another character, O’Sole Meeo, to morph upon reaching level 80. Additionally, the Antidote Relic makes it possible to buy Defang, a PowerUp that makes the game a bit easier.
According to the developers, the next significant update will introduce “Adventures,” which promises to remix the content of the base game and add new stage progressions and descriptions. However, this feature needs some more time for quality assurance and will be delayed a bit.
The 1.7.0 update also includes a range of fixes and tweaks, improving everything from treasure chest placement to text overlaps and character animations. Below you can find more details about it.
New Content Patch 1.7.0: Whiteout
– 6 new EXTRA achievements
– 1 new bonus stage
– 2 new relics to get a new PowerUp and morph an existing character
– 1 new weapon with its evolution
– 1 new playable character
– 1 new music track
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It’s a 20 minutes Bonus stage, so for most of it there isn’t anything particularly challenging. Enemies move very slowly and take extra damage from fire weapons, which is why you might want to save the next spicy sausage for when the boss shows up. Funny snowmen will block your path, but might drop a decent amount of gold coins and everyone’s favourite pickup: Orologions.As you can tell from the unlock condition, this isn’t a post game stage like TinyBridge/BatCountry/AstralStair, so it’s rather easy. If you Invert it though…
Allows the character O’Sole Meeo to morph when reaching Level 80. It gets a few minor stats boost and evolves its Celestial Dusting into Profusione D’Amore.
The weapon evolution still shoots flowers, but these ones also bounce against the side of the screen. It also spawns floating leaves that occasionally bloom into a chain-reaction of damaging explosions.
Allows to buy the Defang PowerUp.
Very cheap PowerUp to slightly reduce difficulty. Makes some enemies completely unable to deal damage. These enemies have a green tint, that can be disabled in Options.
Can be picked up in Whiteout, and unlocked for every other run by levelling it up to Level 7. Attacks faster and in the faced direction when moving, and with standard delay and all around when standing still. Deals extra damage to frozen enemies. Gains bonus area during the time-freeze triggered by Orologions. Requires maxed Wings to evolve into Celestial Voulge.
Has a chance to deal critical hits and to freeze enemies. Changes the time-freeze from Orologions: enemies appear frozen and deal no damage as usual, but keep moving towards the player. Deals continuous damage.
Starts with Glass Fandango. Slightly defensive character thanks to high Armor and Movement Speed. Has a “CriticalHP skill”, that triggers when she drops below 25% Max Health: she triggers a 10 seconds time-freeze, just like Orologions do.
The CriticalHP skill recharges only when the character recovers all HP. If the characters get hit by an attack strong enough to kill them, CriticalHP doesn’t trigger.
If you haven’t already done it last year, cast the spell
to unlock special skins for Mortaccio, Yatta Cavallo, Bianca Ramba, and O’Sole!
The next big feature, “Adventures”, needs just a bit more time in the oven before we’ll be able to release it. We wanted to deliver it together with Whiteout, but there’s a lot of QA to do and, as mentioned in the previous update, the release process has become slower due to all the platforms we’re on, so we decided to play it safe and leave the risky bits to a future update.
If everything goes well, we should be able to deliver the Adventures patch on Steam in less than a month
Adventures remix content of the base game and add a bit of new flavour through new stage progression and descriptions. They allow to have a fresh start with new chapters to tackle, without losing anything obtained in the main game. There are several features and details that we will explain one by one in the weeks ahead.
There will be Adventures in the base game and also a special Adventure for each DLC. For example, this is what you’ll see when you start the Legacy of the Moonspell Adventure:
We’re also planning to put the new cross-save feature into the beta channels; if you’d like to try it, please follow the beta updates on our Discord to know when it will be available for testing.
We’ll keep supporting VS and stick to our top secret updates roadmap, but that doesn’t mean that we aren’t ready to port VS once again if the engine situation becomes unsustainable.
We already had to rewrite almost everything in the new “game engine”, since we’re using it only for the ability to easily export the game for consoles. Everything else is basically custom and working in the new engine was actually an uphill battle against the engine itself.
That being said, going back to the old engine is not an option. While Phaser is a fantastic framework and I wouldn’t use anything else if I could, the tech stack needed to make it run on anything that isn’t a web browser is too heavy and unsupported by consoles. Most of the performance gains we’ve seen with the swap are in fact thanks to dropping the old tech stack, not because the new engine is doing any miracles.
There are also some features that exist exclusively on the new engine (co-op, and soon Adventures) that would have been incredibly hard to make in the old one, so, if we really have to make a change, we’ll go to a new-new-engine rather than the old one.
Thanks to your support we could afford another engine switch if we have to, but it would be another bumpy ride and I’d rather spend that time and headspace on new features, content, and games.
PS: if you’re a fan of Phaser like me, you probably have already noticed some funny content in the Directer’s Cut teaser… can’t wait to show you more in the following months!
Despite being ready for weeks, the Whiteout update is actually still not approved for release on all platforms. The blocker -on another platform, not Steam- , was the usage of the term “Flashing VFX” in the Options menu…
Last time I mentioned that we wanted to always release patches globally, because we know how frustrating it is to receive updates late only because your platform of choice is not the main one. But with this level of silliness, in return it becomes unfair to all other players to hold back a release because a single platform is that slow, for such nonsense reasons.
Sorry if content gets delayed on other platforms, we’ll keep trying our best, but we have so much more content to release before the end of 2023 that we really can’t afford longer waiting times.
Last week we hit 200k reviews on Steam! A huge thank you from everyone at poncle for your support!
In return we will… keep working on VS and stuff! 🙂
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– Added more treasure chests in Il Molise
– Fixed weapon spacing in arcanas list to accommodate new weapons.
– Fixed text overlap in collection where there are 3 line descriptions.
– Fix for some missing translations in the options menu.
– Fixed Je-ne-viv world eater logic causing slowdown.
– Fixed bought character’s in secrets menu.
– Fixed revive animation not being scaled correctly.
– Fixed issue with Je-ne-viv crashing Il Molise.
– Fixed quit button audio cutoff.
– Fixed bestiary enemies scaling up and down incorrectly.
– Fixed resolution dropdrop displaying incorrect resolution.
– Fixed Cosmic Egg display in Bestiary.
– Fixed World Eater crashing with lots of eggs.
– Fixed Trinacria in Bestiary.
– Fixed Bestiary Information cutoff/display issues.
– Fixed incorrect No Future particles.
– Fixed Hellfire projectile rotation on bounce.
– Fixed Goshadokuro losing it’s head in the Bestiary.
– Fixed Directer fight inconsistencies vs old engine.
– Fixed the pause menu not animating the first time it is opened.
– Fixed missing red death particles in Holy Forbbiden.
– Updated Traditional Chinese display name on the languages page.
– Updated pickup logic to better match old-engine behaviour.
– Minor optimisation on damage number display.
– Removed incorrect screen flash on Gorgeous Moon.
– Removed various flashes if Flashing VFX is disabled.
– Added translations for “Mobile FAQ”.
– Added bounds on death particles.
– Added missing flash vfx on Directer intro.
