Lords of the Fallen continues to get patched at a ridiculous rate, and since its release on October 13, Hexworks has put eight updates into the game, tweaking every dial on performance, game parry systems, enemy projectiles, and more. Patch v.1.1.224 (and more updates are scheduled for Thursday) looks to give Mournstead its biggest shakeup to date.

Some background: Lords of the Fallen's critical reception was mixed. Issues related to the sheer number of monsters being fought were one of the hot topics.

My reviewer had many good things to say about the game as a whole, but my experience was plagued by an over-reliance on ambushes, gank squads, archers, dogs, small marauders, you name it. This problem became more pronounced later in the game and the final area was a headache. The game is often technically challenging, but in practice it is just tedious and exhausting.

Hexworks seems to have listened." As a means of improving enemy density, the "leashing" system has been improved to further limit the distance that enemies can chase the player from the spawn point. This will help prevent hordes of enemies from relentlessly chasing players as they run through levels." Hexworks also plans to make changes to the AI to make it less likely that they will just dogpile on you in large numbers.

The developers also plan to "reduce the number of enemies present in areas where players struggle the most." These enemies will be removed in the first playthrough, but will remain in NG+ to align with the more challenging experience players are looking for.

Lords of the Fallen offers many tools, spells, and throws to help deal with hordes of enemies. However, if you are unfamiliar with the game, you will not have the resources to try them on your first go-around. Just knowing where the tricky ambush spots are can be quite helpful. This is a good compromise.

The second major point is a tweak to the New Game+ (NG+) system: in Lords of the Fallen, there are two types of checkpoints called vestiges. These are permanent checkpoints that can be moved through fast travel, and "vestiges seeds," consumable items that can be planted in specific flower beds to create your own checkpoints. Only one seed can be planted at a time.

NG+ previously further enhanced this system by destroying all permanent bestiges, with the exception of those in the Skyrest Bridge, the hub area of the game. This did not sit well with many players, some of whom liked to take advantage of the game's clever interconnectedness and were forced to route their playthroughs.

Others, however, felt that it only reduced their quality of life and ruined NG+ playthroughs that they would have otherwise enjoyed. Frankly, that is also plausible. I don't think it's difficult to have to spend 10 minutes back to a particular area because you forgot to do a quest line; Hexworks tackles this in two ways.

First, there's something like New Game Zero: once you start NG+, you can either move on to the next difficulty level or play the base game with everything you have on hand. This allows you to tear up the Mournstead, move on to a different ending, or try a different quest line.

Alternatively, they can move on to NG+." In NG+1, instead of erasing all vestiges (as it does now), the main locations would remain intact, with only a few vestiges disappearing; in NG+2, a few more would disappear, and in NG+3, all vestiges would disappear except the main hub (Skyrest Bridge) and Adyr's Shrine."

Again, this is a good compromise: with each NewGame+, the world gets progressively more difficult. Hardcore gamers who liked the original NG+ are likely to do subsequent NG+ playthroughs anyway, so in theory everyone will benefit.

Finally, a further performance tune-up is in the works; Hexworks has also addressed a bug that plagues players with a kind of forced respook, changing characters to what appears to be a development build, given that the level and status distribution is always the same The studio has not yet found a way to fix the problem. The studio has not yet found a fix, but has asked players who have lost progress to send in their data so the development team can fix it.

"We have a team in place that can send corrupted save data/downgraded characters, and we will respond by giving the save data the vitality needed to restore the character to the level it was before the glitch occurred. ...... You will need to restart your playthrough, but should be able to recover your progress very quickly with a high level character. Cross-play between consoles is scheduled for today, and cross-play across all platforms is scheduled for Thursday.

Ultimately, while there are still frustrations with Lords of the Fallen, it is genuinely impressive to see these improvements happen so quickly. It's not easy to walk the line between listening to player feedback and maintaining the original vision for the game, and while I doubt Hexworks will keep up this pace (for the sake of the studio's sanity, I hope not), even a month later Lords of the Fallen is a game that I'm very curious to see what it will look like.