The focus of this update is the fates of defeated Chosen. This includes not only those who escape from the Demon Lord, but also those "Forsaken" who willingly enter the Demon Lord's service. It also includes some miscellaneous bug fixes and balance tweaks.
During the final battle, when only two of the Chosen are neutralized, the third will try to flee the battle, and those Chosen fall into two broad categories. The first category is those who have already experienced a Total Break. These Chosen are too mentally damaged to fight anymore, so they currently just get a short epilogue. The second category is those who haven't experienced a Total Break, and their epilogues are more complicated. These aren't yet finished for all personalities, so they're dummied out for the time being. Eventually, I want to include many more epilogues for all sorts of endgame situations (e.g. two close friends who are corrupted in the same way and end up having their ending together), but there are enough possible combinations that I'll probably have to just implement them bit-by-bit alongside other content.
As for the Chosen you capture, they'll now be stored permanently, and not attached to the individual playthrough they came from. You can currently visit them from the main menu, view their profiles, and have them describe how they see their situation. What they say will vary significantly not only with their personalities, but also with their corruption progress. The menu is a bit sparse for now, but options for talking about their training and their daily life will also show up once those features are implemented.
The overall goal for the next few releases is to pave the way for a campaign mode where you defeat Chosen, turn them into Forsaken, and then use those Forsaken to defeat more Chosen. This will involve a "free training" mode, then some interactions between Forsaken (including both having them train each other, and having to deal with rivalries between them), then being able to replace your Commanders with Forsaken, and then finally implementing the campaign mode itself.
I'm hoping to introduce enough gameplay mechanics with each release that none of them feel like "just groundwork." For this release in particular, I've made a fairly major tweak to how Impregnation, Hypnosis, Drain, and Parasitism progress work. Each use of a sinful move now increases the progress toward corruption by a small base amount multiplied by the associated circumstance level, similar to how Resolve damage during the final battle works. I'm interested in hearing whether this makes the lategame feel a bit less grindy, since players should have more ways to make the corruption progress more quickly.
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- Content: Defeated Chosen who escape the final battle after previously suffering a Total Break will now go through a short epilogue explaining why they won't be troubling you again.
- Content: Chosen whose resolve was broken during the final battle will now be stored for later viewing and use. At present, this only allows you to view their stats and hear them say a little bit about their new lives as your servants, but more is on the way.
- Balance: Impregnation, Hypnosis, Drain, and Parasitism effectiveness will now progress more quickly when the respective circumstance is higher. The base rate has been decreased, but this should result in overall faster and more controllable corruption.
- Interface: When only one of the Chosen is a valid target for actions, the target choice option on that round will be skipped.
- Bugfix: Ending a battle in the middle of a capture will no longer result in the capture option behaving strangely in the following battle.
- Bugfix: Some more possible softlocks in the final battle have been fixed.
- Bugfix: Use of Slaughter will no longer cause Surround durations to be treated as negative for the purpose of calculating the Evil Energy bonus from retreating with Causal Projection.
- Bugfix: Fixed a case where Chosen who prepare to sacrifice an ally during the final battle would never actually get around to doing so.
- Other: Saves on Day 1 may now have early cheats toggled on and off, regardless of their initial setting.
