Thanks for playing!
I think I've mentioned this before, maybe not in this devlog though, but expanding the world and the lore has been a major focus of the update. So I'm glad that new quests, collectibles, and achievements are working that way.
Some of your points are things I haven't thought of before. Some of them are things I wish I could do, but had to cut to keep myself sane. Some of the tweaks you've suggested might make it in. Going through them in order:
- AI changes are firmly out of scope. I know that actor AI is a major weakness across many of my games, but it's not something I've had the time to sort out (or, at this point, probably ever will). The actor logic is an absolute mess of kudzu code, and the last time I tried to add something (line-of-sight dependent chasing) it didn't work. Takagi hacks around this with scripting, which could maybe apply to some limited cases here, but I don't feel it's worth the effort.
- More enemy variety is also firmly out of scope. That's one major downside of the 2.5D style I chose, which is that to make an enemy with a different weapon requires redrawing several rotations and animation frames. Adding a variant is almost as much work as adding a completely new NPC. Even palette swaps are annoyingly tedious.
- Unlike the previous, I'm not going to definitely rule out implementing sword sheathing/unsheathing, but it probably won't happen. This is something that kind of cycled in and out of scope for both the base game and the update. It's definitely something I'd like to have, but it would need some new art assets and there are some open questions around how it would actually work.
- I think having more signposting in the intro has come up before, but I'm not really sure how to do it. If there were markers or highlights or some other system used in the rest of the game, we could use that here, but there isn't, and I don't feel it makes sense to have something that's used only in the intro and then completely left by the wayside for the rest of the game.
- I thought it would be nice to show Elisa taking up the sword, but I wasn't convinced I could do it justice. Rather than have something that looks horrible, I felt it was better to just leave it implied.
- I'm not sure if this is what you have in mind, but I think these sections could be made more forgiving with some minor tweaks to the level design and I'll look into that. It's worth noting that the gatehouse is intended to be a trap. You're supposed to have to be careful here. I do agree that the bailey is overly punishing and gives you no break before you have to move, and I think that can be mitigated with some tweaks to the level design and possibly enemy placement.
- There's a new hint mechanism coming in the update- it's sort of in already, but only used for one quest. You can now talk to Cheril for hints on what to do next. I'll keep in mind that those particular quests caused some trouble when I start writing that dialogue. I might also tweak the bartender's "what's the word on the street" dialogue, we'll see.
- Early plans for Shattered 2 actually did include a day/night cycle and game time that ticked forward, but this was scrapped pretty early on. I felt it was just going to be way more trouble than it would be worth.
For now, I'm taking a bit of a break from Shattered 2. Maybe I'll have some ideas by the time I get back to it, who knows!