It’s time for the 0.23 Patch Notes – everything you see here will be playable during the upcoming Crossplay Beta! Since the last time we checked in, we’ve made a ton of fixes and improvements based on what so many of you shared with us. We’re grateful for all your feedback so far (yes, we read it all!) and we hope you’ll see a lot of that reflected in the updates below. Let’s dive in. 

ETERNAL ROTATION

• Tsu’bo: Inactive

• Irenna: Active

NEW PLAYER EXPERIENCE 

Tutorial

Dev note: We’ve extensively reworked the new player experience to make the flow for first-time players more focused, intuitive, and easy to follow. On first launch, new players will now be automatically placed into the tutorial, helping them learn the basics before jumping into matches. To prevent players from skipping ahead, doors will remain locked for each segment of the tutorial until the required actions are performed.

• We added a checklist system to the tutorial UI to ensure players perform certain actions as they move through the tutorial. 

• We added more reminders and pop-ups throughout the tutorial to make the walkthrough feel more intuitive, like an explainer on how to swap weapons. 

• Players now respawn at the Checkpoint if they die during onboarding, including at the end of the tutorial.

• We added more enemy types and environmental variations to better introduce ranged and melee combat.

• We updated tutorial minion animations, hit reactions, health, damage, and combat pacing across the tutorial and in game.

• Tutorial NPCs no longer drop loot.

• The end of the tutorial now brings you directly to Learning Spires to continue training.

Learning Spires

Dev note: With Learning Spires in particular, these changes aim to give a more engaging first taste of combat and better prepare players for what PvP feels like as they’re ramping into the game.

• Learning Spires is now 5 floors (up from 3). 

• Bot difficulty now ramps up across floors. 

• Floors 1 – 2: Bots feel more active and provide a low-intensity challenge 

• Floor 3: Bots begin to use healing in combat

• Floors 4 – 5: Bots begin to behave more like players

• Bot loadouts have been updated across all floors to progressively introduce Echo items, Eternal items, set bonuses, and full Eternals.

• At the end of Learning Spires, players can now choose to continue their training in an endless bot run.

SPIRES GAME MODE UPDATES

Dev note: During Closed Beta, we heard that price increases felt too steep after just one purchase. The goal with the Shrine has always been to give players immediate agency so you can learn and get reps in as you build muscle memory with combat, controls, and item knowledge. Because of this, we’ve adjusted the Spires economy to give you more time with the loadouts you’re learning before prices ramp up.

These changes let the initial combat ramp from Floor 1-10 feel much more forgiving, letting players run the same loadout for roughly 5 floors in a row before having to think about switching things up. This means you can likely complete the standard Spire (10 floors) with essentially two loadouts. Once you move into the Endless run, that’s when things get more challenging and the economy kicks in more as it now resets every 20 floors.

Standard Spires Economy

• All Eternal items now start at 150 Fragments (from 250).

• Each additional purchase increases the price by 50 Fragments.

• Level 2 upgrades now cost 300 Fragments; Level 3 upgrades now cost 500 Fragments.

• Once you reach Endless Spires (Floor 10+), the Shrine economy now resets every 20 floors (up from 10).

Spires Shrine

• New layout intended for easier usability.

• Eternal items now feature Eternal artwork, making sets easier to identify.

• Added a "buy all" option to purchase an entire Eternal set at once.

• “Ready up” status is now visible while shopping.

• Item details now appear in a popup when you focus on an item.

• Items can now be claimed with a single click.

• Active Eternal set bonuses are now displayed while using the Shrine.

Bot Spires (New Mode)

Dev note: We've added a Bot Spires mode to this patch. This is an endless series of Spires matches against bots, without the usual floor/attempt structure.

• Bot team size scales to match your team size just like other bot modes.

• The store resets every round.

• Pages are not earned in this mode.

• Starting essence is 5,000, matching Learning Spires.

• You can move directly from the end of Learning Spires into Bot Spires without returning to the front end.

• You can choose to continue with the same loadout between matches, skipping the checkpoint room entirely. 

Other

• Updated character art assets in the Spires versus screen, including new poses and additional props for some Eternals.

• The Spires versus screen now displays the upcoming arena in the background on Xbox and PlayStation in addition to PC.

ASCENSION GAME MODE UPDATES

Floor 1 Drop

• Initial drop circle count increased from 1 to 3 (one per zone).

• Initial drop circle radius increased from 0 to 75m, giving teams more room to spread out on landing.

Minions

• Both melee and ranged minions now display health bars.

• Both melee and ranged minions now share a common health pool of 25 (melee up from 5; ranged down from 40).

• Reduced melee minion hit count to 3 swipes (from 5).

• Reduced ranged minion damage to 5 (from 6).

• Increased ranged minion projectile range to 14m (from 12m), correcting an oversight from our last line of sight update.

COMBAT

• Added a new Anchor Ability called “Refill Consumables” to the Ascension game mode.This ability refills your last-held consumable to a full stack.

• Reduced the time to fully recharge all evade pips to 5 seconds (from 6). Individual pip recharge remains 2 seconds each.

• Updated dodge distance scaling as you chain evades: hop, dodge, and dash now cover roughly 3.25m / 3.5m / 4.25m, respectively.

• Continued combo-transition timing on various left click or left trigger combos. 

• Updated visual effects for several status effects including: Slow, Exhaust, Root, Incoming Damage Reduced, Invulnerable, and Steadfast. 

• Updated the buff bar to more clearly show status effects including: Slow, Exhaust, Root, Incoming Damage Reduced, Invulnerable, and Steadfast.

• Improved melee auto-targeting so movement and attacks align more consistently with where your character appears to be aiming.

• Updated crowd control timer UI. When affected by crowd control, the HUD now displays:

• The remaining duration of the effect.

• The Eternal Relic that caused it.

• Executes and instant-loot interactions now require the target to still be actively downed.

• Lob projectiles can no longer be reflected.

ETERNAL ITEMS

Grimwold

• Charged Rings' charged projectile is now slightly smaller and matches the speed of the base (uncharged) shot.

• Removed Oscillating Regeneration Crown's teleport-expiry visual delay. 

• Reduced Magnetic Field ability’s duration to 7 seconds (from 10).

Rynshi

• Casting Rampage ability now resets all other cooldowns.

Karriv

• Flaming Lantern pre-toss indicator has been removed once the weapon is launched, making it more difficult for enemies to dodge.

CONSUMABLES

• Manually dropping multiple consumables in the same spot now combines them into a single stack.

• Using a stack from the ground now decrements it by one per use until it's gone.

UI & DISPLAY

• Added "hold to cancel" for matchmaking queues.

• Updated the crowd control timer. When hit by a crowd control effect, you'll now see its remaining duration and the icon of the item that caused it. 

• Added optional nameplate healthbar settings that place a healthbar above or below your character.

• Updated account creation screens with clearer display name and date of birth entry.

• Missing localization strings now fall back to English rather than appearing blank.

• Added on-screen warnings ahead of Ascension queue close while waiting for matches, and dynamic queue time messaging so players get better feedback while waiting for matches.

• Added messaging around upcoming matchmaking waves to better help players know how long to wait for a match to arrive.

• Added on-screen notification in custom games to tell players when a match is in progress. Players who are actively in a match will have their names highlighted in green. 

• The default player icon is now the Arkheron logo.

SOCIAL

• The “invite friend” panel is now a permanent tab in the social menu. 

• Moved the "add game friend" and "find your friends on Discord" icons to the “invite friend” panel.

• Added a clearer highlight state for the team channel in the social panel.

• Discord voice chat now disconnects properly when network connectivity is lost, reducing stuck connections.

• Added a setting to toggle the local player's own nameplate on/off. 

ART & VISUAL UPDATES

• Updated lighting in Mahara Village Square.

• Updated lighting in Archivist Forbidden Halls.

• Fixed character intro animations and updated the intro camera to match.

• Added themed main menu screens. These new backgrounds will showcase the Builders of the Tower and support major story beats.

AUDIO

• Adjusted overall music and UI volume balance.

• Blocked and invulnerable states now use distinct audio feedback.

• Improved enemy footstep attenuation for better positional and distance readability.

• Added a death cue to the training dummy.

• Added additional tutorial audio and adjusted tutorial cue cooldowns to reduce repeated sounds.

• Environment emitters now send to tower reverb for more consistent ambience.

• Mix state improvements for consumable audio.

• Sound cooldowns now use the client's unscaled clock, fixing cooldown timing issues when game time is paused/slowed.

• Added cooldowns to tutorial audio cues to prevent spam.

• Tweaked player death sound effect.

LOCALIZATION

• Improved subtitle coverage across supported languages.

• Improved intelligibility of Japanese and Korean VO for the tutorial narration.

• Console builds now include all supported audio locales.

• Updated tutorial voiceover to improve clarity/quality of guidance during the tutorial.

PERFORMANCE

Dev note: Many of the updates around performance came directly from feedback and bug reports we received from players over the last few weekends of Tech Tests – thank you. We hope these changes significantly improve the player experience and create less technical hitches.   

• Continued graphics stability work, including additional fixes for PS5 and improvements to DX12 rendering.

• Continued investigation into application-not-responding (ANR) issues affecting some AMD GPUs.

• Enabled Adaptive VSync on Xbox and PS5 for smoother frame pacing.

• Improved shader and material warmup to reduce gameplay hitches.

• Improved front end loading so VFX material priming no longer blocks loading progress.

• Optimized line of sight rendering.

• Improved audio loading to reduce potential stalls.

• Improved texture streaming at high settings to maintain texture quality while reducing hitching.

• Improved shadow quality on Medium settings.

• Fixed an AMD GPU shader issue affecting capsule shadows.

• Sped up PC material warmup, reducing load/startup hitching.

• Reduced shader compile costs that could cause stalls for AMD clients with a cold shader cache, helping smooth out load times and reduce hitching, especially on first launch or after driver/game updates.

• Restored the high-quality texture streaming pool to 2048 MB for better texture quality without hitching.

• Face-off video target now allocated as half-float and enabled on console for improved rendering.

• Optimized VFX on Healing Well, store, teleport, and item pickup..

• Optimized Scorcher VFX and Spires VFX placement.

• Optimized chest VFX.