What's new: duels, a gate to walk through, and loot you can see

Duels

Fights between people are agreed. CHALLENGE someone and they get an invite with ACCEPT and DECLINE. It lapses after 20 seconds. If they say no, you can't ask them again for half a minute. Nobody can hit another person without saying yes first, so a new player can't be jumped.

Won on 1 HP. The last blow leaves your opponent standing on 1 HP and the duel is yours. No death, no respawn, and nobody loses the coins they're carrying. The winner gets the kill bounty. YIELD ends it early and pays nothing.

You get your health back. When a duel ends, both of you get back the health the other one took. Damage from enemies who join in mid-duel stays.

Every move works. ATTACK, HEAVY and the running strikes (RUSH and CHARGE out of a sprint) all land on your duel opponent. GUARD and parry work too.

Agents are different. You can still attack an agent without asking. It fights back. An agent never starts a fight with a person, and it only hits you if you hit it, or called it out in chat, a moment before.

The gate

The home screen is the room under the campus: an old desk with a terminal, and a stone doorway glowing blue. Every few seconds the doorway fades into a view through to the other side, where DESTINY waits at the cave mouth looking out at the hills.

Press PLAY and you step up to the gate and choose a door. ENTER THE WORLD sits you down at the desk, the screen types out the gate's greeting, and you make your hero right there. LAUNCH AN AGENT flies you straight through the doorway. BACK plays the whole way in, reversed.

Fighting and staying alive

• Running attacks. While sprinting, press ATTACK for a RUSH or HEAVY for a CHARGE. Either one carries you into the enemy.
• Your hits land when the blade does. Before, you felt a blow a beat late, after the server answered. Now the hit lands as your swing connects, and a HEAVY lands with real weight.
• Rest. Stand still out of a fight and you get back up to a fifth of your health bar.
• A HEAL button, and a syringe now heals 100.
• Enemies chase you twice as far before giving up and heading home. They won't swim after you, though: a chase stops at the river bank.
• FATE walks past new heroes. She won't hunt a hero under level 5, or anyone in the spawn cave, unless they hit her first.

Loot you can see

Kills drop a spinning gold coin and the actual items: the sword, the helmet, the syringe, not a coloured gem. Walk over them to pick them up. Rare ones send up a beam of light. The item you're holding is the real one too: in your hand, on other players, and when you raise a heal.

The world

• You can fall. Step off a ledge and your hero falls and lands with a thud, instead of snapping to the ground. Everyone else sees it too.
• Today's reward pool shows on the HUD, so you know what's left to earn before the kill.
• CHARACTER ▸ CODEX keeps every Record and comic you've found in one place.
• A HERO CARD you can share, a quiet background score, and in-world notices that float over the scene instead of sitting in a dark box.
• On a desktop: real sun shadows, smoother edges, swaying trees, a further view, and a photo mode on P.

Phones

• SYSTEM ▸ SHARPNESS: STANDARD, SHARP or MAX, applied live. Phones with the strongest graphics chips start on SHARP.
• The screen stays on while you play, the SNAP button takes a photo, and the game has a proper home-screen icon.
• The hero creator is one screen, with no scrolling at any phone height.
• Sound comes back after a phone call on iPhone, and the phone buzzes when you're hit.
• Android app browsers (like the one inside Phantom) used to go white after loading on some phones. That's fixed.

Agents

• Agents bank what they earn. Coins an agent carries are lost when it dies, and agents were dying with everything they'd earned still in their pockets. Now an agent with enough on it walks to the vault and banks before it goes hunting again.
• They rest before they buy heals, and use at most five heals a day, so they stop spending their earnings on syringes.
• A dropped agent comes back by itself after a short wait.
• You can see an agent resting its health back.

Smaller things

• Crafting can't duplicate items, a perk can't be unlocked twice, and a claim waits for any purchase still going through.
• Comic pages can be collected again (they'd quietly stopped working).
• DESTINY's message box moves aside for every menu instead of sitting on top.

Thanks for playing. If a duel feels unfair or a door takes too long to open, tell me.