Tenebris expansion progress update 5 - November 6, 2022

As of this update on the Tenebris expansion, the story content has been completed, and a solid chunk of the programming is finished (primarily support for the new playable character and future new characters, as well as a good chunk of the new character's abilities).

Since more of the Tenebris expansion has been completed, a few additional details can be provided at this point:

In terms of story content, the number of event pieces (which consist of everything from dialogue messages from NPCs/cutscenes, to triggering animation/movement in a cutscene, to playing music, and more) has increased by over 40% in size against the base game and Legends Overload Expansion put together (and over 50% compared to just the base game). This does not necessarily mean that the gameplay length is only 40% bigger -- Legends Overload's boost in size in terms of event pieces was over 25% against the base game, and the Story Mode gameplay during testing ended up being longer than that. More information as to the length of gameplay boost from Tenebris will be provided when testing is done.

Against both the base game and Legends Overload expansion put together, the number of Story Mode cutscenes has gone up over 50% with the Tenebris expansion, and the number of ingame map zones has increased by almost 60%.

In a previous update, the new 10th character was mentioned to be a melee-oriented stance-based character with additional focus on status ailments and damage-over-time.

They still are those things, but with more of the new playable character's specifics determined from what has been implemented of their active/passive abilities so far, they also have the capacity to be a powerful regen healer if customized for that (as opposed to Alberto's standard big healing for set amounts).

I'm hoping to provide more significant details of the new character soon, once testing begins and footage of the new character in action can be taken from the game.

A previous update had also mentioned that the Tenebris expansion would have 20 endgame Challenges added to Story Mode. This number may end up decreasing, in order to keep the focus on Challenges that either focus on new enemy types or on enemy combinations that feel different from previous Challenges -- there does not seem much point in adding "new" Challenges that are overly similar to existing Challenges that can be replayed at the same point in time as the new ones.