Another week, another Mortal Shell 2 update! The first proper one arrived a week ago, and smoothed down some of the game’s rough edges to make for a (slightly) more generous experience. This next update brings with it a bevy of changes, but most notably is an experimental adaptive difficulty mode that changes depending how well you’re doing.
It’s all pretty simple. At times when you’re doing well, taking down baddies and bosses without a hitch, they start to get harder. “Enemies gain damage, health and break resist, so they hit harder, take longer to bring down and are more difficult to stagger,” a Steam blog post explains. “Keep clearing encounters without dying and enemies will scale well past the toughest the game was originally built to be, and they will keep climbing for as long as you keep winning.”
On the opposite end of things, if you keep dying, your foes will weaken. They’ll inversely do less damage, have less health and resist, “and a cap is applied so that no single attack can take more than a set fraction of your health bar, meaning you cannot be killed outright from full health.” If you’re playing in Night Mode, it should be noted, “these reductions do not apply.” You should also be made aware that there is no visual indicator to show whether the game has gotten easier or harder, but there are plans to add something in further down the line.
The update goes a bit further than that too, with it now being possible to apply status effects to enemies when they’re sorting themselves out after a riposte. In terms of balance, the update has “improved the logic around Gloom drops on death, making it easier for players to retrieve their lost Gloom.” You’ll also find a plethora of bug fixes, performance adjustments, audio tweaks, and even a few story changes.