Visit lovely and scenic Prison Island! See the horrible monsters! Marvel at the loot! Pray that you can get out alive within the time limit or else you’ll drop all of your stuff! That’s the vacation brochure that would probably be provided by Corepunk to highlight the newly opened Prison Island instance, which went live over the weekend after a second delay beyond the initially announced April 4th delayed release.
The second pause on releasing the new content patch was announced on Discord during the afternoon of April 4th in order for developer Artificial Core to “reduce unnecessary risks and ensure a better experience for everyone.” Whatever technical problems the studio was facing must have been gnarly indeed, as shortly after it confirmed there would be a progress rollback to April 3rd; context was not provided but the announcement called the rollback crucial.
As for the patch, it obviously adds the Prison Island delve, which can be queued up in FFA PvP mode or small-group and solo PvE mode, though the rules all remain the same: prepare with an instance-specific inventory, try to find loot, and find the exit without dying or before 45 minutes run out, as either event sees all of your goodies drop to the ground.
As one might expect, there are lots of rewards waiting in Prison Island, specifically new Tier 3 weapons, recipes, and triple-stat artifacts, all of which can only be found in the instance, so it’s less like an optional vacation and more like a mandatory visit if players want the latest greatest shiny.
The other major introduction in the patch is the addition of the Defender weapon spec for the Champion class, which brings some classic sword-and-board tanking as well as a unique combo system that applies different effects depending on what combos are used for players to try out. Other features of the update include a smoothing of boss loot drops and a small list of bug fixes.
