Episode 21: Quality of Life

Hello folks! It's your community manager Harper here! Wait, some will say, I thought it was Heather? Well, I got a legal name change so it's Harper now. Hi again, friends. I'm here with some fresh news about what we've been doing post-release for Psychonauts 2. A major focus has been on updating the game to fix major bugs and add some new features that will help with collectables and achievements.

To help outline the features, our lead designer Seth Marinello has broken it all down in a new update video!

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Now, since there's a lot of information to digest, I want to share some of the details in writing as well as the full patch notes. Let's start with the new features before the nitty-gritty notes! A main focus was to ease player's navigation of the world and make sure that the process for getting to rank 102 felt more streamlined. We've heard feedback regarding a few tricky figments and a lack of clarity regarding where to search next. There's two new features that should make it a lot easier to find collectables in the game world.

Filters For Finding Figments And Such!

The Otto-Spot Filter is available to anyone who has completed the main story and can be purchased at any Otto-Matic for only 75 psitanium. To use it, you'll need to first collect the camera from Otto's Lab if you somehow didn't snag it in the main game. The filter is activated just like any other photo filter but has a pretty clear gameplay use: highlighting where nearby collectables are. When you snap on the filter, all collectable items near Raz will be made visible. Items like cards and Psi-Challenge Markers gain an extra outline and the filter shifts to a black and white view of the world while leaving all nearby figments bright and colorful. You'll even be able to see them through pieces of the environment.

Using the filter, players will be able to adjust their view of the game world and look at everything around them. Even things that might be normally blocked from view without the filter. This will make locating that last gosh-dang figment much easier and should help anyone looking to reach rank 102.

We have also changed the fast travel and figment viewer interface to make it easier to know what areas you've 100% completed and see all available figments even if you haven't found certain designs yet. When you fast travel around a level, a new checkmark will appear next to the name of any area where you've found all items. This will narrow down where you need to search and will speed up the collection process considerably. Additionally, the figment viewer can show every possible figment design in a level with you needing to pick up a specific figment type. This will hopefully make is easier to know exactly what the remaining figments look like so you know exactly what to look for.

Extra Combat Challenges!

After completing Gisu's side quest to find all psychoseimometers, an additional seismometer will unlock in Otto's Lab that features a variety of randomized combat challenges that can be replayed over and over again to your heart's content. For players who did not collect specific enemy related achievements, this will allow you to collect them without needing to start a fresh game or scour minds for any remaining fights. We know that folks really love gathering achievements and that a few of these combat-related ones were hard to find if you'd already cleared out most character's minds.

This also provides a fun side challenge for players who have achieved rank 102 and the Limitless ability. A lot of players said they wanted the chance to use their boundless psychic powers to completely trash tons of mental goons. This final psychoseimometer features all enemies in one easy to find location in a variety of arrangements that will offer plenty of chances to bash panic attacks or show those enablers who's boss.

If you want to know the full details of bug fixes, as promised, I'll also share the patch notes down below:

New features:

Bonus Psychoseismometer unlocked in Otto's lab after finishing Gisu's quest, making it possible to unlock enemy achievements during post-game state.
Check marks appear in location selection menus to indicate if all collectibles in a location have been found.
Otto-Spot photo filter to show collectibles in the Otto-Shot photo mode.
Show all available figments in the figment viewer menu even if you haven't found them yet.

Bugs fixed:

General stability improvements for all platforms.
Improve environmental collision to prevent player and objects rarely falling through walls and floors.
Fix issues related to fall death and water curse, and preventing them from being broken if interrupted by a cutscene.
Fix duplicate characters and stray animation appearing in some cutscenes.
Fix issue that could cause flickering around objects submerged in water.
Improve save checkpoints to prevent the player's save data getting into a bad state.
Improve photo mode stability.
Expand the mental health advisory message.
HUD improvements to prevent extra health brains from appearing.
Improve PS4 version's resolution and stability on PS5.
Pause PC version when controller is unplugged.
Standardize PC controls between cutscenes and dialogue trees.
Improve xCloud streaming touch controls.

That closes out this update for the time being. You can expect the update to roll out today if it hasn't already popped up by the time of this writing. Heading into the future, we're going to focus on backer rewards and other topics. In the meantime, we hope that this update will help out any of you still looking to fully complete the game!