Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night won't be getting the Roguelike Dungeon mode that was promised after it was unlocked as a stretch goal during its Kickstarter campaign.
In a Kickstarter update, the game's director Koji Igarashi said a Roguelike mode will not be possible as "the code that was created early in the game’s development is not currently compatible with this type of gameplay (especially a procedurally generated castle)."
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The Roguelike Dungeon mode was a $5,000,000 stretch goal that was reached in June 2015 during Bloodstained's Kickstarter campaign. The mode would have used procedural generation to create a new castle for players to beat each time they played. "Once you’ve explored its passages and defeated its boss, you’ll get a code that will enable you to share your randomly generated dungeon with a friend," reads the official description of the mode.
Igarashi and his development team at ArtPlay have apologised for not fulfilling the planned feature but will be replacing it with a Randomizer mode. "Before starting a game, players can choose up to eight different game parameters to be randomized during the playthrough," the developer explains.
Players can choose to shuffle around items, chests, quests, shops, enemy drops, save and warp rooms, crafting results, and which boss ends the game. ArtPlay says that there will be safeguards on certain items, however, so that players don't encounter a situation in which they are unable to complete the game.
As planned with the original Roguelike mode, players will be able to generate a seed for each randomized run that can be shared with other players so they can give it a go. There will also be a timer that tracks their progress through each randomized castle and displays their finishing time at the end.
The Randomizer mode will be free to all Bloodstained players and will launch with the Zangetsu update - which makes the character Zangetsu playable - though there's no time frame on when that might be other than it being the game's next update.
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ArtPlay adds that the game's final Kickstarter stretch goal, Boss Revenge mode, won't be added as part of the Zangetsu mode as that was a mistake announcement. It will still be coming but it will be at a later date.
Recently, the Nintendo Switch version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night was updated with content that put it on par with the other versions. ArtPlay isn't giving up on the Switch version there, though, and says it will still be getting updates going forward that will smooth out its performance further.
In our Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night review we gave it an 8.9 and said that "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, one of the greatest games ever made, finally has a worthy successor on consoles and now on PC."
[poilib element="accentDivider"]Chris Priestman is a freelancer who writes news for IGN. Follow him on Twitter.