A new Deltarune update is here across all platforms, and although plenty of bugs and issues have been fixed, a short mention at the end of the patch notes confirming that "some extremely slight adjustments to gameplay" are on the way is what's got me thoroughly intrigued.
In the latest Deltarune patch notes shared on Steam, we see that most of the changes are for the new Chapters 3 and 4 – although the almost four-year-old Chapter 2 did get a single bug fix, too. In Chapter 3, an issue with Susie "moving erroneously" after a certain battle has been fixed in an, uh, interesting way, as "she now slides around erroneously. Apparently this is better."
Elsewhere, the devs have "attempted" to fix a Chapter 3 issue where "you can see duplicate Ralseis, as well as make Ralsei disappear indefinitely" in a certain section. The word "attempted" does seem to suggest the problem might not be gone entirely – poor Ralsei – but it sounds like we don't have long to wait for the next update, anyway.
"Testing of the next patch (1.03) has already been completed and is waiting for release," the latest patch notes briefly mention. "The next two patches contain many more crash and softlock fixes, as well as some extremely slight adjustments to gameplay."
A tweet posted to the official Deltarune and Undertale account adds that the devs had wanted to release the latest patch "simultaneously on all platforms, but Nintendo Switch took two weeks for approval," which has clearly held the patch back. As for the next one, "we will release it when we can," the devs say, referring to the aforementioned gameplay improvements as "miniscule."
What those gameplay improvements could be, however, is currently a total mystery. Over the last few weeks, there have been many, many cries to nerf a certain Chapter 3 boss – who you don't have to beat, but you miss out on some great rewards if you don't. Now, I'm not sure if nerfs would fall under the "miniscule gameplay improvements" umbrella, but as someone who spent around four hours repeatedly dying until eventually winning that fight, I can imagine why many would welcome any changes here as a cause for celebration.
For now, we'll just have to wait and see. One thing I'm sure we're not going to see in the upcoming updates is an expanded version of Chapter 3, even though developer Toby Fox previously confirmed it was longer before it had to be cut because of pacing issues. I'd still love to see the cut content though, just saying.
