Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night shares 2020 roadmap as sales surpass one million
Boss Revenge Mode due first later this month.
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, Koji Igarashi's acclaimed spiritual successor to the Castlevania series, has now surpassed one million sales, and developer ArtPlay has shared its 2020 development roadmap to accompany the news.
Prior to Bloodstained's launch last June, ArtPlay pledged a wide range of post-launch development updates, many of which had initially been promised as Kickstarter stretch goals. As 2019 went on, however, its most publicised post-launch development activity revolved around remedying Bloodstained's troubled Switch port, with the only additional content news arriving earlier this year when ArtPlay announced it was cancelling its previously promised rogue-like mode, replacing it with a scaled-back Randomiser mode.
That left a heap of promised content still to come, with Bloodstained's first substantial update - introducing a second playable character, Zangetsu, and the aforementioned Randomizer Mode - finally arriving in May. And with that out the way, ArtPlay has now committed to release windows for Bloodstained's remaining content in its newly revealed development roadmap.
Based on current predictions, Bloodstained's next new additions will be the long-promised Boss Revenge Mode - in which players take control of one of four bosses to battle the game's heroes - and a new Chroma Wheel, bringing an increased range of character customisation options. Both will come to PC, Xbox One, and PS4 on 23rd June, and to Switch in July.
These will be followed by a VS Mode and Chaos Mode, both supporting online and local multiplayer, some time in Q3 2020. The former promises tense survival - in which players compete by indirectly attacking one another - while Chaos Mode is described as a specialised boss rush for one or two players, incorporating randomised drops and special sub-goals.
Q3 should also see the arrival of an "80s-style" Classic Mode, pitting protagonist Miriam "against a series of sub-bosses laid out across five harrowing stages and three difficulty levels". The gimmick here, according to ArtPlay's previous discussion of the mode, is that Bloodstained's original open-ended level design will be reworked into a strictly linear affair, closer to that of the early Castlevania games.
Rounding off the current 2020 roadmap is a still-mysterious third playable character for Bloodstained, and ArtPlay says to expect additional updates for bug fixes and improvements, paid DLC, and "a few other surprises".
"We want to thank all the game's fans for being a part of this amazing journey," wrote ArtPlay of its one million sales, "and for making Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night a global success".