// PC GAMER — GAMING
'We are no longer using that one red pipe asset we weren't supposed to use': The Blood of Dawnwalker hotfix clears up one of the game's more charming mistakes
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A new hotfix for The Blood of Dawnwalker rolled out today, and you'll be happy to know that this one improves the game's overall stability, fixes several progression blockers, fixes an issue with controllers that was causing frame rate drops, gets rid of the famous red pipe—more on that later—and keeps dead folks from talking so much.
That last point, about the stiffs who won't shut up, doesn't figure as one of the update's highlights, which developer Rebel Wolves breaks down thusly:
Still, it's interesting. Conversational corpses are almost always upsetting, and not just because the dead shouldn't speak, although that's certainly top of the list. But also, they never have anything good to say. If you find yourself conversing with the remains of the recently departed, you can be just about 100% sure that it's not going to be a happy conversation about how well everything is going. Quite the opposite, in fact.
There is one example of chatty corpses that weren't entirely bad, to go off on a bit of a tangent: Atomic Heart is full of them, a bizarre side effect of the game's alt-history Soviet technology, and most of the talking dead are reasonably cool about the situation. But that's also more of a 'fading echoes' thing, rather than a body that just will not die, and I imagine that would have a way of leading to more philosophical exchanges.
In any event, from the patch notes, for a more prosaic take on the topic:
And then, yes, there's the pipe: "We are no longer using that one red pipe asset we weren’t supposed to use." That's a reference to a discovery last week of a placeholder asset in the game, bright red and clearly marked "Do not use this asset!" which somebody nonetheless used.
Kind of a shame that it's gone, really: I like to think of rogue placeholders as a kind of digital monument that everyone hears about, visits, and then ever-after can tell people, yeah, I saw that thing. I was there. Alas, I have not yet played Blood of Dawnwalker and so I will not get to see it, except on Reddit, which doesn't really count.
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The Blood of Dawnwalker hotfix 1.0.4 is live now on Steam—the full patch notes are below.