Some rounds add a system. These made the game kinder to live in. First they handed you the keyboard, and then they sanded down every rough edge a long playtest could find.
Every key is now your own. Dreadmark's pause screen used to be a plain thing that stopped the world and let you nudge a few sliders. It's now a proper gothic-framed menu with the spire and moon behind it, sorted into Gameplay, Audio and Controls. The headline is rebinding. Every action in the game has its own row, from move, dodge and sprint to all five skill slots, weapon swap, both flasks, every panel toggle and the town portal. Click a row and the game listens for whatever key you'd rather use. Secondary bindings and a gamepad column sit alongside. Bind a key that's already busy and the game stops to tell you exactly which action you'd be stealing it from, then lets you decide. Nothing gets double-bound behind your back, and no input stops working without you knowing why. Whatever you choose is saved and waiting the next time you play. Audio split apart too, into a master level plus separate trims for music, ambience, voice and combat. The comfort toggles are all gathered in one place as well: camera shake, the low-health screen warning, the dodge-charge pips and the frame-rate readout.
Then one long playtest turned into a wall of seventy-four small mercies. The round played the game hard, wrote down everything that chafed, and sanded all of it. The town portal grew a spine. Opening one is now a three-second incantation with a visible cast bar, and it's interrupted if something lands a real hit on you mid-prayer. Getting out of trouble is still possible. It just isn't free anymore. A proper video settings tab arrived with resolution switching. The experience bar became readable, and the character sheet learned to explain itself. Every one of its twenty-six rows now spells out its own arithmetic when you hover it: where the number comes from, what feeds it and what it feeds.
Dying got a fair price, too. Falling in the field now costs a slice of your progress into the current level and some gold, but never a level itself. That's sharp enough to respect and never cruel enough to quit over. The named dead, meanwhile, picked up nastier manners. The Charnel King's thorned ward used to work like a pause button. Now he fights on while the spikes are up, so hitting him then is a real decision. Sexton Veil learned the cruelest trick in the graveyard, a grasping snare that roots you where you stand, followed by a long, patient shot, re-aimed at you while you're held. The dodge roll is the only way out of the root. You will learn this once, loudly.
None of these items was big, but together they turn a build you test into a game you keep playing after the test is done.