Watcher, New Characters, and What's Coming to STS2

Mega Crit has confirmed that the Watcher — STS1's fourth character, a monk who manipulates stances and deals exponentially scaling damage — will appear in STS2. She is not in the game yet. No official release window has been given beyond "we are working on her."

The practical expectation, based on how Mega Crit has communicated about Early Access content, is that she is unlikely before Q3 2026 at the earliest. The studio has historically moved deliberately when reworking characters for sequels — Ironclad, Silent, Defect, and Necrobinder all received significant design changes from their STS1 counterparts, and STS2 introduced Regent as an entirely new character. Watcher's STS1 kit (Calm/Wrath stance, Divinity, Scry) will likely be meaningfully redesigned rather than ported directly.

Dataminers have found placeholder references in the current game build that suggest Mega Crit is working on more than just Watcher. Placeholder epoch identifiers point to at least one alternate Act structure — possibly alternate versions of Act 1, 2, or 3 with different enemy sets, similar to how STS1's Downfall mod reimagined the acts. These are not confirmed features; placeholders frequently get cut or change meaning during development.

Additionally, Casey Yano's public comments and roadmap posts mention "new playable characters" in the plural, without naming specifics. This aligns with the placeholder data suggesting development work beyond a single addition. Whether that means one or three more characters before 1.0 is not known.

An active community discussion is running in parallel with the new-content speculation: should STS2 have meta-progression — unlockable cards, relics, or mechanics that expand across runs? STS1 had a full unlock tree: characters started with limited card pools and unlocked the full roster over time. STS2 launched with everything available from the first run.

Community sentiment, based on Steam forum threads and Reddit discussions, leans toward the STS1 model being valuable — not for power unlocks but for onboarding complexity. The concern is that new players who see the full card pool immediately face an overwhelming decision space. Mega Crit has not committed to adding a meta-progression system, but the Badges system introduced in v0.102 (end-of-run achievement highlights) suggests they are thinking about ways to give runs milestone recognition without gating content.

The realistic near-term picture: the next 1-2 months will continue to be balance patches, difficulty tuning, and quality-of-life improvements. The Badges system will likely get more achievements. A new character — most likely Watcher — is the most probable major content addition, with Q3 2026 as the optimistic estimate.

Mega Crit shipped STS1 in 2017 and reached 1.0 in January 2019 — roughly 18 months of Early Access. If STS2 follows a similar cadence, the 1.0 window would be somewhere in late 2027. That is a long runway, which means there is time for Watcher, at least one more character, and structural additions like alternate acts if those placeholders become real features.

The most concrete timing signal since this page was written arrived with the mid-August v0.111.0 beta patch: Mega Crit announced there will be no patch on August 27 (team break in the last week of August) and warned the next patch may take longer than the usual cadence, because work has shifted to "some BIG, much-anticipated pieces of content," with more detail promised in the August Neowsletter. Read that as the balance-heavy phase slowing down: the next milestone is content-scale rather than another two-week tuning pass.