Do you smell something funky? Yes, you're right -- that's the musky stench of Yeti in the newly released Ice region of Coconut Island. But if you take a deeper whiff ...underneath the Yeti stench, you'll detect subtle notes of brimstone mixed with rose petals and candy corn. And THAT my friends is the smell of Adventure mode being almost finished! We have just one more region to wrap up, and then a few little secret surprises and we'll be done.
After that the biggest TBD to go into the game is Tournament mode, and then a bunch of polish, and ... well lets just say it's getting pretty close. Thanks to everyone for your feedback. Keep it coming!
New this week:
Chapter 11 Ice Region has been added to Adventure mode.
New driver costumes for Benny, Rez, and McSkelly.
New cars! The roads just got a little more furious with the addition of Spearchaser and the Waste Rod.
Gold car skins and missions added for Cyclone, Grand Prix, Indy, Old Timer, Spearchaser and Waste Rod.
Change the sort order in the Collection grids. Now you can sort 'em alphabetically, sort 'em by progress made, sort'em sort'em to your heart's content.
Added ghosts to Drift and Mine games in Adventure mode. We liked the ghosts so much in Time Trial we decided to add more.
Version EA-4.0
After more time than we thought it was going to take, update EA-3.8 is finally ready for Early Access prime time... and it's so awesome that we've upgraded it straight to version EA-4.0.
We kinda went through a lot of this in last week's post so we'll just get straight to the point:
Chapter 10 Wasteland added to Adventure mode. Let's just get that out of the way right up front. Battle in the Wastelands, win Clutch and the Interloper armored car, there's sandworms, it's great.
Massive "Quick Event" update. You can now quick your way into Races, Time Trials, Drift Attack, Firework Fury, Last Car Standing.... all the game modes can now be quick-played. AND you can create different custom Presets for each of those game modes, and save them. And we also shipped with a few pre-made Presets to spark your imagination.
We also added Permanent Effects to the Preset options.... These are special effects you can apply to the whole race. Like giving everybody in the race Police Chase for the entire race. Or Bouncy Tires. It's a little crazy. Please let us know what you think.
Totally revamped Championships. These should be more or less the final Championship track selections (although there's still more features coming here like trophies and stuff). And of course you can play your presets with the Championships too.
Handicapping is now a thing. Because sometimes you want to play with your Grandma....and you can't beat her because she's too good. So now you can pick individual handicaps for the better players in your house so the competition stays close and fierce.
You can also choose Autothrottle if you want for Player Options on the config screen.
Time of Day selection in Quick Events. That's something folks have been asking for.
New Tracks in Quick Events: Glacier Gulch, Death Bat Alley and Fire & Ice are all now available. That's about it for tracks, unless we get a crazy itch in our pants and decide to make another one (but our pants are SUPER not itchy right now.)
New Vehicle available to unlock: Old Timer
New Gold Vehicles: Spookster, Sand Blaster, Interloper, Sandrail, Holeshot
New alt character skins: B'Zorp and Clutch.
Various improvements/bug fixes like Collection screen is integrated throughout the main UI screens, and your choice on skin selection persists on the config screens.
Phew. I think there's probably some other super amazing stuff but I can't remember it right now so let's just say that's enough for a 4.0 and call it a day!
Crickets
Some of you may have noticed that EA-3.8 is missing in action. We haven't posted an update in 2 weeks, and I'm very sorry to say we're not going to post one this week either.
"WHY IN THE NAME OF ALL THAT IS HOLY AN GOOD?!" you may be yelling, as you roll on the floor clutching your handmade B'Zorp stuffie to your tear-stained vintage BBR1 Powerup T. Or you might be saying "What's an update?" Either way, we thought you might want to know what's up.
EA-3.8 is just too awesome
We might have bitten off a little more than we could chew with this one.
For one thing, we are Going Big with Presets. You know, those custom rules you can define in Quick Race? Well we're adding the ability to save custom Presets, so you can hand-craft your very own game mode and then save it out. You can save a bunch. And delete them. Whatever. We're also working on crafting and tuning some pre-set Presets, just to get you started.
Oh, and speaking of Quick Race... it's actually Quick Event now because you can quick your way into Races, Time Trials, Drift Attack, Firework Fury.... all the game modes can now be quick-played. And oh yeah, you can create custom different custom Presets for each of those game modes. Boom.
Maybe that would have been enough for EA-3.8, but we decided since we missed last week's update we might as well shoehorn some more stuff in there. So we also added "Permanent Effects" to the Preset options.... these are special effects you can apply to the whole race. Like giving everybody in the race Police Chase for the entire race. Or Bouncy Tires.
And then we decided since we did all that we should also put in Handicapping. Because sometimes you want to play with your Grandma....and your Grandma just smokes you so bad that it's no fun to play with her. So now you can pick individual handicaps for the better players in your house so the competition stays close and fierce.
Hmmm... I feel like I'm forgetting something. Oh RIGHT. We also added Time-of-Day selection for Quick Race. That's something everyone's been asking for.
And that's not even counting a brand new chapter (Wasteland) on Career, five new gold car skins, two new character skins, and a buncha bug fixes.
Anyway, actually really we are bummed to not have a release for you this week, because we are excited to get this update out to you all. But we also want to make sure it's ship-shape before we push it through the intertubes, so it's going to take another week.
Just hug that B'Zorp stuffie a little tighter. EA-3.8's a-comin'.
Version EA-3.7
Space...the final frontier. These are the voyages of Beach Buggy Racing 2. Its Early Access mission: to explore strange new powerups. To seek out new drivers and new off-road race cars. To boldly go where no kart racer has gone before!
Space region is now available in Adventure. How'd all those stars get into that tiny little video game?
Accordingly, Red Planet has now been added to the roster in Quick race. Get your low gravity on!
Five-Count'em-FIVE more gold vehicle skins: Giro 930, Strange Rover, Chomper, Rad Rod, Lambini GT.
Two new unlockable character skins, Disco Jimmy and Roxy Roller now have fancy new unlockable duds
Paint Take 2! OK now you can actually select and play with your paint scheme. You can also jump straight to painting from the Collection screen. And most of the base colors are unlocked. And we hid 45 secret paint cans which unlock special paints and decals all around the race tracks in the game (roughly 2 per track on average)
Controller screen finalization. From the Settings menu, go to Controls and you should see your actual controller (Xbox, Playstation, Switch, etc.) appear, as well as any other controllers you have connected.
UI vehicle rotation using right stick. We don't have the visual prompts in there yet but you can now rotate your car on paint and other screens using the right stick on the gamepad.
Significant bug fixes:
Customized paint jobs are now used throughout the game (you can actually drive with these)
Fixed several mission tasks
Version EA-3.6
This build has a lot of changes under the hood, and a few over the hood as well!
Graphics Settings. You can now adjust the basic graphic level for single player and multiplayer screen configurations. So if you are running on some ancient vacuum tube contraption and you need to turn everything down to "Optimized" you can do that. Or if you play in the flickering LED light of a Beast and you want to crank 8 player split screen up to Detailed, you can do that too.
Screen Resolution. OK not a new feature but the graphics reminded me to remind you that you can set the screen resolution in the launch options. See this thread for more information.
Vehicle Painting. Now you can click on any car in your collection and customize the vehicle paint. OK OK I know what you're going to say -- a lot of the paints and decals are locked. That's because we're going to hide them all around the game so you can discover and unlock them! It'll be great and totally not annoying! For now we're just testing the feature.
New Gold Skins for More Cars. You can now get gold skins for Baja Bug, Rock Stomper, Lambini, Skull Knocker, Machete and Rhino.
Input refactoring. That's a fancy way of saying we changed the way we show button images (like A or ESC or LB) and it should now recognize if you're using an Xbox style controller, or a PS4 or Switch and show the appropriate buttons. We also kinda changed the way the A/B buttons work on some screens.
Controller screen. Still a work in progress but at least now you can see a picture of the controller with some labels. Nice.
Version EA-3.5
Like the relentless desert sands, our updates continually swirl and build into massive dunes of ... gameplay? OK I admit that metaphor got away from me. But really, this is a big one.
The Desert Region is available in Adventure mode. Explore the mysteries of ancient buried ruins and unlock the secrets of the pyramids!
New driver skin challenges for Mikka and Beat Bot.
New vehicle gold skins for Sun Dazer, Rally Pro, Sarge, Baja Jumper, Lunar Rover and Mudskipper.
Revamped car and character config: Now you can see your skin/paint swaps on the driver and vehicle grids, which means you can show your true colors in 3+ player split screen mode!
Updated to Steam SDK 1.49. Because beep beep boop.
Fixed a bug where some car/driver skin challenge tasks weren’t saving their progress. Not to worry, just play an event with the car/driver where this happened, and it will fix itself. Progress is not actually lost.
Plus of course various ongoing polish and bug fixes. What's that, you say? We didn't fit that one thing you saw in that place? Tell us about it in the forums! We read those and pull tasks out of there every single week. We love your feedback! Give us more!
Version EA-3.4
Welcome the super-fancy new gold car skins, unlockable via the Collection challenges. Complete the missions, unlock the **bling**, and switch to it when you're setting up your race.
The cars with gold skins (so far) include:
Beach Buggy
Dune Jumper
Bulldog
Crusher
Lightning
Micro
By the way, we're trying to go for a mix on all these challenges, with some being easy and some hard, some grindy and others not. We really want your feedback! Are they too hard? Too easy? Too grindy? Not grindy enough? Most importantly, are they fun?!
Oh and we have some new cars for your driving pleasure:
Baja Bug
Rock Stomper
Rhino
Cyclone
Indy
And of course various bug fixes/changes:
Fixed overlapping characters in selection screens
Fixed missing strings in Castle region
Vehicle unlock missions changed dramatically
Fixed PFX colors in Biodome level
Version EA-3.3
This week's update features new costumes, achievements and a new region in Adventure mode. Plus we fixed some bugs and stuff.
Sound the trumpets! The Castle region has been added to Adventure mode.
Oog Oog and El Zipo now have fancy new costumes you can unlock by completing their driver challenge cards.
5 new achievements: Spring Has Sprung, Bought the Farm, Hope You Like Jammin' Too, No Honor Among Thieves, Clean Up Your Room
Version EA-3.2
When the going gets tough, the tough change skins! At least that's what our mothers taught us, and now we've brought that invaluable teaching to Beach Buggy Racing 2 with Bonus Challenge Alt-Skin Missions (name TBD).
Explore the Collection to find the challenge criteria to unlock fancy bonus skins for drivers and cars... OK, currently it's only for Leilani and Beach Bro. But eventually all the characters will have bonus skin challenges, and every car will have a bonus gold paint job challenge. Eventually there will be hundreds of challenge tasks to complete, each leading to a special bonus unlock; this is just the beginning.
As if that weren't enough, there's more!
Track progress on your Driver and Car Challenges from the Collection screen.
Start your engines! Raytona Stadium is now available in quick events!
Removed localization. Oh wait, that's a feature we're actually taking away. The truth is we're developing this game in English, and will re-translate when the game is actually done. Don't worry, all the existing languages will be re-added, and we'll consider adding new ones as well (I'm looking at you, Russian!)
Character normal maps. Wait, they didn't have them before? Well now they do and they look even more awesomer.
Changed car config sequence to be driver-first. Not sure why but it seems to make more sense this way.
Version EA-3.1
The Adventure keeps getting longer and more awesome! This week we introduce Chapter 6, the Jungle, and a selection of new event types, including Time Trial and special Cup events.
Welcome to the Jungle. You knew we had to go there. Adventure mode now has 6 chapters. Eventually the plan is to build it out to 12, plus some side quests.
Major Adventure event re-tuning. We've shuffled a whole bunch of events around (but kept your save games intact.)
Initial difficulty selector in Adventure. When you start a fresh Adventure, the game now prompts you which difficulty level you want to start at. Remember you can always change your difficulty at any time under "Adventure Options".
Time Trial. Time trial events are straight up tests of skill, where you race your car for best time with no opponents, no Powerups and no special ability. Once you complete an event, the game stores a ghost recording so you can try and beat your previous score.
Achievements! We're starting to add achievements for you to achieve. Just five for now: Hot Trick, Leapfrog, Stampede, Keep the Receipt, Pyroclastic Flow
Chapters -- ok we're calling them regions now -- have a new summary screen so you can easily see how many stars, drivers, upgrades and powerups you still have to collect.
