Servers and clients will both require an update to the new version
Our galleon replacement for the Navy has been finished and is now in game. It is based on the HMS Sophie! This ship has a stronger broadside than the galleon in exchange for no anti-sail guns and also a poor layout for being boarded.
Notes for this patch:
- HMS Sophie
- Can now grapple across different ship types (be careful!)
- Community suggested cannon crosshair by PootPoot added
- Fixed "Supplies" icon in Q menu on Junk
- Glitch slop on the galleon plop spot top fixed
Note: Our roadmap is being shifted a bit for 2.33, expect some other stuff very soon!
Dakota & Tyler
Cannon Crosshair Update
When we released 2.32 we were met with mixed feedback about the new cannon system. Not so much about the ranging itself but how we made this mechanic operate. We realized it went against the grain of what you'd expect from a first person shooter and instead opted to revamp it as a traditional artillery reticle. We have had this crosshair tested in a beta branch all week by players on our discord and it is now ready to go live.
Hopefully this helps new players realize how it works much quicker and streamlines the process overall.
Note that detection has changed and it uses an actual arc. Distant shots will be notably more difficult but this is intended as we want to encourage more boarding gameplay and less 20 minute matches of ship sniping.
Tyler & Dakota
2.32 - Cannons, Ice, Volcanoes & More!
Patch 2.32 is here!
!! This update will require server owners to update !!
With 2.32 starts the beginning of our journey to raise the skill ceiling for crew gameplay. While captaining has many tactics and tricks to learn, crew gameplay has always been a bit repetitive. All the captain had to do was have good alignment and firing a broadside was a skill-less race against the clock.
For 2.32, we've now given the spyglass a very important purpose. The spyglass is now used to spot enemy ships for your team, this will make them appear in the Q menu and expose their distance to the gunners.
The spotter is awarded 30 points per ship spot, making it a good method to gain points while also being very important to your ships offensive function. A spot will only last 20 seconds before it will need to be refreshed.
Players on the cannon will use Q to see this distance and range their cannon using the SCROLL WHEEL. There is a grace area of 100m when distancing the cannon, meaning a ship at 550 can be hit at 500 and 600 with no compensation needed. Once you're ranged you must use the reticle to fight the waves and keep on target until the cannon fires. The fuse delay has been severely reduced.
SHOTS UNDER 300M DO NOT NEED TO BE AIMED. At 300m the cannons function the old way, and can hit without entering the aim view. If your crew are not good shots just get them closer!
We've also added two new melee weapons, the two handed axe and boarding pike. Both will be balanced more in hotfixes.
Two new maps have been added, the first being an arctic arena where you are locked within a glacial cove and forced to deal with close combat and obstacles such as ice bergs and sharp patches of ice that will give you holes.
The second is open water map with two ticking time bomb volcanos in place that will change the entire atmosphere when they erupt.
Full patch notes for 2.32:
- Cannon aiming overhauled. Now requires distance to be set with the scroll wheel and you must fight the waves with a verticle reticle. This is the first of our many updates to create a higher crew skillcap.
- When a spyglass views an enemy ship it will become visible with range in the Q menu to everyone on that ship for 20 seconds. Spotting a ship awards 200 points.
- Cannon fuse delay severely reduced.
- Server owners can now place a 500x80 Banner.jpg file in the directory to show on connect. The smaller the file size the better.
- Server owners can now create and edit a welcome message (Run the server to generate ServerMessage.txt template).
- New arctic environment containing patches of sharp ice that will damage your ship.
- New volcano environment that... well, you'll see.
- Two handed axe melee weapon has been added
- Boarding pike melee weapon has been added
- Spyglass third person animations added
- Heartbeat sound to indicate you're bleeding out
- You no longer bleed from fall damage
- Music slider influences menu music
- Cannon medal should track, note that it is kills and not hits.
- Current rank badge icon is shown during levelup
- 1v1 is now schooners
- Intermission reduced to 40 seconds
2.32 hotfix 1
- 2H Axe reduced to 80dmg per hit (down from 100)
- Pike range reduced, damage reduced to 33 dmg per hit (down from 50)
- Sailing over ice patches now has sound
- Volcano eruptions now have sound (may be out of sync until servers update)
- 30 score for ship spotting reinstated
- Cannon crosshair resets when using a cannon
- Ships should now respot without having to look away and back on
Further adjustments are being made to aiming based on feedback: https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackwakeGame/comments/6x7f81/cannon_aiming_what_dodont_you_like/
2.323 Hotfix 2
- Tweaked cannon shot code to not hone in on underwater areas if above water areas were near where you hit.
- Crosshair turns green on friendly ships
- Corsshair will turn white if contact is below waterline
- Random maps shouldn't repeat twice in a row
- Pike attack speed and length reduced
That's all for 2.32, 2.33 will include our new ship based on the HMS Sophie that will replace the navy galleon!
We've also updated our roadmap:
Dakota & Tyler
25% off for Blackwake's birthday!
Blackwake will be on sale for 25% off for the weekend to celebrate it's birthday month!
Keep an eye out for our new ship, based on the HMS Sophie, coming soon!
August 12 - Patch 2.31 Live
THIS REQUIRES A SERVER UPDATE
Patch 2.31
The first patch in our cycle of patches leading to 2.4 is here!
Here are the change notes
- Reload checkpoints, reloads will resume where they left off when you switch back to that weapon.
- Cannonball kills should now track in medals, please let us know if this still isn't working.
- You will no longer accidentally fire an aimed cannon while clicking names in the scoreboard.
- If you are the highest ranked player and also mutinied, the role should no longer go straight back to you.
- You can no longer vote for yourself during election.
- Walking speed reduced by 25% when looking down sights of weapons. This should help reduce some floaty movement.
- Fire damage radius reduced.
- The options menu option to censor ship names now uses "Playername's Ship" rather than "A [faction] ship", as it was too generic.
- We noticed there were no distance flashes at night when cannons go off, so we've added that effect.
- Spawn time after "Waiting for ship to respawn" increased by 2 seconds to prevent the team from spawning in the ocean around the ship.
- Matchlock Revolver damage reduced by 20%
- Annley accuracy increased by 30%
- Short pistol bleed chance increased by 25% and accuracy increased by 15%
- Duckfoot accuracy increased by 20%
- Melee blocking is no longer time based, it can be held indefinitely.
- Fixed random pause that could happen while swinging during melee.
- Dagger now has a 50% chance to bleed and the broken bottle 100% chance.
- Cutlass swing speed increased by 20%.
- Rapier's range increased by 20%.
We've also contracted more animation work and rigging to an animator. So more things like outfits and animations will be popping up quite soon.
Progress has also started on a brand new ship that will replace the role of the Navy Galleon. This ship is based off the HMS Sophie.
We'll keep you folks updated with more to come :)
Dakota & Tyler
Patch 2.3 Live
2.3 changelist
- Fixed bug where XP gained after prestiging would not show until level 4.
- Avatars are now shown in win screen but can be filtered off to never show that specific persons if offensive (In addition to complete censoring in game settings)
- Win screen length has been extended to a minute to give more of a break and discussion about the match
- ADDED completely new weapon shooting sound effects and should be a bit more distinct as to what weapon is being used
- ADDED new sounds for melee impacts
- You will now be able to highlight a medal to show off in win screen and player profile by clicking on it in stats
- Clicking on a player's name will now show a profile with their own stats and highlighted medal
- The right cabin starboard cannon of the hoy has been realigned to be properly parrallel like the rest of the cannons
- Captains being less vulnerable to cannonfire now applies to ship wheel use only
- Kickstarter badge button visibility has been fixed for backers
- Leave button has been moved to the bottom of the esc menu
Patch 2.3 has now finished it's update cycle and we're excited to move to the next series of updates through to 2.4! This will include changes such as reload checkpoints, reload sounds, and many other polishes/QoL/bug improvements. We've been slacking on bug fixes lately (unless they were gamebreaking) to focus more on much needed changes to the game, so it's time for us to do a bit of cleanup.
We will also soon begin to raise the skillcap of ship play by adding more things to do on deck. For example, fires will soon no longer be RNG and instead a ship may produce a heated shot with a furnace every few minutes. New ships are also in the works for quite a big update down the road :)
Haven't played Blackwake in a while? BaronVonLetsPlay has a recent gameplay video and talks about many of the changes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxHbF7U1xV8&t
We'll keep you posted!
- Dakota and Tyler
Patch 2.22 p3
Ahoy! We've gone ahead and pushed some changes ahead of schedule as we wrap up all the changes that will land us at 2.3.
Here's what's new:
- Annley, cutlass, and various other weapons should now properly contribute to medals.
- Opposite factions tickets have been hidden, an experimental change as we've noticed it has positive effects in other games.
- Kickstarter badge is now available as an overwrite for those of you who backed stowaway and above.
- Stat medal values have been adjusted.
- Grunts added for melee swings (better impact sounds on the way for the victim of a nice slice, too!)
Our main change for this patch is our brand new win screen which is still in it's early stages that will display your player avatar and a chosen (not yet implemented) medal to display, if you should feel the need to flex.
We've also introduced noob-friendly marked servers. When custom servers rose in popularity we phased out our official servers because it was unrealistic for us to keep them moderated, the community is usually best at doing this themselves. Recently we've been noticing reports of many toxic servers in negative reviews and in our discord, so we contemplated introducing official servers again and putting customs in a separate tab. We felt that this would hurt all custom communities as a whole, which we did not want to do.
Instead we've opted to recognize those servers that foster positive, well managed communities and endorse them. For a long time we would play on servers as developers but admins/mods continued to recognize us and be on their best behavior. Over the past couple weeks we've been playing on servers undercover with freshly created Steam accounts to get an idea for how the most populated servers were representing our game and treating new players.
These servers will come and go, as we along with our moderation team will always keep an eye out for those that deserve it. They will take up a maximum of 5 top slots, and can be various communities.
The goal here is to funnel new players into these servers to gain experience in a positive environment. We know some players are completely fine with toxicity and find it more fun and competitive especially with rival veteran filled servers, but sadly that is not the kind of environment that welcomes new players.
As with any update we will definitely improve how this system works in the future.
-OneEyeTyler & Dakota
Memory leak fixed from 2.2 Patch
Ahoy mateys!
Over the past week our top priority was trying to figure out the cause of a memory leak. We have finally nailed it down and resolved it. It caused ram to max out the higher resolution your screen was. We've just pushed a client patch for this :)
Now we are able to focus on our next set up updates for 2.3. Which will bring some changes to the win screen, bug fixes and general changes to the game.
Patch 2.31 will be quite a big one with a whole host of fixes and QoL improvements. One of them being the much awaited for reloading weapon checkpoints!
We'll keep you posted mateys!
Dakota & Tyler
Update 2.22 Part 2 - Stats Screen and Medals
Note: Currently aware of the memory leak, it is top priority. It is causing crashing and general instability for some users.
Ahoy mateys!
We've just pushed a patch out for our new medal unlocks. Now you'll receive recognition for doing tasks around ships or slaying swabby sailors!
Medals can be earned by doing that specific task from bronze, silver and to gold. Each tier will require a certain number before unlocking the next one. These are viewable in the Stats screen and will popup like traditional unlock notifications ingame. Currently these values are subject to change/tweaking as we are in early access of course.
This currently isn't fully fleshed out. We will allow you to view other player's stats in scoreboard profiles in the next update.
Dakota & Tyler
Patch 2.22 - Leveling Adjustment
As mentioned in our last update: http://steamcommunity.com/games/Blackwake/announcements/detail/1341359957166971937
Patch 2.3 is all about updates for progression. This means ranks, accolades, and just overall more recognition for sailing the seas as a crew.
In our last update 2.21, we had to introduce the new leveling system early to make future patches easier on us. But with this update came an xp curve change that we quickly realized was too harsh, and have since adjusted it.
The level to prestige is now 50, and all unlocks have been adjusted accordingly.
Remember, no total xp was actually lost in these updates, we have only changed how it is interpreted.
We have also introduced an elite badge that is the final prestige where your level will no longer cap at 50.
We've also added an alert to display what you have just unlocked while ingame:
