Close Order
Coming Soon: The Shmupdate!
Over the past several days, we've been looking at your feedback very seriously and coming up with a plan for our next steps to improve the game.
Our answer: The Shmupdate.
This is a massive update that will drop hopefully in early September. Essentially, it focuses on reworking and revitalizing our enemies to make them more deadly, challenging, and interesting to fight.
As a result, it will place more importance on minions and armada variety -- a key part of Close Order that we feel could be emphasized further.
What we'll be doing is completely reworking their behavior and attack patterns, how they fight in groups, and what their strengths/weaknesses are.
No longer will you fight groups of formations -- you'll be fighting swarms (among many other kinds) of re-energized foes eager to annihilate your armada! Additionally, enemies will now be defined by their behavior rather than their narrative context.
These changes will more distinctly align the game with its core arcade-y, shoot-em-up (shmup) roots.
We don't have a definite date for this update to land, but we'll keep you posted. Tentatively, it's looking like early September.
Please continue telling us how you feel, because this is exactly how we make the game even better!
Finally, a sneak peak at other changes -- we're also working on improving how we tell stories within Close Order. We feel that there are even better ways to convey the journey of Mary, Abe, and Chakor in their pursuits of the remnants of humanity, and we're going to bring it to you very soon.
Again, thank you all for your patience and willingness to help us make Close Order better. :)
- The Raconteur Team
Big Bug Fix #1 is LIVE!
Close Order has been available for a week now, and we've had a really fun time seeing your feedback and finding out how to make the game better.
We've been pushing small updates, but we just uploaded a patch that fixes a LOT of things and also adds some new features. If you haven't played in the past few days, here's what's new and updated:
- Main menu now has a button to view the changelog
- Tutorial bug that prevented you from advancing if you bought too many minions too early has been resolved
- Minion consistency/saving across levels has been greatly improved
- Added ability to swap two minions' positions on the Formation Editor
- Issues with Scalprum damage on Volcano Ridge fixed
- Audio fixes, and master volume option
- Added a "minions bought" counter to the shop menu
- Minions unlocked from story levels now save properly
- Fixed Wandering Soul audio issues
- Fixed bug on Black Hole that would not kill minions that were sucked into it
- Fixed bug that allowed the player to shoot within a Crossroads hub
- Various performance increases
We've made a LOT of progress thanks to your feedback. The number one thing we've added in, though...
Player death!
You may think that this was something that should have been in from the start -- we were thinking of alternative ways to approach this issue, since Close Order is far from a typical game. For now, it makes more sense to be able to die. As a result of that, we have given the player ship (Nadezhda) a small amount of health; the health bar in the lower right-hand corner of the screen now reflects the player ship's health, rather than the relative health of the entire armada (as it did previously).
There are a lot of other little fixes too that we missed here, but all you need to know is this: Close Order will become even more badass with your help.
We've got some great things planned for this game, and we're so glad to be able to have you right here with us! Please continue telling us your thoughts on the forums so we can keep improving your experience.
Go be badass! :)
- The Raconteur Team
Close Order is LIVE!
Close Order is now available via Early Access! We hope you enjoy the game, and don't hesitate to start topics in the forums about what you liked and didn't like. We're listening!
Why are you still reading? Go build a badass armada!
- NL