We’ve added a bunch of attachments to the starting shop to give you a few more options in configuring your starting fleet. You’ll have to decide what ships you want and whether or not they’ll have attachments added to them – but importantly, you’ll have options.
In particular, one option you will have is whether or not to try out the…
…new ship class!
A'Kari Gunships
We’ve added the A’Kari gunship as a playable ship. You’ve seen the Orthani variant quite a lot and maybe even the A’Kari version if you’ve made it to the Erebus Platform – they’re essentially a smaller version of the Assault – they can equip one weapon (missile or cannon) and one attachment (similar selection to the Assault) and with 4 shields / hull each they will be able to take a lot more hits than the Lancer would be able to. Check it out and let us know what you think.
More shops
Each sector will have separate guaranteed shops for attachments, ships and supplies. And the even better news is that the attachment shops will contain a random selection of attachments, including the new…
…tier 2 & 3 Attachments & Weapons
More Attachments!
All weapons and attachments now have tier 2 & 3 variations which will be dropped as mission rewards or purchasable in shops (although they will be rarer than tier 1 attachments). As you would expect, these upgrades are more powerful than lower tier versions.
Changes to Danger Level
Danger level will now increase more per jump but it will completely reset when you enter a new sector. This changes will mean there is an increasing risk to remain in a sector, but you won’t be carrying that penalty with you to the later game.
Changes to Phase Warp Criticals
Previously, if you saved a game while in a mission, you would incur a permanent critical damage penalty for all your ships. We’ve changed how this works.
First of all, if you are in a mission but not in combat, you can save and exit without penalty (the same as if you saved in the sector map).
However, if you are in combat, you can save and exit but you will incur a penalty. All ships will receive critical damage or two if a ship is disabled (but they can be repaired) and you will consume 1 supply. You’ll still have to replay the mission when you reload the game, but it will start over so you can choose new story choices if you want.
Read the full patch notes on our blog here: http://www.blazinggriffin.com/blog/v1-0-0-2-released-update-notes-7th-april-2015/
http://store.steampowered.com/app/335830
[BETA Branch] - Launch Build
Hi everyone,
We're planning to come out of Early Access pretty soon and wanted to give you a sneak peak at the launch build of the game. You can access the Beta branch via the instructions on this announcement:
We'll post full patch notes when the build is merged with the live build, but here's a summary of some stuff you might find interesting:
New Ship - A'Kari Gunship.
More options in the starting shop.
Separate guaranteed shops for attachments & ships in each sector.
Change to how Danger Level works (goes up faster, resets when you switch sector).
Tier 2 & 3 attachments / weapons.
Permanent criticals when you save are now repairable.
Movement orders are now more responsive when moving short distances.
We'll update the known bug list and release the patch notes early next week.
In the meantime, we'd love your feedback on the game. Although we're coming to the end of Early Access, we're still keen to continue to adding to the game - it's just important to round off this phase of the project.
How do you feel the game has shaped up over the past few months?
Do you have any questions for us?
As announced earlier today, we've rolled out a hotfix to a bug that was causing story events to return the wrong text (and rewards) - it could cause the fail response to be returned as the mission succeed response for example.
We've fixed the bugs that were causing this, but it does mean that save games will again be wiped today. Apologies for the inconvenience, but we felt that it was important to get this fix out sooner rather than later.
FYI we've also added a list of known bugs to the forums: http://steamcommunity.com/app/335830/discussions/0/611701999539489838/
Hotfix incoming today
A bug has indentified where the wrong story outcome is displayed for some missions (i.e. it may say you won when you didn't). We're rolling out a hotfix for this later today.
FYI this will cause a save game wipe again. This was unavoidable unfortunately - we'll make sure we don't do two save game wipes in two days again!
Version 0.1.3.5 Released
With this update we roll out an overhaul to the mission system which makes substantial changes to how missions work and improves the flow and pace of the game.
There were a number of issues we wanted to resolve with these changes and we'd like to go through them here and talk about how we addressed them.
Missions are too long. Feedback from a lot of players noted that some missions went on for too long - perhaps there were too many waves or encounters which meant some missions could go on for 30 minutes or so. This was longer than intended and with today's changes missions should take between 5 and 15 minutes.
Enemy spawns are predictable. Another common point raised and again, something we wanted to improve upon. Knowing that an enemy fleet will spawn at a certain point or at certain intervals stops being fun after a while, so we've changed this. We've done two things to resolve this - reduce the number of triggered enemies in each map and also changed the behaviour of triggered fleets. They are less likely to spawn near your fleet than they were but they can now spawn elsewhere on the map (and either move to attack you or wait for you to come to them).
Multi-spawns are a problem. Many players would trigger a second (or even a third, fourth and fifth!) fleet of enemies when attempting to avoid or flee from the first spawn. This would create way too many enemy ships to handle at once, which can be an inconvenience if you're trying to save the galaxy. As of today, most trigger points won't spawn additional fleets if you are in combat which should resolve most situations where multi-spawns occur and will also allow you to explore the maps a bit more. In missions where there are multiple objectives, these changes should greatly improve the odds that players will be able to achieve those objectives as there will be less trigger spawns en-route.
Mission rewards don't reflect difficulty. We've improved the rewards system which will scale both credit rewards and experience gained based on the difficulty of the mission.
Many thanks to everyone who tested out the changes and gave us feedback via the Beta branch – it’s greatly appreciated!
If you were playing the Beta branch and want to go back to the live build, then you can do so by opting out of the Beta branch via the same steps as you took to opt-in.
You can read the full patch notes on our blog here.
In other news, we launched a new trailer this week - check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8PdLY6dAS4
http://store.steampowered.com/app/335830
BETA Branch - Combat Changes
Hi everyone,
We’re about ready to roll out an overhaul of the mission system which will quite significantly change how combat works. We’d love to hear your feedback on the changes so we’ve created a Beta test version of the game to try them out.
**PLEASE NOTE** the Beta branch does contain a number of bugs – this build is to test upcoming changes only.
Accessing the Beta branch
From the Steam client, right-click on Distant Star: Revenant Fleet and select Properties and then the Betas tab.
Enter the access code, “dsrfbetatest” and click Check Code.
Select “betatest – Beta testing branch” from the drop down menu.
Your Steam client will automatically update your install of the game to include the changes.
If you would like to revert to the main version of the game, simply select “NONE – Opt out of all beta programs” and the client will update the game.
Known Bugs
There are some bugs with the Beta branch, so it’s worth noting that before you try it out.
The main one that may affect gameplay just now is a save game bug that causes missions not give out rewards if you save the game and reload. The team are working on and fix for this and we are aiming to have the new changes rolled out next week. So if you want to wait until then to try them out, you can.
Combat Changes
We’ve completely overhauled the spawn system so you will no longer trigger more waves of enemies so often and they will be generally be less predictable. This quite significantly changes the pace and flow of the game with the average mission time now around 5 to 15 minutes. Be warned - enemies may now attack you from different positions and generally behave a little more sneakily! In addition there are a number of new UI & usability changes in place.
Drop by the forums and let us know what you think of the changes.
Some detals of the changes can be found here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/335830/discussions/0/611701999516979801/
Version 0.1.2.2 Released
This update is largely focused on improving the loot system based on the issues covered in this blog post. There is now a chance for new ships and repairs to be added to all (non-supply) shops and generally increased the number of shops available in each sector. This goes some way to addressing the issues relating to the availability of items to purchase – we’d love to hear your feedback on this.
Also in this update are a number of additions and improvements to UI & usability:
Ships will now display an icon to show whether they are friendly or not.
All ships have a shield icon which indicates whether or not their shield is recharging and how long it will take to regenerate.
Clicking on an enemy ship will show an info panel which displays its class and equipped weapons & attachments.
And a number of bug fixes:
Fixed a bug causing the sector and galaxy map squashing information.
Fixed a bug where ships would randomly ignore your attack orders.
Fixed a bug where enemy ships could be invincible.
Fixed a bug where storms caused excessive lag.
New attachments:
A number of new system and support attachments have been added. These will allow some classes of ship to increase damage, rate of fire or repair hulls and shields as well as adding a selection of new support abilities for the Pulsar. While there are still more attachments to come (and upgraded weapons), these go some way to adding more options in combat for your fleet and also offering new challenges to defend against.
Some of the work that has been completed with this update is in preparation for more extensive changes coming later in the month to address combat and how enemy fleets spawn in missions. Let us know what you think of what’s changed so far.
There's no patch this week but given there's been a lot of discussion about some aspects of balancing, we've put together a blog post to update you all on what's currently being worked on.
The short version of what's coming up in March:
Shop system
We are tweaking the values of the currency system – things will cost more but you’ll get more as rewards.
Ensuring shops appear and are clearly marked in all sectors.
Ensuring ships, supplies and repairs are more readily available (esp. via shops).
Removing the chance that a mission will result in no reward.
Adding more attachments and upgrades to the game.
Missions
Reduction in the number of trigger spawns in missions (this should improve pacing with periods of non-combat).
More random chance of trigger spawns (you won't always get a spawn in a certain location).
You will be a lot less likely to trigger more spawns while in combat.
Addition of patrols and lurkers to maps.
Improvements to the spawn formations (where / how they spawn).
This is only part of the work we're doing just now, but it's the main things that's coming back to us from players just now so we wanted to post an update. We're confident that players will be pretty happy with the effect of these and other changes.
This is the first update in Beta, so we added a lot of balancing changes this patch.
Buying Ships / Upgrades / Repairs / Supplies
Quite a few people have mentioned that the lack of these things are a problem and we agree. In this patch we have increased the likelihood that shops will spawn when a sector is generated.
Keep in mind that while we don't want shops to be ultra-rare, we don't want them to ultra-common too. It's a fine line, so let us know and we'd like to hear your feedback on how this is working out for you.
Combat
This patch brings a number of improvements to combat:
Your ships will remember attack targets after move orders are given. This will make it much easier to focus fire on a particular target, but also move your fleet if you need to.
Added a number of attachments - these will give you an idea of what we're aiming for but there's still more to come. So for example, ships will now have more functional abilities (increased damage, lower agro, improved stats) which will improve the flow of the game and offer you more customisation options.
Removed Command Ships and Dreadnoughts from early game enemy fleets. This should ease up the difficulty curve early on, without impacting the end game.
Drones have had their damage halved. In addition, drones, mines and turrets have been rebalanced.
Several changes to how shields work. They will begin to regen sooner than they did before, but take longer to regen to full. In addition, if shields have been fully depleted, they will take longer to pop back to full. This will help improve your own survivability but also avoid situations where enemy shields were respawning before you had a chance to kill them.
Missile buff. All missile types have had their damage increased.
Photon Blast (Rogue) has been significantly reduced in damage. This is to cut down on situations where multiple Rogues insta-kill your ships. However, we have also reduced the cooldown of the ability to keep its DPS in line with other abilities. Also, we fixed the bug where it sometimes misses when the Rogue is moving.
The big thing that's still to come to the game is more attachments and weapon upgrades (all weapons will have level 1, 2 and 3 variants). These will really change the way combat works - they mean you can beef up your ships, give them burst DPS abilities or make them more resilient. Some players have reported that getting past mid-game is tough. The reason for this is that your ships will eventually have more upgrades by that point, therefore can take more hits and deal more damage.
Our plan is that these and upcoming combat changes will really help improve the combat experience - please let us know what you think about it. The other side of this coin is how enemy fleets work - our team is looking at just now and we'll have some more info about that soon.
Distant Star: Revenant Fleet is moving into Beta today, which means our focus will be on performance optimisation and content balancing. We would expect this process to take us through to the end of March – that said, the nature of the work that’s ahead of us may mean that might change!
Alpha was very much about presenting the concept of the game to players, letting you play around with it and listen to what you had to say. It’s been really useful for us and we’re still working through the massive list of feedback and feature requests! That’s a good process because feature requests are very black and white – we can add them or we can’t (and there’s generally a good reason for either option).
Beta will work differently because we’re not dealing with black and white features – we’re dealing with pretty subjective aspects of gameplay which everyone will have an opinion on. To give an example, there are two entries in our current feedback list:
Missions are too long
Missions are too short
Both are valid points of view – our job is to find out the thinking behind those opinions and present a solution that works for everyone. We hope you can join us in this process.
What we’re doing in Beta
Combat Balancing – the current update improves the resilience of ships, but there’s more to be done. We are adding a lot of new attachments which will give you more abilities in combat. In addition we’re looking at ideas relating to targeting and target prioritisation and combat in general.
Performance Optimisation – our team are working on improving the general performance of the game.
Mission Flow – we are looking at how missions are being played and how we can improve the experience of each playthrough.
UI & Usability – we’ve added more tooltips with the most recent patch, but we’ll also be looking at ways to improve how the game is played in general.
Rewards / Shops – we’ve had a lot of feedback about how mission rewards and shops work. We expect this to improve as we add more attachments, but we’re still happy to take on board other suggestions.
So what we’re going to do is to open up discussion on key areas of the game so you can let us know what you think (feel free to start your own discussion on our forums or the Steam community as well). We’ve updated the Development Roadmap with link to main discussions and info on what’s already been done.
Many thanks to everyone who was with us throughout Alpha and we hope you enjoy how the game progresses through Beta.
