Divergence: Online
30% Price Drop Incoming
Ever since January, we'd started getting more and more interest from other studios willing to hire us as consultants to basically "teach them how to do what we did". As you can imagine, we rebuffed the vast majority of these and resolved to continue our goals of using the franchise as the means of self-funding development.
Six-months later the writing was on the wall that while some players were racking up an obscene 800+ hours spent on our little Early-Access game, and while technically it was a commercial success and made back more than the cost of development, that amount was simply just under what we needed to expand the team to a usable size and finish the game.
So we launched Year Zero to a similar result; Success at paying itself off but very meager gains. We made progress, lots of it over the last ten months, but the truth is that continuing at the pace it's going would take years to get where we wanted to go, and simply isn't good enough.
The remedy is that we decided to indeed open the door to a few opportunities who've shown interest in trading our experience for critical resources that we can then turn around and use to fuel Divergence.
As a result, we also made the decision to go ahead and reduce the retail cost of both games by a whopping 30% across the board. The decision comes mostly as a result of the fact that, since these two games together already don't represent a substantial percentage of our income, why not go ahead and make the cost of entry more appealing to newcomers while both games are in Early Access.
Divergence brings a lot of crazy features to the scene. It's still one of if not the best resource harvesting and crafting MMOs that exists, but until it's combat in both PVP and PVE are implemented the way we originally intended them to be, we just don't want players thinking that we've deemed it "good enough".
So that's all of it. We're in the midst of some pretty big developments with regards to upcoming features and fixing bugs, so we hope this decision will make everyone feel better about coming onboard and helping us continue to design our MMO experience the way it should be.
Community Poll: "Play as Creatures" Module
Full details and poll on our Facebook!
Last Chance To Buy-One-Get-One Before Year Zero Launch
It's for that reason that we're making this announcement to clue everyone in to our Year Zero pre-launch promotion;
Once Divergence: Year Zero goes live on Steam any and all current owners of Divergence: Online with an account in good standing can receive a copy of Divergence: Year Zero when it becomes available free of charge. Both games will be offered for a bundled price as well, however this two-for-one promotion will only be available until the launch of Year Zero.
Qualifying sales may take place on either Steam or our website, whichever is more convenient for you. Thanks for your support and keep it coming!
In-Game Tutorials Panel LIVE
Right now, the tabs that are available are Controls, Basic Harvesting, Grids, and Housing. We'll be adding the same type of instructional videos to the other tabs in the coming weeks.
New Continent + Land and Air Vehicles LIVE!
Anduine: a land of brightly-colored flora, low and rolling hills, calm rivers and plenty of room to expand. Accessible via ATCs newly-constructed "Anduine Station", transporting to this new region is as easy as vising your favorite shuttleport and paying the super-low fee of just 1000 credits. Hey, this shit wasn't cheap to build out of salvaged starship wreckage after all. Anduine is also the land of "big game hunting", with Grontos, Vangrels, Aigathrix, and local species of our most beloved creatures that people just like running for their lives from already.
Of course with our "one large world", players can obviously "hoof if" should they wish and run the 10K through the Akkhera desert bearing due East. Whatever floats your boat!
Speaking of boats, Today's build of the game also brings into play our latest profession; "Operator". "Operator" is synonymous with "Vehicle and equipment operator" and if you want to learn how to fly that huge-ass freighter, first you'll need to pick Operator as one of your professions from the kills panel then spend a few skill points boning up on your chosen vehicle types.
How many vehicles are we adding? How about "lots", the majority of which are flight-capable as well!
Included in today's patch are;
Two light freighters, great for hauling them resources from place to place as well as any contraband that falls off the bed of a truck.
One medium freighter for more fun, more friends, and more contraband. Not to mention the added bonus that all freighters can actually accommodate and load land vehicles into their bay for transporting them as well!
Terrestrial Fighter Jet - No working weapon yet but crap is it fast!
Terrestrial Racer - Even faster, it's essentially an engine with a cockpit.
Planetary Rover - Not so fast but a lot better than running everywhere!
Hoverbike - Fast and hard as hell to control, but do you want easy or do you want fun?
As if that weren't enough, all vehicles have their own internal hoppers, so you can not only fill them with resource canisters, but even bolt them to the hull for aesthetic appeal should you choose! Turn your ship into a party... ship... or whatever for all your friends for all we care.
Craftable versions of all vehicles will be coming this week once we have a few days to tune their flight characteristics enough that we're confident binding them to crafting schematic results.
As always, special thanks go out to all our contributors, players, and supporters for making this nearly eight-months we've been able to continually develop our game! We hope you'll continue to support the effort as we drive towards full launch in several months from now. As with everything new, we're sure there are a few bugs we missed so also thanks for letting us know as soon as you find them and being patient while we crush them.
Feel free to join our facebook community for updates and collaborations!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/415812755276522/?ref=bookmarks
50% FPS Boost + Faster Pathing + Stimpaks Take Creature Meat
Client FPS in areas with super-dense trees has also bee more than doubled. Your mileage may vary, but anyone having FPS issues around the woods before, you should be shitting your pants now.
Stimpaks now require animal meat as their biological component. All creatures have meat of quality reflected by their difficulty to hunt, so the biggest, nastiest things you can hunt give the best meat/hide/bone which in turn make the best healing stimpaks.
Resource Locations NOW PERMANENT
Tomorrow we'll be doing the same thing for the Akkhera Desert, which is where the best Solid Petrochemical can be found.
Creature spawns are finally maxing out the server capacity so we're going to hold off populating the desert until tomorrow as well when we can up the capacity a bit.
Creature-Spawns increased by 500%
Bring your ammo, check it out and let us know what you think!
Akkhera Desert 2.0 LIVE
As a player, you aren't just funding our ability to keep developing Divergence: Online, but you're also contributing to our ability to continually improve at what we do as well. A part of this comes in the form of continual improvements on, not just the features of the game, but the overall quality of the production as well.
This new improvement to the Akkhera Desert, which constitutes more than 25% of our game's total landmass is the latest in roll-outs to our games terrain and subsequent systems as our game continually "sheds its skin" of it's original "super-early" placeholder content with (in this case) all-new terrain more than 400% more detailed than the original, while simultaneously providing a big boost to performance through improved shaders.
While obviously imperfect (you WILL find rough edges if you look for them) and needing a few more improvements, this puts us on-track to move onto subsequent updates for our jungle biome "Lomenia" and then circling back to finish the remaning regions of Malkav (temperate) in the same style as the first prototype re-skin we did a few weeks ago.
Tell us what you think and hope to see you around the desert!
https://gyazo.com/3250d0223dbe7f56286dca8ae1bea693
All New Public Voice Communication Available
It's a super-clean interface that you can run from either your PC, your mobile device, or even just connect straight via web browser.
May I use your new voice server for hanging out and chatting, or playing games other than Divergence?
Absolutely! Come and hang out, do whatever you like. No fucks given!
Just go to Divergence-Online.com and click the Connect button!
www.Divergence-Online.com