Greetings Earthfall fans! We are back with a new update now available on Steam. Since our last update back in February, we have fixed tons of issues including more performance updates as well as adding some new content for you to try for the first time!
New Level - Revelation
Revelation is the first level in the second campaign of Earthfall. The resistance has a plan of attack and hopes to turn the tide against the alien invasion. Taking place in a small abandoned town, Revelation look is one of the most distinct in Earthfall with a recent deep snowfall covering the entire town.
Performance Improvements
The last update provided significant performance improvements, but we didn't want to stop there! Over the last month we continued to search for ANYTHING we could squeeze out for more performance. This includes updates to the AI navigation system, tweaks to the visual effects, continued optimization of the user interface and sound which has provided some significant gains. We want Earthfall to play well for those who have the latest and greatest hardware and those who are still rocking the same machine for the last couple years! If you run into any problems make sure you head over the Tech Help and Bug Reports section here on Steam or head over to the Earthfall Forums and tell us the problem.
New Weapon Sounds
We heard you loud and clear from our last update that the audio for our weapons needed some work, so we have started making some changes. In this update, you will hear differences in the SW22, AK47, AK67 and MP5. We will continue to work on the weapons sounds, but we need your feedback. So put your headphones on or turn up your speakers and tell us what you think! Post your feedback on the General Discussion section here on Steam or go to Earthfall Forums to tell us what you think!
Lore System Unlocked
We tell the story of Earthfall in the levels, but there is only so much we can tell you about what is going on without taking you out of the action. For those of you wanting to learn the secrets of Earthfall, you now have access to the Lore System. Play levels and find Lore Items which will unlock story items. We are excited to share more of the world of Earthfall and excited to hear what you think.
These are just the big changes we included in Update 20934. For those wanting to see everything that changed you can read the entire Update 20934 Change List. With each of these updates, we need your help and feedback! With every update, we need your help! Tell us what you think about Update 20934! We are always reading your posts on the Earthfall Forums and General Discussion here on Steam. For all the latest updates follow @EarthfallGame on Twitter and Like Earthfall on Facebook.
Earthfall is back! New Level! New Enemies! Performance Improvements!
Earthfall is back! After being dark for a while, we are now ready to start showing you what we have been working as we get closer to the final release. Over the last couple months, we have touched almost everything in the entire game to improve stability and improve the performance! On top of touching nearly everything in the game, we have added tons of new content that you get to see for the first time!
New Level
We are excited to show you one of the levels from the second campaign of Earthfall, The Diversion. Take the fight to the aliens as you explore an abandoned hydroelectric dam in the Pacific Northwest.
New Enemies
We wanted to add more variety to the enemies we have in the game, and so we added a new boss, a new special and variants on the drones.
First up we have a brand new enemy boss, the Blackout. The Blackout can be easily identified by its eight tentacles whipping around as it floats around defying gravity. While not as big and loud as the Beast, it does have an energy shield surrounding it to protect it from attacks and allowing it to move around the play space at laser like speeds.
The behavior of the aliens changes all the time in Earthfall, but now they can become even more bloodthirsty when in the proximity of an Enrager, a new enemy special. This floating meat blob projects a visible effect that makes all aliens instantly seek and attack any nearby players. If you see an Enrager quickly attack it before you are overwhelmed by stronger, faster and angrier enemies.
Last we wanted to add more variety to the drones, and we have added a new Spitter class. This new drone has a powerful distance attack as they vomit deadly acid at you.
Performance Improvements
One area we have been working on is improving our performance in every aspect of Earthfall. We touched almost everything in the entire game the last couple months working on streamlining and optimizing the game. While most players will see a boost in speed and performance and detail, the area that has improved the greatest is the stability of the performance. All players should see a much more consistent performance throughout all the levels.
New Interface
We have an entirely new menu system! The old menu system was built very early in the project, and we wanted to explore some new areas especially as we bring Earthfall to other platforms. Make sure you plug in a controller and give it a shot!
Earthfall is still in Early Access, and we are aware there are going to be issues. Our goal is to have more consistent releases before we have our final release, so don't be surprised if there are hotfixes and further updates over the next couple months. With each of these updates, we need your help and feedback! Tell us what you think about The Diversion, Blackout, the new weapons, the interface and anything else in the game! We are always reading your posts on the Official Earthfall Forums and Earthfall Discussions here on Steam. For all the latest updates follow @EarthfallGame on Twitter and Like Earthfall on Facebook!
We are excited to pull the curtain back and show you what we have been working on and can’t wait to hear your feedback! Thanks from all of us at Holospark for your continued support!
New Screenshot! New Twitter!
We are VERY close to showing you more from Earthfall, but here is a quick look at one of the new levels, The Diversion!
In other news we made the decision to launch a game specific Twitter account! So make sure you go follow @EarthfallGame for all the latest news on Earthfall!
Don't forget to enter to have your picture added to Earthfall! Enter now on Earthfall.com.
Are you missing? Be in Earthfall!
Have you ever wanted to be in a video game? Become part of the lore? Here is your chance to be one of the missing in Earthfall! Enter by posting an image via Twitter or Instagram using the hashtag #EarthfallContest and then click the image above to enter with that image! We will be randomly selecting 32 submissions that will be added to the shrine in the upcoming map, Revelation. This could be you, your significant other, your dog or cat or even just a note. Enter now! Contest ends on February 28, 2018 @ 12 PM PST.
Enter now over on Earthfall.com.
Update on Earthfall
Hello Earthfall Community!
We have been a little quiet the last couple months so we wanted to give you an update on what exactly is happening here at Holospark.
First. Why no updates? A few months ago we released our last update which improved many issues and increased our performance. After releasing it, we started work on the second campaign in Earthfall. Instead of releasing this bit by bit, we decided to hold back updates to give us more time to optimize, polish and rigorously test it. We want to make sure you have a great experience playing Earthfall, and we have been working hard so when our next update does come out you will see all the hard work we've been putting into it.
Well, what have you been working on? We have been working on Earthfall's second campaign, where you will start taking the fight to the enemy. This includes new levels, new weapons, new enemies, new enemy behaviors, in-game voice feature, updated graphics and interface as well as fixing tons of bugs in performance, networking and audio along the way. We have also started porting to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.
Wait a second?! PS4 and Xbox One?! What about PC? We haven't forgotten about the PC at all! Much of the work on the consoles has dramatically improved the performance of the PC version especially on recommended and min spec.
But I can help test it! We appreciate the feedback and testing on the game so far, but there is a quality bar we want to hit before we even put it in players' hands. We learned a lot from the feedback the community given us so far on our first campaign and using that feedback to make tweaks to make Earthfall a better game all around. We are now getting close and we are looking into releasing some new content via a Steam beta in the future to get your feedback on our official forums or here on Steam.
So really? When can we expect an update? As much as we would love to give you a date but can’t lock anything down right this second. We will keep you more informed on what is going on moving forward so you get a better idea of what is happening on Earthfall here at Holospark.
We're all focused on making Earthfall the best game we can while making sure we hit a quality bar that we are all happy with. We appreciate your patience and your passion, and we're going to see that you get the game you have all been waiting for.
Brand New Earthfall Website
Go check out the new Earthfall website!
We have added some neat things over there including:
Brand new forums. Go check out the new forums. You can post your suggestions and feature requests and have other fans upvote it to get our attention!
Announcing Earthfall Defense Team for Content Creators. For all the content creators out there you can join the Earthfall Defense Team giving you special access to Earthfall, exclusive swag, exclusive in-game content and access to the developers.
Learn all about it and more at www.earthfall.com. We have been hard at work all summer, including moving offices and Gamescom. We can't wait to share what we have been working on, so stay tuned!
Release Notes 7/12/17 [14000]
This is, by far, our biggest update since releasing to Early Access! As you may have already read, our primary goal was to improve performance. Happily, we were able to improve AI companion intelligence as well. We also, of course, fixed quite a few bugs and made some other minor improvements.
Changes include but are not limited to:
Performance: Changed the way every moving thing figures out pathing and such in order to improve performance.
Performance: Removed some footstep sounds that you couldn’t hear anyway.
Performance: Made changes to a ton of art assets to improve perf.
Performance: Made med kits, stim shots, turrets, and fence kits slightly more performant. (There should be no difference in game-play unless noted below.)
Performance: Tuned wood, dirt, and grass particle FX to improve performance when you shoot them.
Performance: Fixed issues with rain and splash FX.
Performance: We now default the video settings to High instead of Epic. (Other performance updates are scattered throughout the list.)
We now truncate long Steam names so that you can read the rest of the information such as whether they’re in a lobby or in a level.
Tweaked font sizes in the friends list in order to increase the amount of information shown.
Your Friends List in the Join Menu is now sorted first by whether they are joinable and then alphabetically.
Added a popup to show an error message if you fail to join a game through the friends list.
Sometimes, when you toggled the Ready switch, it would immediately set itself back, undoing your change. Fixed.
The reminder that T is what you use to Chat in the lobby now returns to the screen when focus isn’t in chat, in case you forget.
Added a Setting to enable you to turn off Subtitles.
Fixed a bug that caused client players to have extra latency when channeling to interact with something.
Added tooltips to Badges so you can tell how you got them.
Changed the way we post leaderboard information in order to prevent a potential hang when trying to start a new round.
AI companions:
No longer speak when unconscious.
No longer excitedly exclaim that they “found” the weapon you just dropped.
No longer excitedly alert you to a weapon that they’re just going to take for themselves. (There's a delay between the time they alert and the time they grab.)
No longer alert you to found weapons while grabbed by a whiplash. In theory, they’ve got more important things to worry about.
Tweaked the way they think and act in order to make them easier for us to control and to improve perf just a touch.
Revamped their goals for staying close to their human companions during combat in order to enable them to spread out and to prevent them making unnecessary moves.
Will now sprint after the player they are following if they get too far away. Also, adjusted their follow distance.
Would keep walking when you were trying to heal them. Now they stop.
Fixed a bug where an AI companion who got pinned while reviving someone couldn’t seem to function well after being released.
Will try to heal you from behind when you’re on a turret so they don’t block you from firing.
Will now try a variety of heights when trying to pick up weapons (in order to address a problem where they sometimes couldn’t reach weapons they should be able to grab).
Are no longer allowed to pick up Vendettas or SW22s (i.e. they can no longer dual-wield).
Are now allowed to use Glintecs and AK-47s.
Now reload more proactively.
Are more likely to heal/revive you if you are on a raised platform (like a generator). They used to think you were out of reach when they were standing right next to you.
Would sometimes try to use a med kit they didn’t have. Fixed.
Used to prefer in-hand med kits over nearby health stations. They’re less stupid now.
Would pick up stim shots and then not use them. Fixed.
Were only allowed to use the health station if their health was less than 70%. They now have permission to use it if their health is less than 90%.
Tweaked the preference AI companions have for med kits over stim shots. Also fixed a bug that caused them to try to pick up stim shots when they already had one.
Now grab items off the printer. To help prevent conflicts with human players, they will wait a bit after your print job is complete before grabbing that weapon to give you a chance to grab it first. They also wait a bit after a printer comes online before printing something for themselves.
The printer now closes after 5 seconds if you don’t choose something to print.
Now have a delay between the time a weapon is spotted and the time they pick it up in order to give human players a better chance of grabbing the good stuff.
Will no longer try to heal or revive pinned targets or targets in a Sapper cloud. They’re also smarter about not reviving you if you or they are just going to get immediately knocked out by a nearby special. They should deal with the attacker first.
Will now prioritize their attack targets better.
May now switch to their secondary weapon if their primary needs reloading but there are a lot of enemies around and they don’t feel they have time to reload.
Were sometimes oblivious to enemies standing behind them, touching them. They will now react to such immediate threats.
Would sometimes fail to attack enemies when they should, including failing to fire during last stand. Fixed.
Repeat themselves less frequently.
Decreased the number of times AIs stand exactly where you’re standing such that you would see the insides of their heads. (Editor’s note: God, I hated that!)
Added physics to Danny and Maya’s clothing to make them look better.
Enemies:
Decreased detail on drones at a distance and the textures on all aliens to increase performance.
Improved efficiency of drone footstep effects to slightly improve performance.
Improved efficiency of drone drool to improve performance.
Tweaked the way aliens decide who they can attack so they’ll be slightly smarter about going through doors.
Improved efficiency of drone animations to improve performance. Also improved the look of some animations.
Improved the efficiency with which we calculate collision during shotgun fire.
Increased blood when limbs are knocked off drones.
Rarely, killing drones with an axe would result in floating drone skulls. Drone skulls no longer float.
Drone “eyes” no longer pop out except with the killing blow.
Drone headshots now play a sound.
Fixed some bugs with the way Drones die from the flamethrower.
If a Drone was on fire when it died, the fire didn’t go out until they disappeared. It should go out sooner than that now.
Improved the performance of the Sapper explosion.
Being on a ladder no longer makes you safe from a Sapper explosion.
Added sound to the Whiplash so you know she’s coming.
Sometimes, when you got grabbed by the Whiplash, you’d see outside the world briefly. Fixed.
Improved the look of Whiplash thrash, grab, and idle animations a bit.
Fixed some funky behavior of Whiplash blood spray.
Improved the look of the Whiplash being on fire.
If you were unconscious and your camera was following someone grabbed by a Whiplash, your camera would shake. It shouldn’t.
You can no longer be healed while grabbed by a Whiplash. (You need to be rescued first.)
The beast should turn to face you when he spits a fireball at you.
Fixed a bug that prevented the Beast from actually firing his fireball at you sometimes. It would get stuck, glowing, in his mouth.
Beast wounds are more gory now. Moar gore! Yum!
There was a rare bug where the Beast would knock around a downed player and no one could revive them. You’re now more likely to be able to revive them.
Propane tanks now bounce off enemies.
Tuned alien sounds in general. (Work in progress)
Gave ourselves more tools for tuning and tweaking sounds and music and then used those tools to improve audio balance.
Improved sounds for other people’s weapons.
Sometimes you’d grunt from being attacked or wheeze from having just sprinted at the same time you calmly delivered your VO line and it sounded silly. We now more gracefully segue from one to the other.
Removed “Reload!” from the screen while you’re pinned or kidnapped and thus unable to reload. It was just annoying.
Added some distance to how close you can put fences to each other.
Removed melee FX trails. They didn’t look good enough to justify their cost.
Headshots with melee weapons were not doing the damage they should. Fixed.
Tuned friendly fire when pinned by a thresher or grabbed by a whiplash based on difficulty level. (For example, damage from friendly fire is 0 when difficulty is set to Easy.)
Tuned FX from metal bullet impacts in order to improve performance.
You should not be able to fire automatic weapons while pinned.
You also should not be allowed to fire automatic weapons while using the health station.
You can now use the health station if you’re injured at all (rather than only when you had less than 90% health).
If someone used a stimshot and then left the game and you joined and filled their slot, you’d see the stimshot FX even though the character wasn’t still under its effects. Fixed.
Fixed a bug with the screens on the EF18 and the CVA when you’re on low graphics settings.
You should be knocked off the turret by explosions (such as grenades or Sapper explosions) instead of staying on the turret and then being thrown back when you jump off.
You can no longer sprint while carrying the Reaper.
Fixed a bug with the Reaper’s char effect and another bug with the flame.
You should catch fire if you’re standing in a fire you caused (such as throwing a napalm grenade and walking through the explosion).
Fixed a bug where you’d hit a flammable item by firing through a drone or something and the fire would show up on the drone rather than the flammable item.
Landmines now come in packs of 3, like Frag Grenades do.
Landmines no longer push dead people around.
Improved the messages shown during reviving and healing and such to clarify the state of the person being acted on.
Some drones that died in a fire were not counting towards the Don’t Fear the Reaper badge as they should. Fixed.
You should be able to get the Gunslinger badge while dual-wielding.
You should be able to get the Pistolier Achievement while dual-wielding.
You should not be able to get the Pistolier Achievement if you’ve used a turret.
Supply Run:
Tweaked physics on some of the items in the world to make them behave more consistently with other items in the world. (E.g. shooting soccer balls causes them to bounce away.)
Becoming incapacitated very close to the wall with that fence, AI companions couldn’t revive you. Fixed.
Fixed a place near that fence where the Whiplash could take you out of the world.
Fixed some ladders in Zippy’s that AI companions couldn’t climb.
Fixed a bug that could cause the count at the rally point to be inaccurate if folks left the rally point.
Made some minor graphical improvements to this level.
Breakdown:
There were a number of places in this level that the AIs could end up (via Sapper explosion or Beast swipes, say) that they could not then get away from (e.g. on top of dumpsters). Fixed.
Fixed some bugs where you could be out of reach of aliens or AI
Updated the music.
Data Recovery:
Fixed a number of places you could put turrets on railings outside the first printer room and inside the generator room. Railings are not a stable platform for turrets.
If you placed a turret at the locked door on the catwalk in the generator room and jumped on it, you could end up on the other side, unable to get back to your teammates. Fixed that and some other occurrences of the same problem.
You should no longer be able to place a turret on top of duct tubing.
Improved the music and sounds.
Radio Silence:
Updated the remaining pickups for perf reasons. You shouldn’t be able to tell any difference but let us know if you see any issues.
Aliens were having difficulty climbing their own shard. Fixed.
The Beast was having difficulty getting into one of the train cars near the shard. Fixed.
Tweaked things to enable AI companions to navigate the river better.
If the barrels on the forklift exploded with you were standing on them, you were left standing in mid-air. Fixed.
Here are a few Known Issues:
If you fail to find another game via Quick Play, the lobby you end up creating will need to be edited to specify which level and difficulty you desire.
There is more performance work to be done. We’re not done yet!
There is more work yet to be done on performance on AMD cards in particular.
Some folks are experiencing problems with garbled sound. This is an issue we have identified related to our audio middleware and we are currently working with them to address.
Earthfall Beta Update Now Available! Feedback Wanted!
Greetings Earthfall Fans!
We are in the final stages of our largest update yet and we need your help! For the last couple weeks, we have been working on an update that will greatly improve performance across the entire game. After a major art optimization pass and some AI pathfinding tweaks, we have improved performance up to 20% in some levels! We are very pleased with the performance improvement, but the work doesn't stop here as we will continue to make tweaks and changes to get the game to run super smooth.
This is where we need your help! We have released this update to Steam Beta and would love your feedback so you can get a preview of the changes and give us your feedback before we go live to the public. Head over to the Steam Forums and leave your feedback here.
Want to try the Beta on Steam?
Open Steam
Go to Library
Right click on Earthfall
Click on Betas tab
Select 'beta' & click Close
We are excited to hear your feedback!
Changes and Update on the Update
Greetings Earthfall fans!
We have some exciting news on the Earthfall team and with those changes you might see some changes.
First I want to introduce myself, I'm Collin, I'm the new Senior Community Manager here at Holospark. I have been working in games for over 15 years having worked on Condemned, F.E.A.R., Bioshock Infinite, Infamous 2 and others. I'm very excited to join the team and work with the Earthfall fans around the world!
We are also very excited to have Mark Duncan join us as Art Director. Mark has a long history in the industry working at FASA Studios, Sony Online, Cryptic among others. So please welcome Mark to the team.
Now let's talk about the upcoming update. We are working on it! We are knee deep in optimization passes on all the levels as improving performance was our primary goal with this update. We have seen some nice improvements, but still have some tweaks to make to really get things to where we want them. We will be locking things down and then start testing. And once we are done testing we will have a better idea of when the update will go live. So stay tuned!
You will be seeing some changes in our community efforts. First thing you might notice is we will be changing our streaming schedule. After reviewing the streams, we want to make them more exciting and provide more important content. So expect streams on major updates such as the upcoming update as well as sneak previews on new content moving forward, but we won't be doing weekly streams for the immediate future.
While we won't be streaming as much we are working with a number of streamers and fans to stream Earthfall on Twitch. Don't be surprised if someone from the Earthfall team jumps into chat and just maybe have some goodies for fans out there.
We have been working hard the last month or two on the upcoming update and can't wait to get it in your hands. We can't wait to hear what you think about it and look forward to your feedback. Just have to wait a little bit longer.
As always you can reach us here on the Earthfall Steam forums, as well as over on Twitter @holo_spark and the unofficial/official Earthfall Discord channel. Don't be a stranger.
Cheers!
Collin
Roadmap Update weekly 5/31 - AI
We are excited this week to talk about another aspect of Earthfall that we’re working on for our upcoming patch: the AI companions!
In Earthfall, you will always fight off the alien invasion in teams of four. Playing with friends is great, but if you don’t have enough people, AI companions are there to fill out the ranks. You can also choose to play solo and take on the enemy with just the AIs!
In the current live build, AI companions can do things like avoid sapper gas and cover you while you complete objectives but, beyond that, they’re not very bright. They might bunch up in your line of fire while also complaining that you’re shooting them or try to go toe to toe with the Beast.
Earthfall is a heavily cooperative game, and you need your buddies on top of their game to keep up with you, so we're excited about the improvements that you'll see in our upcoming content patch.
We've put the AI companions through a rigorous training program, and they will soon graduate the "AI Friend Academy Of Not Getting Your Whole Team Killed."
· Your AI companions will sprint to keep up with you, rather than strolling behind you while you race ahead.
· They’ll prioritize nearby health stations over precious med kits.
· They’ll reload proactively.
· They won’t attempt to shove a whiplash.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=937050162
· They won’t repeat themselves as often.
· They’ll give you first crack at the good weapons.
· They’re polite enough not to stand in your personal space as often.
They’re learning other lessons, and the full academy curriculum will be listed in the patch notes. We hope you are as excited as we are, and looking forward to fighting with your new improved AI companions!
