Exoblast
Bugfixes and database update
Today we are making a major update, not bringing any new content (compared to the last update), but greatly improving the quality of life of the game.
Exoblast therefore goes to 1.2.0.
Thanks to you, our team has fixed a good number of bugs, including a blocking bug preventing connection to the game. Thank you for reporting all these errors via Discord where you form a great community! For those who would like to join, here is the link: Discord
We also took the opportunity to update the database.
We remind you that access to the Season 2 tournament ends in two weeks, bringing together the highest ranked players in Ranked mode. We will give you more details very soon.
To your ships, pilots, it's time to reach new heights and prove what you are capable of.
Exoblast 1.1 is here!
Hello to you, pilots!
Exoblast 1.1 is finally available and brings a lot of new content, as promised in our Public Trello.
Here is Exoblast 1.1:
- New progression system
- Visual improvements
- A reworked ranked mode
- New settings
- Added servers and bugfix
Exoblast 1.1 challenges you!
Most gamers who enjoyed Exoblast didn't stick around for several reasons; one of the main ones being due to the lack of unlockables.
We have therefore added more than 120 customization elements to unlock in a variety of ways:
- Rewards will be given to you at each level, from level 1 to level 50.
- Unique challenges will appear and renew on a daily basis, allowing you to unlock a new customization element with each success, until you have unlocked them all.
- Simple daily quests to complete will be offered to unlock experience points.
- More complicated weekly quests to complete will be offered to you to obtain pilot skins (12 new skins).
- Steam Achievements have been added and reward you with customization items upon successful completion.
A progress screen has been added so you can track the completion of your Challenges, Daily and Weekly Quests, and Steam Achievements.
A timer is there and tells you when the quests are renewed.
A customization screen has been added, where you can change your avatars, titles, borders and emotes.
Exoblast ever more beautiful!
All customization items that you and your opponent have equipped will now be visible in the game history and in the end of match screen.
Between the rounds now appears the pilots of the one who won the round with the skin he has chosen.
There is now a ball accumulation bar that represents the accumulated velocity on the ball, displayed at the bottom of the screen.
Your progress bar progress is now easier to understand.
Finally, we added new animations for the progress bar, when you change rank and when you level up.
A fairer ranked mode!
We quickly realized that there were some issues with our ranked mode. We listened to you and did what was necessary to create a ranked mode that better represents your level:
- There are now placement matches (10) before you start tryharding to climb the ranks!
- The gap between divisions has been revised, it will take you less time to change divisions.
- Matchmaking has been reworked to run against an opponent that is closer to your level.
- We are adding a leaderboard to see where you stand against your opponents, showing your closest opponents as well as the top 10 in the world.
We were overly optimistic about our first ranking system and cancellingthe Season 1 tournament. As an apology, we're giving you exclusive avatars and borders to show off your place at the end of the season.
For Season 2, ranking will be done more smoothly and fairly thanks to the new ranked mode. The conclusion of this season will be in 2 months (June 14), a shorter but more interesting period, with a tournament organized by Dreamirl at the end of which brings together the 16 best players of Exoblast with rewardsat stake!
Whether you fight for rewards or glory, be prepared, pilots!
New settings, new languages!
We have added new settings to meet your expectations.
You can now change the video quality of the game to improve its performance for less capable devices.
A new parameter much requested by the community has been added: the rebind of buttons! The option is available for keyboard and gamepad.
The community helped us a lot! Here are two new translations of the game for you:
- Portuguese translation.
- Russian translation.
Thank you again for your help. If your language still hasn't been translated, we'd love to hear from you!
You can talk about it directly with us via our Community Discord.
Added server and bugfix!
We acquired a new server located in Brazil. As said in our previous patchnotes, servers are a significant cost, and it is thanks to your support that we can continue to fund them. If our community is strong enough in other regions of the world, we can add new servers.
We have fixed many bugs, and we want to address in particular a bug where the ping displayed during your games did not correspond to your real ping. Now you will see your real ping.
Thank you all for your support and your many feedbacks, we continue to improve Exoblast and want to make its community live as much as possible.
It's time to board your ship and join the arena, pilots!
Patchnote 1.0.3
Hello, pilots!
Thanks to all your feedback, we added and modified some elements, gameplay, balancing and progression. Let’s start with the new stuff.
Emotes in game
Many of you want a better way to communicate with the opponent than wiggling. A chat system does not necessarily seem wise, we prefer to add a wheel of emotes to share a fun moment with your opponent.
More emotes will be added in the future and you will be able to customize your emote wheel as you want.
Emotes will be unlockable by playing the game and reaching certain levels or by achieving challenges.
Progression System
At the launch of Exoblast, we made all the ships, pilots and game mode available from the beginning. This has caused you three problems:
- You could play against experienced opponents who take away the pleasure of smooth discovery.
- Once the gameplay was in hand, you had no real reason to take levels.
- A “guided” discovery of the game was missing.
So we’ve added a first progression system that will make you play against AI at level 1, before unlocking the online mode at level 2 and the ranked mode at level 6.
The same goes for the ships: you will unlock them from level 3 to level 5 depending on the difficulty of taking control of them.
As we just said before, emotes and other things will be unlockable through leveling and achievements in the future.
A necessary balancing
You quickly found the most outperforming character and ship combos.
This allowed us to see that these combos were too strong and became omnipresent.
We have therefore done a balancing that should completely disrupt the meta and hopefully make almost all combos viable.
Statistical Changes
- We removed the fire rate which was the same for all ships.
- We added the shield size. All ships have their shield sizes reduced to 80% (except the Hovership which stays at 100%).
Pilot Balance
- Rikito : Aggression duration > 3s to 1.5s
Rikito profited too much from his aggressiveness which created a snowball effect very hard to counter. - Nisha : Adrenaline > 2% to 3%
Nisha is the least used character. Increasing her adrenaline, we hope you will feel a real usefulness to her kit.
Ships Balance
- Bee : Health points increased > 25hp to 50hp.
The Bee has a nervous gameplay, but gets destroyed by bullets not being powerful. We want to slightly reduce the punitive aspect of its kit. - Hovership : Shield return power > 75% to 150%
Projectiles speed > 300 to 208
Charging speed > 2.7 to 3.1
The Hovership was a decent ship, but it struggled too much to send powerful bullets. From now on, the ship will be able to rely on smash shields to send ultra-fast bullets. - Devonian : Shield deflection power > 50% to 75%
- Destroyer : Maximum Power > 6 to 6.5
- Pretorian : Move speed > 302 to 292
Recovery of projectiles > 65% to 60%
The Pretorian/Rikito combo was widely used. So we nerfed the ship so that it can be countered while remaining viable.
Bug fixes and features
- the timer stops at the last set point and no longer after the victory animation.
- Joystick navigation on the readycheck has been removed to avoid missclicks.
- Accents are now filtered on the “End Game” screen.
- The custom popup translation is now fixed.
Thank you for your feedback!
Constructive criticism is really useful to us, whether positive or negative, so thank you for sharing your feelings with us!
Positive reviews allow us to expand the community and thus improve the game accordingly.
For those who don’t know yet, we are very active on Discord so join us! https://discord.gg/2mMTMRxaCb
See you in the arena, pilots!
End of the WANTED event, come claim your skins!
Congratulations, pilots!
You fought with a lot of fervor, but the targets were incredibly powerful.
You who have defeated the streamers, come claim your skins, you deserve them.
To tell us which pack you prefer (between Vampire and Unicorn), join our Discord: https://discord.gg/2mMTMRxaCb
Other events are planned, such as the tournament end of season 1 scheduled for May and streamed on the channel of Mister MV. The selected players will be the 24 best in the ranked mode.
So this concluded the first edition of WANTED event, enjoy your brand new ships 💥
About Servers and lags
We are aware that some of you are experiencing server's issues and lags and this post will explain what our plans are and why, hopefully you’ll get some answers.
First of all, we are very thankful for all the positive reviews and the growing community.
What an exciting time for us! (also very stressful)
Let’s start with the servers (lags).
At the moment we only have 2 regions, Europe and North America, servers are respectively in the north of France and in Canada, you can choose which servers you want to play on from the Settings menu.
And so, all the players in Asia, Oceania, Center and South America, not forgetting Russia, have a high ping, we are aware of that and it is very frustrating.
We are very sorry about that, adding servers is something we want to do and are working on, but not to forget that servers are a non-negligible cost so we have to choose carefully.
Also, adding servers will split the queues : yes it will reduce your ping, but if you find no-one to play against, that’s also a problem.
Today we plan to add 2 server regions (one server for each), one in Asia (not precisely defined where) and one in Brazil. From all the feedback we’ve got, this should fix the majority of player lag.
If after the update you are still having lag, please make sure to reach out, either on Twitter, Discord, Facebook, Twitch, or through the Steam community. We spend a lot of time reading all of your concerns, feedback and questions.
Today, if you are in Europe, your ping should be less than 100, same as if you are in the USA/Canada.
From what we have seen, most of you play with a 20-30ms ping or less and servers rarely get overloaded, so if there is high ping, it’s more an issue about internet speed, wifi, or others settings, but we are very concerned by it and will gladly help you finding a way to improve it.
A bit of informations about the “rollback netcode”
A lot of players are asking us to implement the “rollback netcode” and we understand why.
It seems important to us to give a bit of explanation about what it is and how this will change in terms of feeling and gameplay, but also to explain how we plan to solve this.
During the early-access we have tried to implement prediction/reconciliation.
It is not “rollback” but it takes some principles from it.
It was working and good for beginners, but the feeling was not great for competition.
Rollback can give some weird feeling for your opponent in a high ping situation, and what happens today from players complaining about lag (for the vast majority), is that they do have a high ping.
So except if we decided to use a P2P solution (without an authoritative server), there is no counter to high ping.
Here is a complete article explaining what Rollback is and how it impact the gameplay, I can’t explain better than this (or then read some PHd about P2P games and rollback, but this is not the point here): https://gamerant.com/rollback-netcode-explained/
As competitive players, we know how frustrating the lag is and how unacceptable it is to lose a match because of lag.
So here is our plan.
- First, bringing new servers that will reduce the lag, from 200 or 400 you should go under 100 which is more acceptable.
- Then, we will re-implement the prediction/reconciliation algorithms we’ve made during early-access, and it will be activable as an option in the settings, this will reduce your lag input but could cause some weird feeling, so as an option, you’ll be free to activate it.
- Third, add an extra option to “blend” the lag and prediction, which could contribute to reducing the lag feeling and the gap between reality. We want to try this but are unsure of the result.
- And last, we are going to improve the general netcode in the server, moving to a new stack, that should make the game faster and improve for everyone, including players who have no lags today.
We do not want to implement a full rollback for many reasons.
The first one is the cost of development, we can’t assume it today and it you’ll be a lie to say “let’s go”, while we have some affordable solution that does work.
Also, full rollback with high ping (keeping an authoritative server) would make unfair matches for matches with high and low ping, and it would be even more frustrating for everyone (seeing the shot teleporting, or the ship teleporting, also it is a cheat exploit used in some games).
The best we can do today is adding servers.
As the community keeps growing and supporting the game, we might in the future have the budget to plan on a P2P with an authoritative server (checking and validating what’s happening), that will be safe and fast.
But for now, it is not possible.
Giving you more inputs here, the more you play Exoblast and the more you will be able to predict what is happening in the fight, and the more you will be able to compete even with high ping.
Unlike other games, Exoblast is completely playable with a good anticipation and skill, but this requires some training, as an example, some dev members and community players are playing from the EU on NA servers (with a ping from 100 to 200) and still able to win a lot of games.
We know how different it is from fighting games, but Exoblast does not have that many frames to read and only 3 inputs to play.
Just give us some time to update the game and improve all of that.
With your feedback and our hard work we can find the solution 🙏.
As a small indie team, we are doing our best efforts to bring new servers and a netcode update in the next patch, with a new balance and some new features we are excited about.
While waiting this new update, if you want to experiment the game without lags (and by that I mean if you are far from the servers we plan to add), our advice is to play using the “Local Mode” (which is Offline) and there you can set up the AIs you want, the side you want, etc…
It’s not the perfect solution you want “now”, but you can train and learn all the ships, and trust us, if you beat the AI level 8 you will be rocking the ranked mode once servers will be close enough for you to play 🤠
Enough talking, back to work.
Thank for your time and understanding 🙏
1.0.2 - Ranked Elo fix, some balance and tutorial is back !
Many of you joined us during the last week, we are so happy about it.
A lot of feedback has been sent back to us, mostly around the ranked game mode and the newbro’s accessibility.
Without waiting anymore, here are the Changelogs:
- Tutorial ! If you haven’t played it yet, you will get it, no worry, you can skip it (that’s a first version that we will improve in the future)
- Default ship is now becoming the Destroyer
- Destroyer’s minimal firepower have been slightly reduced, a bigger balance update will be done soon (mostly focused on pilots and others ships)
- Various languages mistakes fixed
- VS IA gamemode is now the default mode for level 1 players
- A popup appears to warn a level 1 player when he tries to join online matchmaking
- ELO ranking have been improved/changed (player with ELO have got their ELO calculated accordingly, no loss have been seen)
- Matchmaking modification to get it more precise and more balanced in between the player’s level (waiting slightly longer)
- Readycheck auto-cancel bug have been fixed if the queue is left
- IA training level start at level 5
- The server with the less ping is defined as the lowest one
- Bug with command spam during training/queue is now fixed
- Bug about the winner’s name on the endgame screen is now fixed
- Bug on the replay button of a local game is now fixed
- You can’t join anymore a game where you’ve been kicked from
- VFX of the goal have been improved
- Reward part of the endgame screen have been visually improved
If it’s not already the case, we invite you to join us on our Discord server, to find opponents and participate in the bug chases. Come join our growing community !
Also, we invite you to leave a positive review on the Steam page, it greatly helps us and give the game a bigger visibility to get more players which mean more opponents to fight.
Exoblast works only with his community support and we all thank you for being part of it !
The next patch will follow soon, we hope it will fulfill your attempts.
WANTED event - Season 1 begins!
The first event of the season is here!
Find streamers Mister MV and Shisheyu on Exoblast and battle them as they broadcast your matches on Twitch.
As a reward for defeating both targets, we will give you a free skin pack of your choice. The pack will be delivered after the event which will last from February 1 to February 6, 2022.
We wanted to create an event that was out of the ordinary and that would allow streamers to play with their community. The WANTED format is therefore the perfect mix of fun and challenge, all while remaining in our universe.
If you like the format, we will organize other editions of the WANTED event, potentially with other streamers that you can suggest to us.
More events are coming up, so get ready!
Will you be strong enough for the challenge, pilots?
Exoblast Season 1 starts today!
In addition to creating occasional events, we wanted the Exoblast community to be able to invest in the game and be rewarded for it: this is why we have introduced seasons in ranked mode.
The first season will therefore last from February 1 to May 1, three months. We will be able to modify the duration of the next seasons depending on your feedback on this one.
At the end of the season, the top 24 players will be invited to a tournament rebroadcast on Mister MV's Twitch channel with rewards for all players who participated.
Other off-season tournaments are being considered and will be defined as a special event.
We can't wait to bring together the best of pilots, so join the arena and show us what you're capable of!
Exoblast 1.0
Glad to see you, pilots!
First things first, we wanted to say thank you.
You have been a really supportive community for a year and half now. Without you, this game would not be what it is today. The many hours of reading your feedback, discussing the possibilities with you, all support you have given us, we have translated into Exoblast.
This is not over yet!
We want to continue Exoblast's development, add content, improve features, add modes, develop a competitive scenes among the community, organise tournaments and events.
We also want to release the game on other devices, like smartphones or consoles, which will take time.
For now, we need your help to push Exoblast's community forward. May you be someone competitive, a streamer, casual gamer or just curious, give us your opinion on the game, bring out your friends and keep giving us your feedback.
A game without gamers is worthless, you are the key component of Exoblast.
New menu and navigation!
As we promised, we made brand new menus, easy to navigate with both mouse and controller. It was a really hard process to figure out how to make it fluent for you to go through.
We hope you all like it!
New GOAL animation!
To improve the feeling you get when you land a ball in your opponent's goal, we made a brand new animation that cannot be missed.
Data wipe!
Until now the game was in early access, datas evolved a lot and it is not relevant to keep the old data.
To start anew with a competitive season and to give you the best experience for old and new players, we wiped the data so everyone will start from the same level..
DLCs for ship's skins and announcers! (to support us)
Here is a really important subject we need to talk about.
While developping Exoblast, we considered many possibilities about the business model. At first, we wanted it to be free to play because it felt pretty common to do so.
But, because of the game's evolution, we decided to remove what was F2P to become entirely free, so no one is left appart in the matchmaking.
However the creation and maintenance of a game is onerous and needs a form of revenue, so we would like to propose skin DLCs for sale tu support the development team and the data fees.
These DLC packs will not change gameplay in any way and are completely optional.
They give you skins for all your ships, as well as the visual customization of the announcers that are in the game (Goal, Smash Shield, X5, X10, Max Speed and Destroyed).
From now on, you can destroy your opponents with style. Let's see how it looks!
When unicorns beat the ship out of you!
You don't like cute stuff and prefer deadly scary demons?
Well, the Vampire pack and the Unicorn pack are available on steam this week!
Season 1 and tournaments!
We want to encourage you to go on rankedmode and become the very best pilot.
At the end of the first season, we will organize a tournament starring the 24 best players who reached the top of the tower. The tournament will be broadcasted on Twitch by MisterMV, and everyone will receive gifts.
You have from February 1st to May 1st to rank yourself! We will anounce the pilots who reached top 24 during May's first week, along with the tournament date.
What's next!
To your controller, we have a first event where you can win DLC skins we talked just before.
The WANTED event will take place from the 1st of February to the 6th of February.
Take down two french streamers, Mister MV and Shisheyu, while they stream to get a free skin pack! Every details are explained on our Discord server : https://discord.gg/udndb6NS3T
Thank you again for your support.
See you in the arena, pilots!
0.9 "Back to Basics" Update
Version 0.9 “Back to Basics” is here!
Welcome back, Pilot!
We're glad to see you back. A lot has changed since the last time you were here.
You may be confused by the drastic decisions we have made, but we will explain them to you.
Exoblast is now rolling from version 0.5 to 0.9 because we changed a lot of things and what we wanted for the game, to focus on the main experience of Exoblast “instant fun and simplicity”.
Enjoy the game, online or offline with friends, forget about farming and progression and focus on mastery.
The development of Exoblast has been going on for almost three years. After trying many things, we found what was the most important and how to exploit it properly. The number one feature of Exoblast is “the simplicity”. By adding crafting, farming, and progression, the game was more complex without being more fun.
At first, we wanted Exoblast to be a “Free To Play”, we decided it is now completely free.
Removing everything related to progression allows us to give fair matches between new and old players. Now only skill will make a difference.
In order to support the game and the devs, we decided to create purchasable packs, soon available. Those packs will give ship Skins and will support the game and its becoming, thanks to you.
Removed features
-The customization of ships is removed.
The balance was hard and a lot of unfair matchup was possible because of the variety and freedom of the feature. By pushing back fixed ships, we have a better control of the balance and experience.
The modularity was also a big limitation for artists.
-The Forge is removed, not required as customization and farming are removed.
-Currencies, the shop button, and inventory are removed.
New features
- This update comes with 6 different ships, all of them are playable and do not require any unlock. They are all different to let you choose your play style. We can't wait for you to get your hands on these ships with their unique designs and gameplays!
- The interface during gameplay has been completely reworked and display more interesting information on the screen.
The in-game version is a pre 1.0 version. Improvements on the menus will be released for the version 1.0 pretty soon.
Thanks for your patience Pilot! See you in the arenas.