As promised, we are listening to your feedback and doing our best to deliver improvements, fixes, balancing changes and more. Although it does take a couple sleepless nights, a promise is a promise so the weekly patch #2 is upon us.
If you have not already, you are free to take a look at how we approach the issues you report, and we find in last week’s patch notes.
Weekly Patch 2
We've been addressing all three important categories - technical issues, balancing issues and UX/UI issues. So, here's what's new:
Technical Issues
These should give you a more stable FPS. We're still working on bringing you the in-game graphic settings so all of you with lower performance systems can tweak them in-game to find the optimal settings without having to restart the launcher.
Fixed Cinematic Bugs
Fixed Solarium Teleporter Enemy
Improved Gameplay Performance in Extreme Combat
Improved Beam Weapon Performance
Balancing Changes
You've been commenting spikes and weird changes in difficulty. This is something that will need a couple more hit and miss iteration loops before we find the sweet spots so bear with us and keep on letting us know if something feels broken to you.
Fixed First Bullet Spread
Improved Enemy AI - Reactivity on Player Bullets
Balanced Certain Weapon Combinations
Balanced Duration of Buff Pickups
Balanced Tank and Flank Enemy Weapons Firing Salves of Bullets
Balanced Enemy Health
UX/UI Changes
Mostly for better clarity of information, how it's displayed and where it's available. Look at that feature image at the top of the post! You can now check your setup anytime you like, showing you the pilot, ship, components, abilities - the works!
Added Current Setup Information Screen
Updated Text Rendering for Better Readability
Updated Typos
Updated Armory UI
Removed Random Free Components
All in all, there are quite some changes so there will probably be some you really dig and others you don't. As always don't hesitate to let us know. Either on the Steam Discussion or on our Discord.
And have a wonderful weekend :)
Weekly Patch 1
Greetings,
We thank you again for posting issues or worries about certain aspects of technical issues, balancing and mechanics of Last Encounter. The more details in your feedback we get the better we understand the issues. Which leads us to making better choices in how we approach the updates.
Weekly Patch 1
Fixed Free Upgrades Bug
Fixed Floating Text Credits Display
Fixed Enemy out of Bounds in Tutorial
Fixed Void Beam Bug
Fixed Enemies Dying from Poison to give Loot
Balanced and Fixed Beam Knockback
Improved Bullet Performance
Updated Gravitron Boss Visuals
Updated Void Visuals
Updated Dialogue Visuals and Grammar Galaxy-Wide
Updated Cinematics
Frequent Objections
Technical issues are mostly straightforward, something in the game is not working as intended. Either in terms of performance, bugs, glitches etc. Sometimes these errors are easy fixes that we can update the same day that they are reported. Other times they are a bit more complex and we need more time to understand the background of the error and how it might be connected to other systems.
Technical issues are high on our priority list since they convey either the wrong experience or ruin your experience. We apologize if you've had any and we thank you for taking the time to report them. Although we did, and still do a lot of testing, and since we're not a big team we were not able to catch all of them, but we are doing our best to get rid of all of them.
The other type of issues would be Information based or UX based. These situations are when mechanics and other elements in the game do work as we intended but they are not understood well. We see these cases as our missed opportunities. If a high number of you reports that things are unclear, we see it as us not giving clear enough instructions inside the game for you to be aware of the rules and mechanics.
We will keep working on these as well. Trying to bring more clarity to how the weapon system is designed, and how other things that may seem random are generated and created inside your run. For most mechanics, pickups, weapons, drops etc. we have separate systems that are aware of your progress and state in the game. The purpose of all of them is to have the right mix of known and procedural to give your runs the right amount of "randomness".
The last type of feedback we hear is Balance and / or Mechanics based. Since there are multiple systems in the game which are connected, it takes some time to balance them out perfectly. While at the same time also doing our best that the resulting balance is smart enough to accommodate both advanced players of the genre as well as players who might not have played many similar titles.
Our goal with the systems is for the resulting gameplay to be challenging so that your runs are fun, while at the same time not being too challenging so that they don't trigger frustration.
Changes that are coming soon
Since we are changing the balancing we hope to build a better experience. Even if you already unlocked or seen most of the content in the base release, we're currently working on a couple new options that will allow for a new experience.
Were still working on:
In-game Graphic Settings
Key Binding Changes
Gameplay Settings Changes
With the Gameplay Settings we want to introduce the ability to reset your current progress. So that you're able, if you want to, to experience the new balance from scratch - with no unlocked components, pilots or ships.
We also want to work on more content which can be explored once you completed the base story, so that even after unlocking the basic collections there is more for you to explore and more challenges to face.
There are more things that we have planned, but we will address them once we get closer to implementation.
That's it for this week. We hope that you are having a good time in deep space. And even if not, let us know your worries. We appreciate the time you invest in giving us feedback and will continue working on making Last Encounter better.
Day 2/3 Update!
Greetings pilots,
As you're progressing deeper into the galaxies new hick-ups keep popping up. And we're doing our best to mend any issues you find. Thank you for taking the time to report them. We will keep monitoring all of your feedback.
As soon as we get the technical issues out of your way we will be able to focus more on the content updates that we would like to bring through future updates.
We would like you to join us in this process. So if you have ideas, suggestions, critique or recommendation - don't hesitate to share them with us either through the Steam discussions or our Discord.
Here are the changes we did today.
Changes and Updates
Improved Enemy Balancing
Improved Visuals of all Bullet Types
Improved Performance of all Bullet Types, especially the Rocket Launcher
Increased the Pickup Buff Duration
Updated Solarium Asteroid Graphics
Updated Dialogue Lines on the Bosses
Fixes
Fixed Boss Health Bar UI
Fixed Key / Money UI
Fixed the Tutorial Scene
Fixed Credits Saving on Pilot Death
Fixed Pilot and Component Texts
Thank you for reading and for supporting Last Encounter!
And good luck out there.
Post-Launch Updates!
Hi pilots,
We hope that you're enjoying the ride in Last Encounter so far! We've been listening to your feedback, both the good and the bad. We've been enjoying the discussions on Steam, Discord and the published content.
We will keep track of all the issues you find and do our best to address them all. Some of them we can fix and update quickly while others take a bit more time to implement.
Here are the changes we made from yesterday, based on your comments.
Global changes
Added Tooltip to Passive Ability Pickup
Increased Pickup Duration by 100%
Increased Floating Text Time by 100%
Improved Homing Bullets
Improved Permanent Buff Pickup Floating Text
Improved Audio Sound Effects
Updated Tutorial Texts
Fixed Base Scene UI
Fixed Audio Bugs
Galaxy specific changes
Increased Visibility, and Reduced Force of Black Holes by 33%
Reduced Poison Plant - Poison Zone Radius by 33%
Reduced Poison Hedgehog - Poison Zone Radius and Duration by 33%
Improved Gravitron Bullet Shield Mechanics
Improved Boss Visual Effects
Fixed Materion Story Pieces
Fixed Gravitron Boss Bugs
There are still some major things we want to improve upon so thank you for your patience.
We will continue to listen to your feedback and give our best to update the build often, with both fixes and balance changes but also new content.
Last Encounter is Now Available!
Last Encounter is now available for purchase on Steam!
What the game includes?
10 pilots with unique modifiers
10 ships with unique abilities
20 passive abilities
dozens of weapon components
6 different procedural galaxies
4 boss fights
Content Creators & Streamers
If you create videos or stream gameplay and would like to cover Last Encounter, feel free to reach out to us through Keymailer.
We will happily share a game key with you, but please know that we are currently focusing on those with more than a thousand followers.
Feedback, Bugs, Discussions, Discord and More
Feel free to use our Steam discussions for any bugs you encounter, if you want to share your ideas for new content, things that could be done better, if anything needs to get buffed or nerfed. We look forward to your comments.
We'd be thrilled if you want to hop on our Discord as well to join our community.
Launch Date Announcement
We're happy to finally be able to share that we will be releasing Last Encounter on May 8th. (Less than two weeks from now!)
To celebrate the announcement, we have prepared a new trailer.
