The Anacrusis
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Update 56 - Bring That Boom, Boom
- Reworked pretty much all the primary weapon sounds with the goal of improving their impact and feel. More of the guns make sci-fi appropriate gun sounds now and have more of the punch that you’d expect from a modern shooter
- Rebalanced most background noises so there was more dynamic range for the guns. If you hear weird/loud sounds after this update, please take a screenshot and post it to #report-a-bug on Discord or the Steam forums. Likewise, if you used to hear sounds in an area that you don’t anymore, please let us know about those too
- Added more flavor dialog to things like special weapon pickups
- Added subtitles for the new dialog we've added in recent months. There are a handful of bugs in the subtitles, which are entirely Chet's fault
- Added Eggs to Versus mode. They should spawn at the same place and same quantities for both teams
- Weapon spawns should be in sync between rounds in Versus mode now. We carved off a few more edge cases that caused the two teams to get different weapon drops. There are a handful of bugs that can cause this to happen that we’ll continue working on
- Fixed an issue that prevented login for people who were playing on PCs with protected system folders but not using admin accounts
55 - Flasher’s Gonna Flash
- Flasher Perf fixes
- Flasher death leaving common they control stalled out is fixed
- The dead corner at the start of Episode 4 should be fixed (finally, we hope)
- Heavy Plasma is now louder and punchier
- Fixed collision bugs in Episode 4
- Bug fixes and QOL improvements
Update 54 - Getting Free From Grabbers
- We fixed a collection of bugs that prevented Survivor bots from reliably rescuing players who had been grabbed. Bots can now target and shoot the Grabber more effectively at close to medium range. That means you shouldn’t see any more bots shooting into the wall by the Grabber
- Additionally, we found a few cases where pulse wouldn’t release a grabbed Survivor when we expected it to. This was caused by a reduction in efficacy of the pulse at its maximum range, and affected both bots and human players, where a pulse at the edge of the effective range would look like it hit a grabbed Survivor, but it wouldn’t actually free them from the grab. We’ve fixed the issue, so now any amount of pulse hitting a grabbed player should free them
- Health stations no longer work in versus mode. We disabled them in Versus after feedback from playtests. They tend to tip the balance hard in favor of Survivors, with no accompanying risk increase of risk
- Bots will no longer teleport when they’re reviving a downed player or respawning a dead player
- We’ve fixed a long-standing issue with player-created fire. Previously, the fire visual FX and the area of effect for fire damage from grenades or flaming goo could get out of sync in certain conditions. We’ve fixed the desync, so now if you can see fire on the ground, it will damage you. If you can’t see fire on the ground, you won’t take damage when you walk through a space
- Added ambient sound effects to Episode 4, Level 2
- Added sounds to force fields and repulsor lifts throughout the game
- Added and adjusted timing for voice lines in Episode 4
- Gave the bots an unhealthy fixation on spawner turrets
We're Leaving Early Access, But This Is Just the Beginning
Retro-Future Shooter The Anacrusis to Blast Out of Early Access after 22 Months, 53+ Updates, and More Than a Million Players Served
After 23 months of intensive Early Access development, more than a million players, 53 updates (and counting), and the constant help of our community of players; The Anacrusis will reach version 1.0 and leave Early Access on Steam on December 5, 2023.
The Anacrusis tells the story of four survivors of a surprise alien attack set in a retro-futuristic sci-fi world. The unlikely survivors are stranded at the edge of space, where they must search for other humans, find a way to warn the rest of humanity about the alien threat, and maybe pick up some corn dogs—all while locked in a desperate fight for survival against endless alien hordes.
The Anacrusis is a multiplayer co-op shooter, with 1-to-4-player cooperative story and holdout modes as well as a 1-8 player competitive versus mode. With multiple intensity settings, The Anacrusis delivers the experience players want, whether they’re looking for a social hangout with friends or a difficult game that requires coordinated action and solid teamwork. The game is built for replayability—each time you play an episode, you learn more about the story and the characters.
Developed by the creative lead of Left 4 Dead series, The Anacrusis builds on what was learned making those games to create something new and modern that still feels familiar to returning players. The core of The Anacrusis is a new breed of AI Director. The AI Director monitors players’ status and ability, then uses its control over enemy, weapon, health, and ammo spawns to dynamically change the state of the game—pushing players right to the edge of their capabilities, before letting off and giving them time to recover. By creating the peaks and valleys necessary to build alternating feelings of dread, excitement, and relief in players, The Anacrusis’s AI Director makes every game exciting.
Stray Bombay launched The Anacrusis in Early Access because we knew we how difficult it is to make a game that’s simultaneously accessible to new players and challenging for experienced players. Since the Early Access launch in January of 2022, we’ve built the game with the community – 53 updates later, our new Steam reviews are Very Positive and the community is thriving.
In addition to the traditional co-op and holdout modes, we added asymmetrical Versus to The Anacrusis this summer. Versus lets players take on the role of the Special aliens, working together to prevent the human Survivors from reaching their goals. (Because of its asymmetrical nature, we like to think of it as a form of sanctioned griefing—teams basically take turns being mean to each other.) Unlike other titles, Versus is tuned to allow between 1-8 players to play, with our AI bots taking on unfilled roles. That means you can play a Versus game with any size group of friends, you don’t need to get 8 players together to have a compelling game. Additionally, our full bot support lets players practice as the aliens against AI Survivors.
One of our most requested community features was Steam Workshop support. We rolled that out last year, giving players access to community-built episodes, unique cosmetics, emotes, character skins, and more.
We’re proud of how far the game has come during our Early Access period. We embraced the spirit of Early Access—a virtuous circle of feedback from the community followed by updates to the game followed by more feedback—to create a successful game. The game wouldn’t be in the place it is now without the active community that’s formed around The Anacrusis. We owe a great deal of thanks to everyone who has given us feedback and helped us build the best co-op shooter.
“The Anacrusis is built on everything I learned from making the Left 4 Dead series," said Chet Faliszek, founder of Stray Bombay. “I wanted to modernize the core L4D concepts, so we started with a strong, replayable story mode and built from there. The Anacrusis is among the best of the genre and showcases our unique take on co-op shooters. I’ve enjoyed working directly with the players and modders for the last two years, but what we’re shipping with 1.0 is just the beginning for the game."
Update 53 - Meet the New Brute
Co-op players need not fear the new Brute. The traditional leap attack was working great for AI-controlled Brutes, so we didn’t apply the new change to co-op games.
But wait, there’s more. We’ve also made a bunch of other significant changes to both Versus and Co-Op mode.
Director changes
- We’ve changed the way spawns are selected by the Director. Previously, if the Director thought a spawn was unacceptable, it would stop evaluating that spawn for future waves of aliens. Now, each spawn will be evaluated for for suitability during each alien spawn wave. This should encourage players to stick closer together, as teams that spread out will face a great deal more common aliens than they did previously
Versus Changes
- Adjusted the alien special third-person cameras to be more stable, to reduce motion sickness
- A bug that prevented players from starting and cancelling the Gooper alt-fire (aka the Happy Dance) has been fixed for mouse & keyboard players. A fix for gamepad players will be in the next update
- Fire VFX is more readable and less disorienting when you’re surrounded by enemies on fire
More Episode 4 fixes
- Fixed fire that was mis-sized in several areas of Episode 4
- Fixed several holes in the world in Episode 4
- Dramatically reduced the volume of the episode 4 finale generator sounds
Sound Changes
- Added ambient sounds to episode 4. The Isolode is in bad shape by the time the Survivors are heading for the self-destruct switch. Expect to hear lots of creaking, groaning, leaking, and crackling as you explore the first level of Episode 4.
- Increased the oomph of the special weapons. After our primary weapon balance pass earlier this year, we were worried that the special weapons were sounding a bit anemic, especially the laser and arc rifles. We’ve bumped up their sound and intensity a bit to accommodate.
Lobby Changes
- Team selection widgets should work more reliably when the host changes modes
- Fixed “a ton” of UI state bugs that could occur when the host and party members got out of sync in the lobby
Update 52 - A Doozy of a Hotfix
- Scoring bug for versus fixed
- Ep4 finale generator sounds work right but are still too quiet
- Damage radius on some fire in the Ep4 finale reduced
- Several more Ep4 spawn areas that are invalid were fixed. Please keep sending these in, it’s hugely helpful
- Removed the reference cube from Ep4
- You’ll see titles on other players when you join in progress now
- You should see hitmarkers on kills for common again
Update 51 - This One's a Doozy
There are a lot of significant changes in this build, so we’ve been testing it both internally and with the community on the Discord for the last several weeks. Even with extended testing, we expect to find new bugs once it’s widely available. Please submit your crash logs and let us know about any other bugs you find on the Discord or Steam forums.
Backend Changes
We’ve moved The Anacrusis to a new backend provider. This should improve issues with downtime due to provider issues and all our Crossplay lobbies to be updated in real-time as players change the game settings or player loadouts for banners and titles. It’s also one step closer to our eventual goal of running a true offline mode.
From a player perspective, almost everything is the same as it was in the previous patch. Matchmaking works within the same constraints as it always did, Crossplay between the Steam, Microsoft Store, and Xbox versions of the game works, and party codes work to join games.
The backend changes allow us to change the way in-game rewards are distributed to players, but we needed to roll out the new back end before we could begin work on the rewards system in earnest. While we finish up that system, we’ve temporarily made all the dances, cosmetic items, matter compiler re-rolls, and the Rocket Rocket Launcher available to everyone.
We expect to roll out the new system in an update in the next month or two, but before we reach 1.0, we have to reset player progress for most earned items.
Engine Update
With this update, we’ve moved The Anacrusis to the latest version of Unreal 4.27. With that change, we’ve already fixed several crash bugs as a result of this change, including the bug that caused crashes between levels for people with very fast computers.
We’re currently testing fixes internally for the last few DX12 crashes and expect to reenable DirectX 12 support for everyone in the next several patches. DirectX 12 support will allow us to improve framerate dramatically, especially on newer cards. It will also make it possible to support perf and image quality features that are available on newer GPUs.
More (and More Audible) Survivor Voices
As part of this update, we’ve added hundreds of new voice lines. These are mostly concentrated in Episode 4, which you can hear today, and Episode 5, which will be available in the next month or so. But there are also a large number of new lines in all episodes that include special alien callouts (”Did you hear a Gooper?”) to general story (Lance shares things he loves, Liu’s relationship with computers) as well as lines for specific power ups that didn’t exist the last time we recorded voice lines. We've also added more callouts for downed characters and respawn events. These lines should have subtitles for English, but we’ll add the localized lines for other languages in an upcoming patch.
We’ve also done a top-to-bottom pass on the priority of all voice lines, so the Survivors should no longer interrupt important story or mission lines with transient callouts. They should also be smarter about calling out objects that another Survivor has already mentioned or that they’ve already used. Now if you hear a Survivor mention a Matter Compiler, they can see a MC that they haven’t claimed a perk from.
Finally, we’ve adjusted the audio mix so that Survivor callouts should have priority over most other sounds in the game, making them more legible for all players, even in chaotic battles.
AI Director Adjustments
We’ve made substantial changes to the AI Director for this update, which should reduce the frequency of unwanted double special spawns in co-op mode. Additionally we’ve added several new behaviors to the Special aliens in co-op mode. Expect your special aliens to be sneakier and/or more aggressive depending on the class.
Additionally we’ve changed the way the Director handles aliens that it believes are stuck in geometry. Previously, the game killed those aliens, which meant their deaths were attributed to the players. This would dramatically increase game’s measure of player skill, which would increase the number of aliens it was trying to spawn, which would increase the likelihood that aliens would get stuck in a spawn. This feedback loop could unintentionally increase the difficulty of games. Now the Director simply despawns those aliens, which doesn’t increase the game’s perception of the player’s lethality. This should make the game feel fun and challenging without being overwhelming for players of all skill levels playing both Episodes and Versus.
A side-effect of this change impacts Versus mode, where players on the Alien team would occasionally be killed by the Director when it thought they were stuck. Now if the Director thinks you’re stuck, it will trigger a respawn loop, where it will warp you to the leading player and let you choose where to respawn you. When you reenter the game, you’ll have the same health you did when you despawned.
Episode 4 Updates
In addition to the new voice lines added to help players understand what’s happening in Episode 4, we’ve also cleaned up a bunch of places where aliens get stuck in Episode 4, added new alien spawn spots, fixed a bunch of collision bugs, and retuned each of the Episode 4 events to be more impactful.
There are several spots we know of where aliens are still getting stuck or having difficulty finding a path that lets them attack enemies, but if you spot one, please grab a screenshot and post it in the #report-a-bug channel in the Discord.
We’ve also significantly reworked the Episode 4 finale. We’ve provided more clear pathing for Survivors between the three reactors, added a path that aliens can use to move from the reactor room to the control room (so aliens left outside can still attack players after the control room event starts), and simplified the path from the spawn to the reactor room. We’ve also added placeholder sounds to the reactor room, which will be toned down significantly in the next patch.
Player Viewpoint is the Intended Height Again
This is a weird one, and it’s kind of embarrassing to admit. We’re not exactly sure how this happened, but at some point in 2022, the default player height was reduced fairly significantly and no one noticed. We’ve been experimenting with player movement speed during this update process and we noticed that the player height seemed low versus the common aliens. So we’ve reverted the change.
Reduced Common Alien Speed
We’ve reduced the common alien speed to match the speed of a full-health Survivor. We feel that it makes the game less punishing and more fun at the Normal difficulty level, but we’re extremely interested in feedback from players on this change, especially for people who tend to play on Intense or Intenser difficulty.
New Audio
We’ve continued adding environmental sounds to many parts of the game that didn’t previously have them. These include spark and bubble sounds where there are relevant VFX, beeps and boops when doors open or close, made adjustments to the balance of all weapons, including special weapons, so that the audio mix is less fatiguing for longer sessions.
We’ve rebalanced all the special alien announce cries that they make on spawn, so they should be more perceptible when we intend for them to be more perceptible.
We’ve added pain noises to all Survivors, to signal to players that they’re taking damage. Some of them are a bit much and will likely be removed or toned down in an upcoming update.
Lots of Smaller Changes
- Increased the network tick rate for the game significantly
- Increased the heap size on all platforms, which should help minimize some of the weirder crashes we’ve seen
- Added AFK mode for alien players in Versus
- Fixed laggy scoring for Versus mode. Previously, it would take a few moments for the score to register correctly at the start of a new map, now scores for both teams should be correct from the beginning of the round.
- Added tutorials for the current alien Special class to the inventory/tab menu of Versus mode
- We’ve begun utilizing more aggressive precomputed visibility on each level in the game. This should improve performance dramatically, especially on lower-end systems. We’ve done a handful of levels so far and will continue adding more in upcoming patches.
- We’ve also started using mesh streaming on all platforms. This lets us load a lower-quality asset at first and then replace it with higher quality assets when needed. This should help performance on all systems as well.
- Updated the DLSS plugin to the latest version
- Added kill confirmations for specials to hitmarkers
- Players joining games will be routed to Survivors that are alive first.
- Players rejoining Versus games will be routed to the team that they were previously on if there’s a slot available
- Adjusted the holographic sights to work the way holographic sights typically work in other games
- Added the -nomods & -noworkshop startup commands for modders to test with. -nomods will disable all mods, both local and Steam Workshop. -noworkshop will disable only the Steam Workshop installed mods. These are useful for debugging/testing addons if a modder already has a version of the same mod on the workshop.
A Very Spoopy Pre-Halloween Weekend Sale!
