v1.34.2.0 - Rebalanced Training difficulty for Survival/Blitz modes, new console

A new update has been released for BlastZone 2! (v1.34.2.0) This update focuses on rebalancing the Training difficulty of Survival and Blitz modes. This involves several aspects, including enemy spawn rates, bullet firing rates, difficulty scaling between waves, and messaging to the player. The difficulty of earlier waves have been reduced, but later waves maintain their difficulty and there are fewer starting lives to balance the overall experience. This was done to help ease new players into the game and learn its systems before the difficulty ramps up.

This update also includes localization fixes, a new command console, and a crash fix. Here are the full release notes for v1.34.2.0:

• Rebalanced the Training difficulty for Survival and Blitz modes
  -Greatly reduced the enemy spawn rate baseline for waves 1 and 2
  -The spawn rate significantly increases each wave until wave 7 and 8 nearly reaches the spawn rate of previous versions
  -Reduced bullet firing rate of Type A Enemies
  -Reduced starting lives from 5 to 4
  -Added a popup message when entering wave 7 to instruct the player to use charge weapons here
  --Charge weapons are stronger in Training mode, and can break through large groups of enemies
• All Type A enemies in Survival/Blitz modes now wait a short period of time before starting to fire bullets
• Added support for centered message text during gameplay
  -Ship/Mode/Difficulty unlock messages now use centered text
  -The new Training mode Wave 7 message uses centered text
• Addressed text that was not localized for Ship/Mode/Difficulty unlock messages
• Unlocking a new ship now immediately saves progress to disk
• Fixed a rare crash bug when closing the game
  -Was caused by a rare thread collision when shutting down Steam services
• Added a new command console interface
  -Press the tilde '~' button to access it
  -Displays a history of previously received messages
  -Press up or down to access previously entered commands
  -This makes it easier to text chat with other players in online multiplayer games
• Added input support for several special character when sending chat messages in online multiplayer
  -Includes the top number bar of special characters, and slashes, brackets, colons, quotes, etc.
  -Double quotes are disabled to prevent packet parsing issues in multiplayer
• Optimizations for the particle system
  -Improves framerate and update time consistency
• Changed menu item and description text for friends list and online lobbies multiplayer
• - Fixed duplicate incoming chat messages in the command console during online multiplayer

As usual, to make sure you have the latest update, launch the game and check the lower left corner for “v1.34.2.0” or higher. Enjoy!