Hello everyone,
We’re happy to release Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2 Pre-order Beta 2 today!
We are currently aiming for a 6PM CET / 5PM GMT / 12PM EST / 9AM PST launch, but stay tuned as we may do a soft release a few hours earlier to make sure everything is working as expected. This Beta will last until the full release of the game on January 24.
In case you missed it last week, you can take a look at our new campaign trailer, breaking down every facet of the 100+ hours that can easily be spent in Armada 2’s single-player offering.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnAEk0Kj8Y4
This second beta features:
- The 12 playable factions
- The 80+ subfactions
- Ranked play
- Updated custom map options with special environmental effects from the first beta.
- Prologue of the campaign
- First sectors of the Imperium and Necron campaigns
The team has worked hard on your feedback from the first Beta and this second Beta will bring a lot of balance tweaks and bug fixes. You’ll find some highlights and a patchlog at the end of this post. Make sure to read our Quick Start Guide and the more detailed How to Start guide to prepare for the Beta.
Much like in the last Beta, we’re really interested in getting your feedback about all aspects of the game: balancing, technical issues, and now also the campaigns, including the Necron and Imperium first sectors.
We’d also like to tackle an important topic as we near the full release of Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2. This game is an incredibly ambitious project for our small team and we’ve worked hard to release a sequel improved in every way over the original. It includes 12 factions and three massive grand campaigns playable in co-op. But as we’re working around the clock to polish every part of the game, we will be forced to release the co-op mode in an early access state on launch. It will also not be available during this Beta phase.
This means that we’re simply not entirely satisfied yet by the level of polish on offer in the co-op mode. It will be available at release but we will continue to improve it and fix technical issues in this mode after launch and our current estimation for the full release of campaign co-op is during March. In the meantime, the co-op mode will be playable on launch but you might experience some technical issues. Your feedback about this mode will be instrumental to make it stable as fast as possible.
Join us tonight for a campaign livestream on Focus Home Twitch channel to discuss the update and give us your opinion!
Pre-Order now to receive access today to the Beta until the release of the game on January 24: https://store.steampowered.com/app/573100/Battlefleet_Gothic_Armada_2/
Pre-Order Beta 2 - Changelog
New Content and features
- 1st Sector of the Imperium Campaign is now available
- 1st Sector of the Necron Campaign is now available
- Added Ship Viewer
- When you create a custom fleet in skirmish, you can access the ship viewer with the associated button
Balancing
- Reworked armor mitigation calculation
- Stronger armor and hull are now more resilient and more in-line with what we originally intended
Multiplayer
- All profiles have been reset for Pre-Order Beta 2
- The game will allow more time for slower players to connect to a game before invalidating it
- Fixed multiple connectivity issues
- Improved netcode to reduce desynchronization issues
- You can now ping on the map in 2vs2, which will be shown to your ally
Bug Fixes
- Multiple localization issues fixed
- Fixed and cleaned several issues in the prologue
- Added mouse and keyboard input in the prologue
- Giant asteroids are now properly displayed and available in custom games
- Multiple optimizations on VFX to improve performance
- Multiple performance improvements on the battle map
- More than 200 bug fixes on gameplay/campaign/graphical settings.
- The AI will now properly ignore Asteroid Fields if they are immune to them
- You can no longer use burn retro while a ship is in mutiny