Hello again, space lovers!
Thank you for checking out the game and new update, whether you're a new or returning player.
Now that the update is out on both Steam and Xbox, it's about time for another writeup recapping what we're doing and what's next, including how this update launch went, our immediate fixes and changes, and Roadmap plans.
It's a lot of good stuff, and we want to give you as much info as we can so that you're not left in the dark until summer, which is when we want to drop Update 4.
We mention a lot of this in our latest Q&A stream, so if you want to listen to us talk for an hour and absord the info you can do that as well:
Listening to what y'all have been saying, it sounds like you enjoyed a lot of the new features!
Heat, map changes and sliding were all very well received, so now we're very confident that future changes like this will also get the Thumbs Up of Approval from the community.
Now right away it became clear that our enemy rework and difficulty balancing was a little overtuned.
We think you all enjoyed the changes to enemy AI and bullets themselves, but spawn numbers and health were not balanced correctly.
We've now adjusted these values to make Trivial, Easy and Moderate feel appropriately difficult again and stop enemies swarming you.
We gave our AI Director system the ability to increase the gap between spawns depending on your HP and if a teammate died recently, so it will now be easier to make a comeback and not get stuck in a death spiral.
You may have also noticed some stuttering or freezing when shooting or doing actions for the first time after launching the game. This is related to our new shader warmup after switching to Unity 6 and using DX12. Players on AMD cards specifically have noticed this.
We should have these performance hitches ironed out for everyone soon with more hotfixes, but until then you will get a better experience using DX11, which is now the recommended default on startup.
There are other issues reported on both platforms for a few players (can't interact, keybindings being wrong etc). We're aware, and these will be fixed with the above hotfixes.
If you want to help report one of these bugs, put as much info as you can into a discussion thread or join our Discord and do a bug report there.
So - a banger update, with some issues that we are taking care of posthaste.
Thanks for being patient with us and, more importantly, reporting all these issues with such efficiency!
Aside from the next big Summer Update (Update 4) that we will talk about below, we want to drop an Update 3.1 with some smaller but still great improvements in about sometime in May.
We have improvements to the Server Browser that we can add sooner rather than later, so look forward to more info displayed about the available lobbies like what difficulty the current mission is and what sector that lobby is in.
Here's what we're initially planning for, but more things can be added or switched around:
Player Ship 3
We know you've been waiting for this one. It will be a little bigger than the Catamaran and focus on heavy firepower. You will see sneak peeks of how it's coming together in the coming months if you check our socials from time to time.
Persistent Inventory / Loot update
Changes to Player & Ship Health & mission economy
Ship combat rework and boarding enemy ship experience
Similar to the ground enemy rework from the Heated Update, we want to do the same to enemy ships. Make them more distinct, rewarding and fun to fight. The Corvette should feel more like a "mini boss" than a bullet sponge.
Renown system (long term progression)
New ship components
Joining a lobby mid-sector
So with all that said, here's an updated roadmap to reflect how we're prioritizing some features. We're also being more transparent with our timeline and intentions.
One of these that you will notice is that story content has been pushed up to next year. We believe we still have plenty of gameplay refinement and features to introduce that's more important to the overall experience.
We hope that you agree with us on this, and won't be too bummed if the continuation of the story has to wait a bit longer. Everything will be added to the game eventually - we're not going anywhere.
Thank you as always for your support!
We will be right here working on the Summer Update, so stay tuned for sneak peeks of the new ship and further details as we get closer to those warm, sunny months.
Stay vigilant, and fly safe ❤️
- The Keepsake Crew