Hey Racers,
We just finished with another round of closed beta and I’m excited to recap what we had learned!
First off, I want to thank everyone who participated in the closed beta and took the time to report bugs and gave feedback on the build. If you would like to follow the news of Airframe Ultra, then I suggest joining the Airframe Ultra Discord. You might just get a hint of something new coming later this summer.
What we learned?
This beta delivered on changes that players asked for in the January beta and uncovered some new pain points that we’ll be addressed in the future. In this recap, I’ll be covering all of it! The improvements, the detriments, and all the feedback from racers making friends and rivals along the way.
First, we added a few easy wins: the added settings for players to personalize their preferences was a great success. Players enjoyed the cops and even killed them in some cases. And the finishline win brought games to a more climactic end.
We definitely have some plans in place to change that third one: some exciting situations where players who dominated in the arenas struggled with closing out the game with a win.The Finishline Win means in order to win the game you need to reach the score to win and then, win a race. Good racers and good fighters should both have good access to winning the game and right now, it feels a bit tilted towards the former over the latter.
The beta introduced new maps that players could burn rubber on. Well, I guess, airframes don’t have tires to burn rubber but uhhh… you get the idea. From deep in the urbanized heart of Megacity West in Nightride to the man-made canyons of Quarry, there were a ton of fun games played. Players highlighted visibility on Nightride as an issue, which is something we’ll look to address in the future. And of course, there were still players who hung out on the warehouse map and chilled on the couch. That couch is about to be the most popular couch in gaming history.
We also introduced more movement tech for players when off their airframes. The community had a blast figuring them out and learning how to chain them together. In fact, I heard on the streets that a fight club popped up, only using these movements and no airframes. If you want to peek at this club here is a video from the community!
Watch on YouTube
Also, I’ve also been tracking the community while they break the maps with shortcuts and ways to skip parts of the track. Fair warning! We may choose to close some of these shortcuts as bugs if we find them to be too disruptive to the competitive side of the game. This is a beta, after all, even if we do recognize the fun in finding cool ways to go out of bounds. If you want to view the movement tech and different skips the community has found, check out the community made Tech and Skips! Some amazing skips there.
Fan Art
We love seeing the fan art made by the community and I want to end our beta weekend recap to share some of them!
Ellihunden on Discord
Brkojquag on Discord
Acidhydra101 on Discord
Thingamagic_and_co on Discord
Walleye_enlightenment on Discord
Seodoro on Discord!
PAX East
Airframe Ultra was the second title we brought to PAX East! The team had a wonderful time hanging out with James and Joar, the developers at Videocult working on Airframe Ultra!
It was exciting to see people walking from all over taking a shot at Airframe Ultra.
Even if you missed PAX East, you can still check out the Airframe Ultra demo on Steam!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2522120/Airframe_Ultra/
-riv otter