Hello Riftbreakers!
The Steam Awards 2025 nominations are open. It would mean the world to us if you decided to vote for The Riftbreaker in the ‘Labor of Love’ category. We’d like to try to convince you why we’re the right fit for this category. In this article, we’ll go through a brief history of the most important milestones we’ve reached so far. We will also tell you what’s next for The Riftbreaker - we are not ready to call it a day just yet!
It is no secret that developing The Riftbreaker has been a life-changing experience for us. We have reached more players than ever before. Hundreds of thousands of you have set out for your Galatea 37 colonization mission, showing your trust and faith in our work. In fact, the total number of players across all platforms and including subscription services has surpassed two million unique Riftbreakers. Each and every one of you has our eternal gratitude.
We have always planned to support The Riftbreaker for a long time, but it is your unwavering interest and support that made it possible. Ever since the launch of the game, we have managed to give you the following:
- Three massive world expansions, each with an entirely new biome to explore, dozens of new technologies, buildings, and weapons, unique fauna and flora, and a new portion of the Story Campaign in the form of paid DLCs.
- Over 90 game updates, improving on the game’s quality of life features, gameplay changes, and thousands of fixes, with a vast majority influenced by your invaluable feedback.
- An entire suite of Editor Tools, which we have used ourselves to create the game. Now, they are in the hands of modders, who are already putting them to good use.
Still, the game was missing something. For years, you have been asking for Co-Op Multiplayer to finally be able to enjoy The Riftbreaker with your friends. We knew that it would take years. We knew that it would require us to rewrite the entirety of the game’s code. We knew it was going to be tough.
We agreed anyway.
The development of the Co-Op Mode ran in parallel to all the updates and improvements we mentioned above. It took much more work than we initially anticipated, but we pushed on, detailing our journey in our series of ‘Co-Op Status Update’ articles. You can give them all a read here.
Finally, on August 25th, The Riftbreaker 2.0 Update was released as a free update. It included:
FOUR-PLAYER CO-OP - Gather your team and conquer Galatea 37 together. You can play the entirety of the Campaign and Survival Modes, as well as the Prologue mission.
EXPANDED ENDGAME CAMPAIGN - A brand-new story arc involving Megastructures - specialized buildings with massive resource and upkeep requirements that will test your planning skills and grant powerful passive boosts in return.
NEW OMEGA-STRAIN CREATURES - These are new, more powerful, and tougher versions of the existing species. They are the new backbone of the enemy hordes, bringing destruction wherever they go.
RANDOMIZED MISSION GENERATOR - After completing all of the main missions in any given biome, you will now have the option to look for new planetary locations. You can either look for hidden treasures and Bioanomalies in exploration-style maps, or you can set up new resource outposts in resource-rich areas.
LOOT SYSTEM REWORK - Crafting is not the only way of getting new gear anymore. You can now find weapons, mech upgrades, and other useful items as loot from enemy creatures, Biocaches, and Bioanomalies.
GAME BALANCE ADJUSTMENTS - We have rebalanced the entirety of The Riftbreaker campaign, taking all your feedback into account. The difficulty modes in version 2.0 have been redesigned to better suit the majority of players.
WEAPON SYSTEM REWORK - We have rebalanced the entire weapons system to improve firepower scaling across the entire campaign.
QUALITY-OF-LIFE IMPROVEMENTS - We’ve added many features, such as mass item disassembly, research search bar, quick multiplayer teleports, and many other options to make your gameplay experience as smooth as possible.
MASSIVE PERFORMANCE GAINS - Since this update required us to rework the entirety of the engine, you will now be able to enjoy The Riftbreaker with much smoother performance, able to handle truly massive bases and enemy numbers.
We were proud of this update, knowing that this was, by far, the best version of the game to date. Seeing that tens of thousands of you downloaded the update and brought your friends along for the ride was the best thing we could ask for. Although it took years to develop, we successfully fulfilled our promise and delivered an update worthy of the 2.0 moniker.
WHAT'S COMING NEXT
A sane person would probably call it quits at this point, but who said we’re sane? The Riftbreaker is our Labor of Love after all, and we’re not ready to say goodbye to it just yet. We still have more updates coming to you in the very near future. In chronological order, these are:
DEDICATED SERVER RELEASE - We will release a self-contained, small (about 500MB), free app that will allow you to host your Riftbreaker sessions on any (decently quick) PC connected to the internet. This way, none of the players will have to take the performance hit that comes with hosting the session (provided that you have a spare PC to host it on).
WORLD EXPANSION IV - OPEN CAMPAIGN - A free content update, featuring an all-new, previously unexplored biome on Galatea 37. The biome will include new map tiles, special encounters, map generator missions, a survival mode mission, and, of course, its own fauna and flora. The update will also feature a brand-new game mode - Open Campaign. Designed for experienced Riftbreakers, this mode will allow you to start a new Campaign in any part of the planet and choose your own path to victory. You will not be bound by any story elements or objective-based research locks - you’re free to do whatever you want.
WORLD EXPANSION V - SURVIVAL MODE UPDATE - We will add an optional endless mode to the well-known Survival Mode. If you choose this option, the enemy waves will scale beyond what was previously possible. Each attack will become slightly stronger, leading to your eventual destruction. This mode will reward skill, strategy, and planning. How long will you last?
We hope that we’re worthy of your vote for the Labor of Love Steam Award in 2025. If we convinced you - cool! If we didn’t - also cool! We’re going to continue working on The Riftbreaker anyway! It’s been a blast so far, and we can’t wait to see what happens next.
EXOR Studios