Hello Reclaimers,
Hell of a day, huh?
It’s been a rollercoaster of a launch and we’ve gotten lots of feedback, both positive and negative. We’re taking both seriously. We’re currently working on a patch for today with some “safe” smaller improvements, and cooking up a plan to address more major points of critique in the immediate future.
Thanks to everybody who’s been part of this launch — both for your enthusiasm, and for letting us know how we can make Rogue Core better.
Busy days ahead! Let’s get into it.
Smaller short-term fixes coming in a patch today
There’s a whole lot of feedback to process, and much of it has to do with systems that are pretty deeply baked into how Rogue Core is designed. Those will take a bit of time to tackle. But we’ve identified some stuff closer to the surface that we can fix right now to help smooth out and improve people’s first impressions of the game.
Later today we’ll be rolling out a day-one hotfix focusing on smaller, “safe” fixes. Basically, stuff we can do right now without setting everything else on fire.
In that, you can expect:
- Improvements to the tutorial: Reducing the post-processing effects during the tutorial, and clearly mentioning the photosensitivity toggle in settings. Also, more clearly explaining the Workbench/Toolbox system (more tutorial improvements coming later).
- Difficulty tweaks: Smoothing out the new player’s experience by extending time limits on Depths 1 and 2, and slowing down enemy spawns in the critical threat level
- Bug fixes: Standard stuff here; preventing crashes, softlocks, other high-priority issues
- Musical diversions: Adding 3 new tracks to the Jukebox (Jazz, Jungle & Blues)
These will be coming in a few hours, and we'll post the full patchnotes here on Steam.
Key frustrations: timer, shared upgrades, and ammo
When we look at what people don’t like about Rogue Core, three main pain points stand out:
- Lots of people think the timer isn’t fun.
- Shared upgrades can be frustrating and interrupt the flow of the game.
- Ammo economy is a big issue.
These certainly aren’t the only issues we’re seeing, but they do seem to be the biggest. Both in that they’re mentioned most frequently, and they take the most fun out of the experience. So we’re making them our immediate priority.
We don’t want to just rush out a knee-jerk panic fix for these things. It’ll take a second for us to reflect on how to improve them, and then to build and test those improvements. It’s not an overnight fix, but it is our main focus right now.
We’ll update you once we’ve got more here. Until then, you can trust that we hear you loud and clear, and we’re working on it.
Roadmap coming tomorrow
In light of your feedback, we’re changing up our roadmap. We want to focus on the stuff that’s most feasible for us to fix quickly, that’ll make the biggest difference for people who don’t feel like Rogue Core is up to their expectations.
We’ll post that tomorrow here on Steam. That ought to give you a clearer picture of how we’ll go about developing Rogue Core from here, and what to expect from us in the weeks and months to come.
All of us, laying aside any gripes or praises, want Rogue Core to be the best it can be. Early Access is just square one, and we’re excited to see how the game grows from here.
Hope everybody’s doing well. Talk soon!
With love,
-The Ghost Ship crew