We're currently working on a huge update that will change up the scope of our metagame by a lot.
At the moment Rogue Command is a roguelike. In the sense that you never get any upgrades between runs that make you stronger, only access to new things in the arsenal.
The next update will change that and shift the progression to a more roguelite system. Every XP level you unlock will give you access to Archive Tokens that will allow you to unlock nodes in the Ancient Archive. A collection of battle wisdom shared in the Engineer database.
This will allow you to further customize your playstyle by choosing from a huge variety of nodes. Some are straight forward stat increases, others allow you to get more control over your builds.
You can emphasize your economy, your defense or go all out for more damage. You can trade in engineer lives for more start crystals. Add new nodes to the reward maps and much much more...
It is also super easy to assign and reassign nodes, clicking on a node further down the tree will unlock all the needed ones before as well and shift clicking left or right unlocks the whole stack or refunds all.
A personal favorite is the new Engineer enemy sensor, that allow you to spot enemies even in the fog of war.
You can see the engineer here watching over an upgraded start crystal field and already sensing the enemies across the map, revealing their location on the minimap. (the range is a bit higher here for testing).
We definitely did not start with this type progression in mind. That's why it is a rather late addition.
This being our first game we had a (in hindsight) pretty naive idea about how we would balance this game. It would just be one difficulty tuned just right and that would be it.
But having the game actually being played by thousands and thousands of players made it clear fairly quickly that we had to introduce ways to adjust this. People were complaining to almost equal parts that game was way too hard and way too easy.
At the same time the landscape of games changed as well. We fell in love with a lot of survivor-type games, like 20 Minutes till Dawn, Halls of Torment, Death must Die and many more.
And while we never said that we would never introduce roguelite elements to RC, we definitely said that it was not likely to happen.
I know some people are really not a fan of this type of progression, although I feel like that sentiment has gotten less prevalent since we started working on the game back in 2019 (oof). With seeing how elastic the challenge in the game is though and how some people really struggle while still putting dozens of hours into it, it just seems like a natural fit. And since it also allows us to introduce different types of effects and upgrades, that would not be doable with the current Hacks and Upgrades system it also really extends the philosophy of modular builds that is the very core of the game.
We hope that most of you will enjoy the new system and can not wait to see the new ways you come up with the break the game. We don't know exactly when we will roll out the new system, but at least for the beta branch it should be fairly soon.
Balance will of course be adjusted as part of this rollout. We were planning to make the default difficulty a lot harder anyway and the fact that the player now has ways to get stronger necessitates this even more. It will however definitely never be the case that you have to grind like crazy to just get through the base ascension. Our goal was always to have the game be so hard, that I (Mario) can juuuust beat the final Ascension, maybe after a couple of tries. And that without using any of the metagame upgrades. Because - well - until now they did not exist... And because we think that this will allow most players to finish the game by beating Ascension 10, if they either get better or make clever use of the Ancient Archive unlocks. For the hardcore there is always the challenge of the Heat Levels after that.