Hi Brigadiers! Can you believe that Phantom Brigade launched on Steam two and a half years ago? Since then, our small core team of three developers have continuously toiled away at our final vision. In some cases, we’ve ripped apart entire systems to deliver refined features, tighter gameplay, polish, and a deeper expression of what the game could be. We’re in the final stages of playtesting and we’re excited to share a release date very soon for our biggest update yet!
The work we’ve done for the next update is pretty transformative. When we say we’ve ripped entire systems apart, we genuinely mean that. We’ve been working really closely with playtesters to ensure that we could elevate the features you love, and do away with the features that you either didn’t love, or that didn’t fit with our final vision.
Because these changes are so expansive, we want to do a bit of expectation setting with you all. We’ve talked in previous posts about some of the things we’re adding, but in this post, we want to chat about what is NOT making it into the big update.
Okay, let’s start with the big one. We know some players were expecting more narrative from our original launch. We can totally see why; we had CG trailers, intros and named characters in the tutorial, accompanied with VO. This was a blunder on our part and we could have done a better job to set expectations.
We understand that some players want more story and we totally get it! Ultimately, we realized that Phantom Brigade just isn’t that kind of game. So we’ve pulled out misleading content to focus expectations on the core of the game instead—thrilling, high-stakes tactical gameplay.
That meant making events more focused on mechanics rather than story, as well as streamlining cutscenes and removing VO from the tutorial to be more in line with the full game experience. We really want players to be focused on the combat, tactical gameplay and strategic overworld, rather than expecting a game that will provide them a deep narrative.
That said, we ARE restructuring the game’s campaign. While the campaign is not a story-driven experience, it provides you with clear goals and structure all the way to the capital. Some additional backstory and lore will be available through the optional in-game Codex and while we’re shifting the game’s narrative to the background, we’re not removing it entirely.
We hear you - we also want to see a full battle replay of our lone sniper mech taking out an entire enemy squad, or that time we domino’d a bunch of enemy mechs. Believe us, this has come up a lot (at least once a week since launch), and we've put in many hours trying to make it work over the years!
Eventually, we realized that it would not be possible to implement well. The game records changes to thousands of dynamic objects, dozens of animated characters and a myriad of other events every turn. In short, keeping track of everything across the entire fight is not possible without large compromises to other parts of the game.
We have seen some awesome clips from other players who have strung together their single turn recordings to achieve the same effect. We wanted to make this easier to do, so we fixed parts of the game interfering with continuous recordings and provided new options to customize replays.
When we were looking at how to improve the overworld gameplay, something we kept running into was the limitations of the original world map. While the ability to seamlessly travel around the whole country was cool in theory, it ultimately limited us on providing interesting gameplay options for players. We also kept seeing the same thing during playtests - while players had total freedom they did not end up having meaningfully different experiences. Plus, loads of players actually ended up lost or stuck in provinces they were not prepared for. So we decided to completely overhaul the overworld!
Players will progress through separate provinces that gradually unlock based on their strategic choices throughout the campaign. While this approach will not allow driving straight to the capital, it allows us to make a more structured experience with varied landscapes, interesting set piece battles and significant improvements to mission variety. You can read more about what to expect from the overworld changes here (Note: Once players enter a province they WILL still have the freedom to drive around and select missions).
We love this idea! The kicker is that we’d have to entirely overhaul our existing save system to make it work well seamlessly and meet player’s expectations. Since players have the ability to limit their own reloading of saves, dedicated players can still create this experience.
When developing pilots, we considered a bunch of different ways we could go. One potential direction was deep pilot relationships. We decided on a different direction for the next game update and have focused on developing pilots in a way that is directly tied to core combat and other game systems. Each pilot will be a key component in unlocking the combat potential of your mechs!
We have seen a lot of requests for alternate leg types for mechs. Spider legs and quadruped mechs would have been really cool! Looking into it, we realized that supporting these additional body types would require too many new animations and would have challenges due to the small scale of our mechs. Instead we decided to prioritize a comprehensive rebalance of existing parts and adding more depth to existing unit types.
All the big changes coming in the next update are so extensive that unfortunately they won’t be compatible with current save files. Players will need to start a new game to experience all the new and exciting content. HOWEVER! Don’t worry, your old save files will be preserved in a separate folder when you update to the new version. We will also make the current 1.3.4 version of Phantom Brigade available on a separate Steam branch if you ever want to return to this legacy version.
These are the major things we wanted to let you know about ahead of time. Thank you for reading, and for continuing to follow Phantom Brigade on its development journey. Our next post will be to share the update’s release date, so follow/wishlist the game on Steam to be the first to get the news or join our Discord! We’ll be doing more posts about the cool things we have in store for you, so stay tuned! — The Phantom Team