Angels Fall First · published
Hey there AFF Community!
So we're almost there! The Big Day! Our Discord won't stop laughing at us for this silly joke but AFF is actually coming out of Early Access in Two Weeks ™
Over the years AFF has grown into something enormous, and as we prepared for 1.0 we found ourselves with pages and pages of changelogs - improvements that simply deserved to make it into the game before launch, also to minimize the risk of something going up in flames spectacularly on the launch day.
Does it mean AFF will suddenly be an incredibly polished AAA game on July 11? Nope, and we're not hiding the fact it's an old-school passion project that will always come with some degree of jank - but also tons and tons of cool content. Fully expecting some hotfixes being necessary post-1.0 as well.
This update also contains the extensive tutorial our Community has been testing on a beta branch, covering a wide range of topics:
Infantry combat
Commanding your squad on the battlefield
Vehicle controls and requisition
Spaceflight and boarding
An introduction to gamemodes
It also features practice arenas in which you cannot take damage, perfect for learning and trying out the more complex aspects of the game.
And if you've been there, you know there's also 2 new missions coming with 1.0. Let's say the resort they take place on is undergoing some final maintenance before summer and will be open to the public on the 11th ;)
Phew, it's been a long, long journey. We're very aware it shouldn't have been this long. There's a million stories, happy and sad alike, around the development process of AFF and why it took so long. Perhaps we'll share some of them post-release as well?
And whether you've been here since the mod days, joined us somewhere along the Early Access way, or discovered the game only recently, know that we couldn't have made it without you all! We would also like to award some little special in-game cosmetic to all of you who got the game during Early Access, we'll see what we can do about it.
Onwards and upwards!
Tutorial! Or rather 4 of them! Covering infantry, vehicles, ships, command. Plus condensed sandbox maps to try all the guns, vehicles and ships out!
Modern DX11 renderer now fully functional and set as the default
Even smarter and more reactive bots
New loadout items - Mech Flamer, Infused Armour Countermeasure, on ground vehicles, Twin-linked guns for fighters and bombers
Tons of weapon balancing and gunplay responsiveness improvements across the board
More improvements to maps in terms of layouts, cover, collisions, visuals and navigation than a Steam post could hold, tons of polish including new intro sequences
Patched up collision holes and snags inside many of the ship interiors, redesigned parts of the smaller ships' interiors, made the ambient audio inside them more consistent, added extra damage variations
Better performance both in terms of GPU (could probably run on a fridge at this point) and CPU cost of big singleplayer matches
Improved controller support, radial menu now usable on a gamepad, better button layout to match modern FPS standards
Vehicle controls refined, including improved bailout and exit behaviour
Added audio cues for when capital ship subsystems are disabled, switching between flight modes, for when dropship attaches its pod to a capship, added boarding alarm sound that plays for the driver of a boarded capship, plus a lot of improvement soundscape for deployables
Ship weaponry balanced and in some cases renamed to be consistent and distinct, lock-on weapons should be less likely to prioritize disabled subsystems, a bunch of more telling status updates on the HUD when it comes to ships' subsystems
A few utility functions around loadouts that might've flown under the radar before: you are now able to mirror a loadout to the other faction, generate a random loadout, copy and paste loadouts, sort them, also the cosmetic appearance should now properly save when clicking on the different sliders, instead of only when moving the indicator. Various items' loadout descriptions have been adjusted to fit better in the UI
Various UI quality-of-life fixes, pressing the menu button (esc) during match-end voting will now open the scoreboard/voting menu if it's closed, server Browser will now sort servers displaying “versions-out-of-sync” to the bottom of the list, the tacmap should highlight selection arrows for the correct destination (contextually dependent on your orders), improved capturing/neutralizing/stalemate messaging in objectives - should be more accurate/consistent, especially in multiplayer