ENTER THE DRAGON
1.0, codenamed DRAGON, will be unleashed on Tuesday, November 1st at 12:00pm PST. Along with being a culmination of all the improvements implemented during Early Access, we're excited to share some new improvements.
The base price of the game will not increase, and we will be participating in a launch week discount.
DEVELOPMENT BETA
An early build is currently available for testing in the beta branch. Lots of work will continue in this branch until Tuesday.
To access it, right-click the game in your Steam library, click "Properties" and select the "Betas" tab. Select "beta" from the dropdown menu before clicking "OK." The game will begin downloading the beta version.
If you have any feedback about the following additions, feel free to post them in the forums. A lot has been tweaked, so if any technical issues arise, please report those as well.
NEW DIFFICULTY
DRAGON DIFFICULTY unlocks after beating the campaign. Fighters are the only units available to you, and each mission is rebalanced with new timings, new enemy fleets, and new enemy loadouts.
When we first launched the game, some of you asked to opt-out of taking your capitals in order to have a greater challenge. This does that and more, offering a tuned experience that tests your interceptor piloting to the fullest. You will be required to truly understand your loadout, your enemies' loadouts, and the parameters of the mission.
This mode was super fun to work on because it is incredibly pure, and knowing the size of the player's fleet along with their skill level lets the mission be tuned more aggressively than normal. In our opinion, the game is at its strongest in the cockpit, and this mode takes advantage of that.
INTERDICTORS
With DRAGON DIFFICULTY comes INTERDICTORS, which will prevent your fighters (and allied assault transports) from warping out until they are destroyed.
Idle long enough for the flagship to arrive and you might be trapped until you can eliminated its electronic-warfare minions.
Along with interdictors, TARGET JAMMER FRIGATES make appearances on some missions, preventing your highest DPS from firing its weapons until this electronic-warfare frigate is destroyed.
FLAGSHIP HUNT
Some advanced players took it upon themselves to try and defeat the traitor flagship in every mission. We thought this was pretty cool, so we added gameplay around this.
Each mission's flagship has been given a unique commander and a custom escort fleet. They are designed to be extra challenging while offering super-capital battles even in missions that didn't originally support them.
Achievements are granted for each flagship you are able to kill during the campaign while playing on HARBINGER DIFFICULTY.
OTHER NOTABLE IMPROVEMENTS
We've improved the game in many other ways since the last update. Here they are:
- Found and fixed several small memory leaks
- Added option to start missions in the cockpit (as opposed to tactical mode)
- Several small polish items, such as inbound fleet warp effects
- Rebalanced subsystem repair times, they'll often stay disabled for longer
- Increased ECM pulse damage for allied fighters
- Buffed shield damage booster effectiveness (now 250%)
- Tweaked cockpit UI for readability (particularly with off-screen targets)
- Reworked The Physician mission and encounter skybox
- Reworked The Quartermaster mission, now with cover
- Fixed kamikaze behavior for enemy fighters, gave certain fanatics the Kamikaze Chassis upgrade
- Traitor flagship torpedo launchers may now be disabled
HOTAS UPDATE
To be absolutely clear, HOTAS controllers are not officially supported and are not guaranteed to work. Some HOTAS controller do work well with the game, but they will remain at-your-own-risk.They were becoming a huge, never-ending time sink, so no more work will be done to support them.
Known throttle issues:
Thanks, and good hunting!
