Hi Divers,
Ahead of our upcoming patch next week, we want to give a peek behind the curtains and talk a bit more about what our team’s been working on, and what’s coming next with Starlight Re:Volver.
First and foremost, we want to extend our biggest thanks to our players and our community. We launched in Early Access to build Starlight Re:Volver alongside our community, and your feedback has been incredibly valuable. Being able to work so closely with players who care as deeply about SR:V as us has been one of the highlights of development.
Our focus for the October patch has been addressing top priority launch feedback from our community that needed a bit more time to get right. While full patch notes will be shared closer to release, we want to highlight three key improvements coming soon: key rebinding, deko re:runs, and networking updates.
Key Rebinding
This has been one of the most requested features since Early Access launched, and we’re excited to finally roll it out. Our UX team’s goal is to make Starlight Re:Volver accessible to as many players as possible, and key rebinding is a step in that direction.
Some notes from our UI Engineer:
We’ve actually been working on this feature since before our Early Access launch, but it turned out to be more complex than expected, since Starlight Re:Volver uses two separate input systems: Unity’s built-in input framework, and a secondary system that leverages our UI for any menu/UI navigation. Unity supports rebinding relatively easily, but our UI layer unfortunately came with very little support, which meant that we had to build a new system from scratch to allow for both sides to communicate and support remapping in real time. This required not only building a new system to remap our UI controls, but also rebuilding our translation layer between the two systems so that SR:V could correctly register new inputs at runtime, rather than being locked to settings baked in at build-time.
Even after the core systems were in place, key rebinding came with a lot of tricky edge cases that had the potential to leave players stuck or with broken inputs, so we decided to pull it from our Early Access launch because it wasn’t up to our quality standards. Supporting both mouse + keyboard and multiple controller types added even more complexity, and given our weak controller support during launch, key rebinding would have made an already poor experience even worse. Our priority was to first get controller support fully stable, which we shipped in the September patch. With that groundwork done, we’re finally ready to roll out key rebinding in this October update.
That said, we still consider key rebinding to be in beta. Some actions (like basic attacks and a few menu controls) can’t be remapped yet, since we want to avoid any setups that could leave the player in a broken state. Please give it a try once the patch drops, and, as always, our team appreciates all your feedback and bug reports!
Deko Re:runs
We know exclusive or “FOMO” dekos have been a hot topic, and we've been reading through the feedback threads and the discussions happening on Steam, social media, and in Discord. When we originally released early supporter cosmetics, it was our way of thanking our early supporters; it was never our intention to create any sense of exclusion or frustration for the community.
Moving forward, we are doing away with FOMO dekos entirely. That means all future dekos will be available for crafting permanently or at the same time each year (seasonal). We are also re:introducing past cosmetics in a new form so that players who missed them have another opportunity to obtain them. To start, we’re excited to announce the following deko re:runs coming in our October patch:
The two deko series that we distributed alongside our September patch (E:MO recolor pack and Falling 4 U recolor pack) will be available at Fox
A re:color of Spring Fling Kira (Flower Power Getup) will be available at Frankie
Re:colors of our summer swimsuit Bowline series will also be available at Frankie
We also want to acknowledge player feedback that the time investment required for dekos has been higher than expected. This update is part of our effort to revisit our deko strategy, and to make cosmetics more approachable and rewarding for everyone who spends time in the game.
Networking Updates
We’ve also received feedback that players, especially ones in regions other than NA, have been experiencing instances of rubberbanding and desync/networking issues. Improving our networking has been a big focus for our engineering team, but one that took longer to nail down. This upcoming patch includes a networking update that should help resolve instances where players would experience desynchronization from their party. We’ve been testing directly with players across regions who have been experiencing issues previously, and we’re hopeful that this patch will help things feel tangibly better.
On top of networking updates, we’ve also adjusted our matchmaking so that parties will be kept together at the end of dives – this was another feature that was widely requested from our community that we’re excited to finally release. This means that, after a dive ends, you and your party can vote to either dive again immediately, or return to NIM. In both cases, you will be kept together with your party.
Starlight Re:Volver's Direction
Starlight Re:Volver’s initial release did not go as we had hoped, in part because we tried to do too much all at once and therefore did not deliver a complete experience. As a result, we are making the hard decision to return to “pre-production”, which means going back to the drawing board and re-designing the core game structure.
To do this, our development team needed to shrink to a core group of designers, engineers, and artists. Pahdo Labs is now a core team of 15 full-time developers, and we are still working with many of our previously full-time artists and devs on a part-time or contract basis.
Starlight Re:Volver is no longer aiming to be an MMO, or “MMO-lite”. We believe that this vision is too broad for us to deliver as our studio’s first shipped title. Instead, we are converting Starlight Re:Volver to be a co-op roguelite, which means that it will be available to play fully offline with local save files. This is a self-contained Starlight Re:Volver that you will fully own with no risk of losing access during an End of Service.
This re-creation of our game will be named “Starlight Revolver: Ignite”. We are testing a new progression system with story and quests, a new dungeon structure more worthy of replaying, and a new way to interact with NIM and its residents.
We are not going dark; the transition from Starlight Revolver to Starlight Revolver: Ignite will happen in public, via monthly updates, in close collaboration with our community. We are grateful to our players for being incredibly flexible and supportive of the major changes we have been making to our game so far, and want to make Starlight Re:Volver the best game it can be with the participation and support of our Early Access community.
