Hey everyone!
Stephen here bringing you the next feature vote!
Unlike the previous feature vote, this one was WAAY closer.
- First Place: Better combat
- Second Place: A New Biome/New Giant
- Third Place: Blueprints
Let's talk about combat.
Combat up until this point has been put aside to focus on the automation and survival.
Admittedly, the combat is a big weak spot in the game and feels very unpolished. You guys have clearly noticed.
What's our goal with combat?
A big theme of the game is that the player is just trying to stay alive. We decided long ago that we didn't want to give the players weapons that let you be the aggressor, and instead, only arm you with tools to defend yourself. The hope is to make the player feel more vulnerable and eliminate the possibility of the player at no point "conquering" or "mastering" the world like in many of the other survival games.
How do we make it better?
We'll be focusing our next questionnaire on more specific details around combat and how we can improve it, but here is what we do know:
- We need to improve creature pathfinding. They're get, they glitch out, they fly through walls. We can't have that.
- We need to get rid of the random creature attacks.
- We need to fix creature capture, by adding Dispensaries.
Everything else will be decided by your votes!!!
Dispensaries?
Dispensaries are large elevators you find in the wild that need to be activated. Once you activate it the dispensary emits a loud signal that attracts all sorts of wonderful creatures from the dark (all of which will be trying to kill you). If you can stay alive within that radius for a certain period of time, the elevator will arrive to the surface and deliver a special item, the sound will shut off, and the creatures will go back to the dark.
You'll be able to keep all the creatures you manage to knock out during battle.
Does this mean those random creature attacks are going away?
Yes. We want to separate building from combat. If you're in "the zone" when you're building, it can be pretty disruptive to have to deal with the onslaught of creatures.
By adding dispensaries, the player gets to choose when they want to engage in combat. This creates a safe space in your base to create, prepare, and explore the dangers….
At least, that's what we hope. This is all just brainstorming at this point.
In the battle patch, we'll also be fixing creature pathing, trying to polish the creatures movements and introduce a couple of new battle items.
A New Biome/New Giant
Is coming. But not for a while. Our first priority is to finish the picker-pal update, and then combat.
Both of these patches are pretty big chunks of work, and we expect this will occupy all of our attention through 2021 (and maybe more).
Localization.
It's very clear that the two most popular languages for Atrio that haven't been localized are German and Spanish. We are talking about having the community help us with localization, but this won't happen until 2022. Mike and I are in the middle of writing the rest of the story, and it often goes through a ton of edits. Once the story is complete, we can finalize all of the text and /be able to start looking at localization.
This voting helps us build a roadmap to proper localization, so we'll be keeping this in our back pocket for the future!
PickerPal Update
Is coming along nicely. Francois has successfully prototyped our first version, and now it's time to fully implement them (which, sadly, is like 90% of the work).
The team took a much needed break from Atrio to make Squid game. If you're interested, go watch it!
Expect to hear from us once the Pickerpal update is complete!
Stephen + The Isto Team