Hey there Gungeoneers,
On Tuesday we released Exit the Gungeon on PC and Switch, the bite-sized spin-off to our first game Enter the Gungeon. With XTG we took the opportunity to make a smaller, more arcade, more immediate game that we hoped Gungeon fans would enjoy, where we could build and test a new set of dev tools to be able to deliver better, more performant, more stable games, faster. Many of you have survived Enter the Gungeon release days on various platforms, and may even know that one of the reasons we halted development on it was due to the headache of working in an increasingly brittle engine. We wanted to give Gungeoneers something new to play, relatively quickly, without having to go back to square one. Exit the Gungeon is the result of those efforts, and its release has been by far the most stable and most performant release we have put out, while also showcasing a number of the systems we’ve been working hard on.
And, we are happy to see that many of you are enjoying the game, but we’re also very aware of those that are not. We’ve received a lot of feedback over the past 48 hours - some of it relates to issues with XTG that we can and will address, but some of it is based on unfavorable comparisons to Enter the Gungeon. It is clear that a decent number of people were expecting XTG to be a full sequel to ETG, something that was never part of the concept and something we regret not making clearer in the game’s promotion. When XTG was announced last year, we made a post on reddit explaining what the game was, as well as including the words “smaller” and “spin-off” in our press releases, and we thought that knowledge had propagated to the Gungeon community at-large. It seems we were wrong. Including expansions, Enter the Gungeon was developed for more than five years, with its last expansion (A Farewell to Arms) releasing less than one year ago in April 2019. Exit the Gungeon has had a much shorter development time, and we had hoped that the relatively quick development time coupled with the lower price point would communicate what size and shape of game to expect.
Additionally, we did not adequately communicate the core gameplay of Exit the Gungeon, in which your gun rapidly changes throughout your run (which Gungeon fans will recognize as a blessed run). This wasn’t called out in the game’s description, and has been jarring and unexpected for many players. For this we especially apologize; we did not intend to mislead any Gungeon fans, and we’ve updated the store descriptions to emphasize “smaller” “spin-off” “arcade-style” and to call out the Blessed runs/gun switching nature of the game.
All that said, we’re certainly not ignoring the feedback. We have spent the last several months hard at work trying to deliver the best and most polished version of this game we possibly can; we wanted dearly to make a game that was fast, fun, challenging, and filled with puns and other Gungeon humor, even if it was not scoped to be a “true” sequel. We believe that we delivered on that goal, but we will also continue to listen and respond to criticism. XTG is a smaller game, and a different one; it is more action and less roguelike, but it’s full of Gungeon characters and humor that we hope you’ll get to experience.
One thing we should also mention here is that the Glocktopus is not currently in the game, but will debut in an upcoming free update. When we had the trailer commissioned months ago, we fully intended the Glocktopus to be part of the launch content, but as launch approached, we felt that we would have to rush him to fit him in, and we know he deserves better.
As far as bug reports and feature requests go, we will as always do our absolute best to fix reported issues quickly and improve the game with your feedback. To that end, we submitted a patch last night to Steam which includes several soft lock fixes, changes to charged weapons, the restoration of some ETG gun names, and more. You can read the full patch notes here. We’re currently working on more improvements, including some requested control options and balance tweaks, which you can expect in a patch soon as well.
You can report bugs or other ideas & suggestions here:
https://support.exitthegungeon.com
Please keep making suggestions. Enter the Gungeon wouldn’t be what it is today without your feedback, and we are listening!
Sincerely,
Dodge Roll.