Hello Riftbreakers!
We are happy to tell you that The Riftbreaker: Prologue is receiving a major update today, including hundreds of fixes, tweaks, balance changes, and most importantly - the save feature.
Finally! What took you so long?!
Yeah, we know… Let’s answer this question in two parts.
Part One: The Save Feature
When we first released The Riftbreaker: Prologue we thought that it would serve as a bite-sized teaser of the full game. It was meant for around 30 minutes of gameplay and as such wouldn’t need a saving feature at all. It was also at a time when the save system was quite unstable and going through a lot of changes, so even if we enabled it, we couldn’t guarantee compatibility of the save states between versions of the game.
It turned out that a lot of you have been playing the Prologue for a lot more time than 30 minutes. In fact, we received multiple screenshots from users documenting that they have spent more than 50 hours playing it. That’s insane! We have never expected that, nor did we expect a vibrant modding scene forming on our Discord (www.discord.gg/exorstudios) for a game that hasn’t even been released yet. Now that our save system is more robust and well polished, we can enable it in The Riftbreaker: Prologue.
Part Two: Delays Between Beta and Prologue Updates
Parallel to The Riftbreaker: Prologue we also have a Closed Beta going on. We have been publishing updates to it quite regularly, but not all of them have made their way to the Prologue. The reason is that Beta players are more willing to accept the game becoming unstable and crashing. They know that they are testing an experimental version of the game and technical difficulties are expected to happen.
The Prologue is different - a player who downloads it shouldn’t have to worry about the game becoming unstable or encountering severe bugs that prevent them from progressing further. It’s meant to be a demo of the game, showcasing all the advantages and giving an idea of what the gameplay in the full version might look like. That is why we were quite cautious about what changes we have been pushing to the Prologue version.
Those are the reasons why this update has taken us so long and why there was a disparity between the Beta version and the Prologue. As we get closer to release we are going to do our best to keep the Prologue up to date.
Without further ado, let’s take a look at the changelog for today’s update:
FEATURES
- You can now save the game in The Riftbreaker: Prologue. If you find any issues with the save system, please report them to us.
- The crafting screen has received a massive overhaul. All feedback is appreciated.
- All game menus can now be operated on the gamepad using a software cursor controlled by the analog sticks on your controller.
- When Mr. Riggs loses all weapons in any of his hands, the game automatically equips a basic version of the power fists. You are no longer defenseless after dropping all the boomsticks.
- Max FPS limiter has been added to the settings menu. Thanks to this option you can manually reduce the maximum workload of your GPU without enabling V-Sync.
- Cursor size setting has been added to the settings menu. There are three available sizes and the game chooses the right one according to your screen resolution, but you can change it manually if need be.
- New ribbon effects have been added to all throwables, melee attacks and bigger projectiles, such as rockets. They are fully dynamic and much better at showing you exactly what's going on on the screen.
- New pipe system - now with much fewer bugs!
CHANGES
- Changed the basic research tree layout and costs: - geothermal lvl1 is easier to get - solar and wind lvl 2 and 3 are easier to get - cultivators are much cheaper to research
- Much bigger solid material storage - +200 from +100 at level 1, +400 from +200 on level 2 and +800 from +400 on level 3.
- Added a sound for collecting dropped weapons.
- Tweaked some weapon mods - some are less powerful, some are actually useful now.
- Tweaked how foliage fire is spreading for all you pyromaniacs.
- Ground textures have been tweaked to give them more contrast.
- New sorting order for resources on HUD.
- Less powerful reflect damage upgrade.
- Ammo storage and solid material storage buildings now have separate models for all building levels.
- Longer protection time for loot pickups.
- Reduced arming timer in mines.
- Much brighter flashlight on the mech.
- Added support for screenshots in auto saves.
- SettingsMenuScreen: `vibration` and `camera_shake` are now power sliders, allowing you to fine-tune the intensity of those effects.
- Continue Game' option has been added to the main menu. It will load the newest available save file.
- "How to play" removed from options because you know how to play.
- Icons added to shielding research.
- Tweaked build menu order for defense category. This is still not the final version of the build menu, but it will do for now.
FIXES
- Lifesteal gives back hitpoints only when damage is dealt to enemies.
- Improved CPU and GPU performance, especially on larger maps with lots of creatures.
- Improved performance for scenarios with large radar coverage.
- Grass models have been changed to have a lower impact on the GPU.
- Updated seed for the GPU benchmark.
- Fixes for metal floor 3x3 and 2x2 tiles appearing darker in some conditions
- Fixes for memory harvesting and leaks.
- Fixed raytracing glitches and crashes.
- Fixed a lot of random crashes and performance issues.
- A lot of other fixes, changes and improvements that were never logged and forgotten.