As promised last week, the first Kepler build was made available as an opt-in beta last Sunday. There have been two patches since then to fix potentially significant bugs, but at least some players have made it to the game's end.
Here are the changes relative to Jupiter (the last opt-in beta):
Non-spoiler changes in Kepler:
- New side-quests
- 27 new anomalies
- Additional void regions
- Changes to existing missions
- Difficulty / skill roll modifiers now in 5% increments
- New alien
- Several changes to late game
- Player drones
- Ability to toggle mission goal tracking
- New music tracks
- Three new achievements
- New analytics tracking for various progress metrics, localization
- If anomaly image changes during anomaly, the last image will appear in the log
- New enemy weapon
- New ship modules
- New technologies
- New achievements
- Numerous balance changes
- Changes to fighter sounds, trails
- Changes to enemy AI
- NPCs now automatically aggro'd by attacks to their allies (unless also allied with aggressor)
- Refactor fighter drone logic
- Various performance optimizations
- Various UI fixes
- FPS limit option
- Priority mission identification
- Fixed transient objects, screen shake persisting after game load
- Added discovery sounds/tier labels
- Block players from interacting with cloaked ships
- Fix several minor anomaly bugs reported by players
- Fix for potential soft-lock in late game
- Fix for null reference exception
- Added some missing gamepad UI indicators, controls
Known Issues:
- Loading a game during a transition (such as a wormhole) can break the game camera
- Plasma range extender doesn't unlock
- Player drone behavior/balance needs some work
Since Jupiter was never promoted to default, unless some critical bug appears, I hope to make Kepler the default build once enough players have finished it that I'm confident in the stability.
If you're about to start a playthrough, you may want to switch to Kepler, as it has the most content/improvements, although there may still be some undiscovered bugs. (Opt-in instructions here).
Until next week!
- Kevin