Hello everyone!
it's 14 days till early access launch! The last two weeks have been rather busy with finalizations and post-beta updates as well as testing, balancing and constant re-checking the to-do lists of stuff that needs done before launch. So this update will again be a bit more organizational...
So how does Early access differ from Beta?
There's been a huge amount of ideas coming from you during our Open Beta. Also an (unexpectedly smaller) list of bugs. And there was a proportionate temptation to fix and implement all these to the Early Access right away. Knowing however that there is no other beta testing before launch, I had to keep the number of changes relatively small (and safe).
Generally the content of Beta will remain the same as Early access launch version.
There are a few UI tweaks, rebalancing changes and Quality-of-life features. And also Steam Achievements. There's also mappable control settings, slightly better tutorials (yes still much to improve there) and a bunch of new Crises to face. One significant point is - your Beta save games will not be usable in Early access version.
Closed Beta is shutting down today
Thanks to all of you participating the Closed Beta. You have been a tremendous help over the past weeks. Unfortunately it is time to shut down the beta branch and prepare the whole system for a new structure. Later today I'm going to shut down the closed beta access. For those who'd like to continue supporting development of this game, I'll have a new beta structure ready after launch. So watch this space for more announcements.
Demo to be disabled in a week
As highlighted in a previous update, I will also be taking the Demo down. One reason is that the Player experience is now too different from the Full Game and thus I don't think it would be a smooth transition from Demo right to the Early access version. Second reason is that during post launch phase, I will not be able to properly support two separate game versions at once (without going crazy). So at the end of this week I'm going to turn the demo off as well.
That's everything for this week. Looking forward to the Launch day in two weeks on Nov 13th.
Cheers,
Ondrej