Hi everyone
It’s time for another update post.
As you might know, the meta-progression update turned into a pretty hefty rework, focused on addressing one of the most frequent pieces of feedback: improving replayability by reducing run similarity. This required a significant refactor of several systems tied to equipment progression and variety.
To the Community
Before we get into it, we'd like to take a moment to thank you for all of your Steam reviews and feedback. Steam reviews and community feedback are the compass guiding the future of Breachway. They’re not just a way for new players to find the game — they provide us with the insights we need to deliver impactful updates. Every review, comment, and suggestion so far has helped shape the journey.
Now let’s break it down:
Equipment Overhaul: More Loot, More Choices
To add some much needed variety to your equipment loadout, enemies will drop equipment as loot.
The type of equipment each enemy drops is based on the faction they belong to, so Starkin might drop Laser weapons more often, while Solarii ships are more likely to drop Flak weapons.
This means your loadout will evolve differently depending on who you’re fighting.
Variable Equipment Quality
Our new equipment quality system now varies items by card slots, subsystem slots, and drafting library tiers (from Mk.I to Mk.III).
No longer is all Mk.I equipment 4 card slots and 1 subsystem slot, all equipment can range from 2 to 8 card slots, from 0 to 3 subsystem slots, based on the equipment quality level.
Quality level is marked by a colored bar on the right side of the equipment UI, as seen in the mockup below (We have 6 different levels at the moment, with more to come).
For example: An early-game Mk.II weapon drop might offer powerful cards but only 2 card slots. So while this may be useful power spike in the short term, eventually you will want to sell it and get something more powerful.
Card Upgrades & Drafting Libraries
In order do differentiate Mk I, II and III equipment more, we added card upgrades. While Mk.I equipment has weaker, basic cards, it can also roll upgraded versions of those cards as rare drafting options, creating more interesting and exciting drafting choices.
Besides more powerful cards, a Mk.II version of an equipment comes with upgraded versions of the Mk.I as the default common picks, creating a clear power progression.
This will also synergize with the Crew leveling system coming out soon after this update, higher crew levels means improved chances to draft rare/uncommon cards on their equipped gear.
Drafting Library Visibility
To handle all of these new cards and equipment drops, you can now click any equipment to preview its draftable cards, no more guesswork required!
(This update just got done yesterday, so excuse the placeholder UI art)
Station and ship status UI polish
We have updated the Ship Status and Station/Store UI to a cleaner look, doing away with the oversized station action buttons, and adding more compact buttons with icons under the "Store" category. Soon we'll fill that empty spot in the station services with a button for hiring a crewmember!
(The image is quite large, click to expand)
Starting loadout and enemy rebalancing
All of these changes also meant we took a closer look at balancing, something what was long overdue. The player now starts with weaker equipment, but will have a lot more opportunities to swap that equipment out for more powerful options as the run progresses. This leads to a more noticeable power increase for players, the further into a run they get.
There’s a lot of exciting content coming soon. This update is a massive undertaking—we’ve more than doubled our card count with upgraded versions, not to mention all the new cards and dozens of new equipment drops enabled by the equipment quality system. We really want to share this with you for feedback as soon as possible.
We’re testing the update internally and refining it this week, then rolling it out to our beta testers, and eventually to a public testing branch as we integrate all the content for this major update.
We'll keep you updated on when the public testing branch will go live.
Thank you
We’ve been heads-down making these changes (sorry for the quiet Discord and Steam Forums!), but your feedback directly shaped this upcoming update. Keep it coming—we’re listening!
—The Breachway Team