Hi everyone,
Today marks one year since Breachway launched into Early Access. We can’t believe how fast the time has flown by!
We'd like to start by thanking everyone in our community for their feedback, patience, and support. We're humbled to have such dedicated players.
Looking back
Over the past year, we’ve shipped a few major balance updates, added the Avalanche missile ship, overhauled the Equipment system, and introduced a meta-progression system. Most importantly, a lot of those changes were driven by your feedback.
The last year of feedback has been really eye-opening. The game's vision is a lot clearer now than it was at launch. We've spent a lot of time figuring out where exactly we want to go with Breachway, and the way forward feels clearer than ever.
It’s easy for to get caught up in the day-to-day tasks of fixing bugs, tweaking balance, and adding features, while losing sight of the bigger picture. But for occasions such as this, looking at some numbers really helps put things into perspective:
- 551,086 runs started
- 269,287 boss ships defeated
- Average playtime: 9 hours 57 minutes
That’s a lot of spacefaring, and we’re incredibly grateful to have you along for the ride. Here’s to many more in the year ahead!
Going Forward
If year one of Breachway's Early Access was about adding extra features and refining existing ones, year two is going to be about new content, a better faction system and a more developed universe.
Our goal for this upcoming year is to keep:
- Expanding the game's content
- Improving balance
- Enhancing run variety
- Fully fleshing out the faction system
So the game keeps getting better with every update.
But let's look at what's coming in the very near future:
Breachway's next update - coming October 10th:
Enemy overhaul
We've focused on making enemies easier to understand, with more straightforward card effects and that pose more varied challenges
This means 32 reworked enemies and 8 reworked elites and more than a dozen new enemy cards and effects for the first and second sectors.
Alternate bosses for each sector
Boss variety is something Breachway lacked since launch, we're changing this by adding 4 new bosses you can face at the end of each sector. Sector 1 bosses are done, and sector 2 bosses will be coming in the very next update.
The ability to hire crew in stations
This has been a requested feature for a long time, and something we've always wanted to add. This makes player power scaling more predictable, without being reliant on finding the escape pod to get another crew member.
Crew keyword changes
Crew keywords is a feature with a lot of potential that we really wanted to add, but we never took the time to properly explore.
Right now, we're going through existing keywords, making sure they are all relatively equal in usefulness in the right circumstances and that they all play some part in events.
We'll expand on this further in future updates as well
UI/UX improvements
More information on enemy attacks, such as amount of ignite and shred they will add, and making cards that will be played on their next turn more obvious
Neutral elite encounters and neutral ship skins
Neutral Elites provide the player with a challenge that does not reflect on their faction standing. This enables us to really crank up the impact of faction specific elite encounters in future updates.
We're slowly adding in neutral skins for these encounters
This was another massive rework that took a lot of time, similar to the equipment rework a few months back, both of these are crucial as a base to expand the game from, with more frequent updates. Which is what we're gearing up for!
What to expect this upcoming year:
- Third sector and fourth sectors - The current enemy overhaul is meant to expand our design space in order to create interesting and powerful enemies for the player to face in the third sector and beyond
- Larger and deadlier enemy ships - we're preparing a whole new class of enemy ship models for the later sectors
- More focused and diverse player ship equipment – This is probably the feature we're most excited to work on, it boils down to less cards in each equipment's drafting library, but having drafting libraries more focused on a specific niche that equipment fills. This will move the focus away from what cards you're offered in the drafting screen, and more towards how you load out your ship
- Higher loadout flexibility - We're adding an additional hardpoint to ships and introducing multi-purpose hardpoints that can fit multiple equipment types. This should lead to a more varied build for ships
- Event overhaul - Another part of the game that wasn't fully baked on release, we have a lot of design space to explore here, after we have all of the sectors
- A more meaningful faction system - Tied to the previous task, faction events will now have a deeper impact on your faction relations, which will in turn affect future events you encounter
- More focus on narrative - developing the story and universe of Breachway further
- The 1.0 release
We hope this post gives you an idea of what to expect from Breachway in its second year in Early Access.
We’re a small team, but we’ve learned so much from your feedback this past year.
Every bug report, review, and suggestion has helped us see the game more clearly and guided us toward both the improvements we’ve made and the bigger ones still ahead.
Thank you for standing with us through this first year of Early Access. It’s been a wild ride with its fair share of bumps, but now that we’re starting to hit our stride, our focus shifts to delivering new content, fleshing out the faction system, and making every run feel more unique and rewarding.
See you, Space cowboy
– The Breachway Team