Hey everyone,
It’s finally time for another update!
This one focuses on addressing one of the biggest points of confusion in Breachway: enemy design and combat clarity.
Originally, we tried to make our enemies modular, essentially assembling them from equipment pieces that handled all of their logic and behavior. We hoped this would lead to interesting, emergent encounters.
Instead, it created enemies that were overly complex, confusing, and — ironically — kind of bland.
To make matters worse, enemies hadn’t been updated to use the new equipment and card systems we introduced back in June, meaning they were missing entire mechanics and interactions.
That mix of blandness, confusion, and inconsistent difficulty really hurt the experience, so we decided to rebuild enemies from the ground up.
A Quick Note
Please keep in mind that this update is massive. Dozens of new enemies, over twenty new cards, new station functionality, and a much wider range of possible builds.
We’ve tested everything thoroughly, but there’s only so much a small team can catch when it comes to bugs and balance.
Steam Reviews: Feedback Helps Build Breachway
This is where you come in: your feedback is invaluable. We read through the reviews, and it's a powerful way to let us know what works, what you'd like changed, or if you enjoy the recent patch. Please help us improve this update further by reporting any issues you find and sharing your balance suggestions on the forums or Discord. You can also join our community on our subreddit, r/Breachway.
Rethinking Enemies
We went back to the drawing board. Rather than thinking of enemies as bundles of complex systems, we focused on them individually:
What makes each one interesting to fight?
We also realized a key mistake in our original approach: trying to make enemies play the same cards as the player.
That’s fine for the player, stringing together intricate combos is part of the fun.
But when enemies did it, it just became hard to follow.
So, we set some new design rules:
No more same-turn effects, every change in enemy stats (damage boosts, buffs, etc.) don't affect any cards played in the current turn, giving you time to react.
All enemy actions must be clearly readable.
And most importantly, it’s okay for enemies to have unique, even overpowered cards. This makes their actions more impactful, without the kind of combo gymnastics a player would need to go through.
Patch Notes
Enough talk however, here are the patch notes for this update:
Reworked 42 enemies: some have been updated, most are brand new
8 New elites, completely replacing the old set
4 New bosses for the end of sector 1, each offering a unique challenge
Reworked Sector 2 boss: the old version was the epitome of what went wrong with our enemy design: overly complex, hard to follow, and frustratingly difficult. It’s been retired for now, and we’ll add more variety for Sector 2 bosses soon.
New enemy cards and effects: first sector enemies are simpler and easier to read, while second sector enemies now have a few new tricks up their sleeves.
Improved enemy card clarity: you can now see the amount of shred and ignite enemy attacks will do, without having to read the card text (which is still strongly recommended!)
Crew hiring at stations: you can now recruit new crew members at stations. It’s not cheap, but an extra card slot can make all the difference.
Removed the Tactical hardpoint type: shield and hacking equipment now goes on the Utility hardpoint instead. This makes ships more similar in the short term, but with the upside of opening up a lot more build variety during your run. We’ll keep refining ship differentiation in future updates.
New map node icons: reward nodes, merchants, repair ships, and fuel ships each have their own distinct icon and are now visible on the map.
Improved card drafting: you’ll no longer see the same card shown twice in a row (though there’s a known issue where you might still see duplicates in two-option drafts — we’ll fix that soon!).
Neutral combat events, both for Elites and regular enemies. This allows us to make the faction combat encounters more impactful in the future, and allows you to hunt elites free of any repercussions on faction relations
Many smaller changes and fixes throughout the game.
What’s Next
We know everyone’s eager for the third sector, but we couldn’t keep building new content on a shaky foundation. We felt this rework was necessary.
The good news is that we’ve built a ton of new enemies recently, and that momentum isn’t slowing down.
The third sector is now our top priority, and moving forward, our focus is on iteration and maintaining a steady cadence of updates as we develop it in parallel. No more months-long reworks!
Beyond the third sector, this is what we plan to work on in the near future:
Alternate sector layouts, this will come in the next update a couple of weeks from now
Improved and more streamlined tutorial, offload some of the information presented in the tutorial to the game itself, to be presented when necessary
Crew levels
Split equipment into smaller, more varied equipment types, with a more focused drafting table. We want to put more emphasis on your ship loadout
1 more hardpoint for each ship
Reworked waypoint nodes, populated with more interesting encounters (we have some great ones in the works)
Worldbuilding- we are going to further flesh out the world and story in new events and crew interactions
That's it for this update.
Thank you for your continued support and encouragement.
We hope you'll enjoy this new update.
- The Breachway Team