Commanders, are you geared up for Boot Camp?
We are excited to share our latest Early Access Roadmap News with you, giving a preview of what's to come in the next weeks for Survivor Mercs!
In the last update, "Evolution" (0.9.9), we laid the groundwork for more interesting squad builds and meta progression, introducing many new Traits and ways to configure your Commanders, alongside many improvements and new features like the Armor system.
This last update was inspired by your feedback and input, and we were able to patch multiple annoying and hard-to-reproduce bugs based on your reports. THANK YOU very much for caring about the game and helping us make it better ❤
If you aren't already part of the community, join our Discord to get in touch with us and help with improving the game:
So, Commanders, report in for the briefing on updates 0.9.10 and beyond!
Our primary focus with the next update(s) is making the game deeper and more fun for both our veteran Commanders as well as our new recruits.
More Synergy & OP Squad Build Potential
Since you're now able to configure your Commanders to your liking, it's time to give you more choice over the rest of your squad and how it works together in your build.
This is happening in two major steps, with the first one going into the next major update 0.9.10 "Boot Camp" - a skill tree overhaul for all Mercs - followed by another huge change, Commander Weapons. Additional adjustments for Gear and Traits will leverage that to give you many more creative ways to synergize and combine everything into your OP killer squad.
The primary goal of the skill tree rework is to provide you with meaningful choice between at least two, mostly 3-4, very distinct profiles for each Merc. We will provide a full list of these changes with the respective update notes. Overall, we're working on this:
- Many more Mercs can specialize in different damage types.
- Some Mercs will receive completely new, additional attack options.
- Others receive additional Utility skills that may affect your Commander or whole squad.
- Most skill trees will have more notable impact on attack, targeting, and movement patterns.
- More special skills with new status and proc effects will await you in or at the end of these new skill trees.
We are testing new status effects for Mercs and Commander Weapons, potentially also for enemies, to give you more control over the action and add more variety:
- Decay - temporarily reduce target's Armor
- Marked - target is prioritized by your Mercs
We will also use status effects for our new proc effects system. We will start with "on crit" procs that are enabled by Gear, Merc skills, or Traits, and offer new ways to cause mayhem, especially together with the status effect procs that can trigger if certain status effects are combined in the correct order. But they come at a trade-off: some status effect procs may cancel each other out.
Update 0.9.10 brings some of these procs, others are following with the Commander Weapons that are less focused on damage but on status effects to give you more control over your squad and its combat effectiveness.
Improved Level-up System
The next update will bring some improvements to the level-ups and reduce the randomness, specifically supporting you to choose the Merc skill tree options.
Upgrades for Mercs, Commander Abilities, and Gear are separated from the Generic Upgrades, and we want to ensure you can pick from all exclusive skill tree options when you reach a branching point. The Generic Upgrades appear frequently in your upgrade rotation as a similar special case. Overall you are going to be less dependent on randomness, your Commander's Luck attribute becomes more meaningful, and Re-rolls & Excludes are more useful.
We're also trying to reduce the sheer number of level-ups to make each upgrade choice more impactful.
Battle Decorations & Awards
We are about to introduce a new "Trophy Room" for your bunker, with a huge amount of new Awards for completing different challenges and Steam Achievements to complement them.
The Awards are divided into ribbons, badges, and medals based on their challenge difficulty, neatly sorted into the Trophy Room. But they are not just for the completionists among you! They also serve our new recruits to learn more about the ways to play the game, and will inspire some of our veteran Commanders to experiment with new squad builds and Commander configurations.
Elite Operations
Starting with the upcoming update, we are going to introduce a new Elite Operation Type for the existing maps.
Elite Operations are harder variants of each map's Standard Operation.
We see a lot of players struggling in the first runs since our difficulty is currently balanced to provide an interesting challenge for both new recruits and veteran Commanders.
The new Standard Operation will be a bit easier compared to the current one, allowing you to learn more about the basics of the game and experiment with different squad builds. But you will only find common loot!
So to upgrade your bunker rooms to higher levels, you have to play the new Elite Operations. These will be tougher than the current Standard Operations, so you need some Bunker upgrades and advanced Traits to get the rare loot required for improving the Bunker rooms further. We're trying to find an interesting balance and different enemy setups for each Operation Type to add more variety and fun surprises. Expect these changes to come in multiple steps! As usual, we'll lay the groundwork in the next major update and will refine it based on our insights and your input and feedback.
The new Elite Operation will be interwoven with the new Awards, and much of the other content and features, particularly late-game progression. As always, we'll try to make it compatible with your existing savegames, but we cannot promise that we won't reset at least part of your progress to make everything work.
Meet "Conduit"
We're about to introduce "Conduit", your heli pilot. She's your helpful assistant and will appear on multiple occasions to provide little hints or bits of background information to help you understand some of the inner workings of the game.
Her appearance also marks another step in adding more lore and flavor to the game. We aim to show more of the personality of the individual Mercs and M.E.G.A. Corp.'s big bosses. We hope you'll welcome Conduit to your bunker with open arms!
General Improvements
In addition to these highlights, the upcoming update(s) will bring many more additional improvements, like various UI changes and additions, e.g. damage type icons to identify quickly how Mercs, Gear, and Traits work together. We also continue working on performance improvements, better Merc behavior, and juicier boss fights.
The Road Ahead...
We are working on many other things at the moment, too. The following list of items is neither complete nor final!
But we want to provide an outlook as to what's coming, and are always happy to hear your thoughts:
⏩ A new Airlift room allows you to save some loot instead of extracting.
⏩ Choose between different Commander Weapons to gain additional firepower and control over your squad, utilizing many of the new status effects and synergies.
⏩ Enjoy a better, more polished UI and configure your input mappings alongside other improved settings and options, specifically to support accessibility.
Apart from these, we're always looking to add new maps & bosses, enemies, Mercs, and other content as they fit these updates.
We continue in Early Access and plan to release these updates over the course of the next weeks and months.
Please join the discussion on our Discord server and let us know which of these new features or improvements you are most excited about.