Hello Captains and Crew,
We’re so happy to share that the playtest is live RIGHT NOW! If you have any questions then check out our FAQs for this playtest HERE, join the Discord or Reddit to ask questions, share feedback or find a crew.
Muse Team Lobby: Saturdays @ 12pm EST
Competitive Mode: Saturdays and Sundays @ 11am to 3pm EST
In the meantime, we wanted to share everything we have worked on since the last playtest just over a month ago - spoiler - it’s a lot! There was heaps of amazing feedback from everyone who playtested so we want to take a moment to say a big thank you for that!
We’ve been able to implement a large portion updates for this playtest so hopefully you all feel the difference! Whilst we haven't been able to implement everything we want to at this stage, we are continually be processing all the data , bugs and feedback shared and will be continuing to improve more and more upon Stars of Icarus throughout this Alpha phase.
"We tried to combine or trim the log where we can, but the devs literally added a whole game's worth of content so please savour the content and length of this!" - the marketing team.
See you in the stars,
Muse Games
PLAYTEST 2.0 - PATCH NOTES
We’ve renamed the “Pilot” role to “Captain”.
Projectile Speed, Range, Lifetime
We now define ammo effects as modifying projectile speed, or projectile range. If it just says it modifies projectile speed, it does not impact range. If it talks about modifying projectile range, it will not affect projectile speed.
New Ship: Squid
The Squid is a speedy and lightly equipped two seat corvette. As the fastest and most manoeuvrable crewed vessel, it can keep up with fighter combat and make quick hits against other crewed vessels, but requires coordination and upkeep of automated systems. Its gun layout encourages an assault approach before passing by and laying in supporting fire with the side gun. When it’s time to leave, the back gun provides cover, or can be used as a finisher. Although its maneuverability can mean a skilled pilot with good crew communication can find other ways to use its layout and positioning to full effect. Unlike other crewed ships, it lacks point defense guns and a tech station.
New Ship: Albatross
The Albatross is a heavily armored and shielded single seat fighter. It maintains the effective maneuverability, and boost enabled drift engines of fighters in its class, but trades off the mobility drive and top speed for its extra survivability. It excels at interception by jousting lighter enemy ships and staying within the attack envelope of larger friendly craft.
New Map: Cleaved Canyons
A long lava filled map full of smokey corridors. Fly into the center for long but exposed sightlines, fly to the sides for a stealthier flank, or stick low along the jagged floor to catch your enemies by surprise.
Community Servers
Highly customizable community hosted dedicated servers. Find your favorite place to hang out!
Ranked Mode
Available during limited test sessions, jump into a locked loadout deathmatch, where your strategic choices in the lobby matter just as much as your tactics and communication in combat.
Crew Gunning Changes
We’ve decided to make a significant pass at the crew gunning experience for this Alpha. We wanted to make gunning more engaging, with active decision making and to make human gunners definitively better than automation. We’ve also tried to create an entry point for new players to be able to jump on without understanding every nuance of ammos. Lastly, we wanted to give ourselves some space to balance crewed guns against fighters and against other crew ships in slightly different ways as well as adjust some of the style of “prepwork” play to focus more on power mechanics.
Systemic Changes
Reloading a full magazine only takes 1s penalty time, instead of a full reload
This also affects fighters.
Reduced the amount Overheal decays on all stations.
Active Gunner Tools
We’ve added two new “Gunner Tools” (not available to fighter pilots). We hope these active abilities help power up human gunners in ways that aren’t accessible to automation, and give players more interesting decision points while operating a gun. Fighter pilots already have a lot of buttons to juggle, we’ve changed how they interact with ammo a bit, and this gives us another lever to balance fighters and crewed ships, so we decided not to bring these to fighters.
Gun Station Override is now also considered a “Gunner Tool”
Arc Extension Tool
Extends your guns turning arcs and projectile range for 30 seconds.
60s cooldown.
Reload Tool
Instantly reload your weapon with bonus ammo.
60s Cooldown.
Ammo Archetypes
The ammo archetypes apply the following buffs/debuffs to all ammos in that archetype:
Anti-Fighter Spec
+20% Projectile Speed.
-15% Damage.
Anti Crew Spec
+15% Damage.
-20% Projectile Speed.
Anti-Fighter Ammos:
Overvelocity
Zip
Fighter Proximity - Increases effective size of projectile against fighters
Scattershot - Fires more, weaker, less accurate projectiles, saturating an area.
Anti-Crew Ammos:
Lochnagar
Penetrating Shrapnel
Hack
Incendiary
Jump
Shield Lifesteal - Takes a small percentage of damage done to enemy shields and spreads it among your active shield segments.
Balanced Ammos:
Repulsor
Firewall Protocol
Convergence
Many of these ammos received small changes in order to have them mesh better with the ammo archetype stats they received.
Captain Broadside View Changes
Added Broadside “Wing Mirrors”
Includes friendly and spotted enemy ships.
Enemies that enter your broadsides cause a flashing alert on your wing mirrors, including hotkeys to immediately snap your view left and right.
Adjusted default bindings for Snap View Left/Right to Z and C
Added Fighter Rearview “Mirror”
Shows a simplified version of ships directly behind you, allowing you to see if anyone is on your tail
The helm HUD now displays the aim and status of your weapons.
See a quick view of what guns are being operated, what their status is (destroyed, reloading, ready to fire), and who or what is operating them.
Viewfinder Changes
Viewfinder now always in 5th tool slot
Viewfinder is now raised, but unzoomed, by default, and pressing Tool5 again will switch back to your previous tool
One of the major issues we’ve had with the viewfinder is that it was disorienting and slow to use, instead of allowing you to immediately peek through the ship and spot enemy ships.
Captains have access to the Viewfinder, and can be toggled on and off with Tool5 to see through their own ship’s hull.
You’ll find this especially useful on our new crewed ship
New Active Scan on Left Click, spotting an enemy from any distance or cloud cover for 10 seconds if aimed accurately.
Crew can press T to mark terrain while using viewfinder to communicate locations while using the viewfinder
Tractor Beam Rework
The tractor beam is now a standard weapon, and can be equipped in standard and battery slots (but not dedicated support slots).
Tractor beam increases linear and rotational drag on hit ships
Tractor beam now does a moderate amount of non piercing kinetic damage
Tech Actives Cooldown Nerf
Tech stations were a little too spammable in Alpha 1. We’ve tuned them a little longer, so enemy ships have a chance to punish a poorly used tech activate without risking getting hit by it again midway through an engagement.
Speed Drive Nerf
Active time reduced
Cooldown increased
Speed drive now applies 2 levels of power drain to ship weapons
The speed drive simply made the Raptor unhittable, while still able to shoot back. Now, shooting back is further limited. Other ships rarely needed long active times or frequent usage rates to use the speed drive to engage or disengage. Now usage should be a similar level of commitment for crewed ships, but a more proper commitment for the Raptor.
Grav Bomb Changes
Now less powerful in the centre, while still having the same pull at max range. More ships should now be able to use weaker manoeuvrability tools to escape more consistently.
Combat Spawns Improved
You should now spawn near larger friendly ships more constantly away from enemy players, and in less situations that would put you in immediate danger.
Speed and Turning Retune on several ships
Raised forward speed and acceleration on all ships slightly
All ships were coming in a little slow without additional tools or engine buffs. Getting into and out of cover or combat was harder than seemed reasonable.
Raised turning acceleration of Manta and Taurus
Similarly, Manta and Taurus piloting was also too tool dependent, and made crewed ships feel unresponsive by default. Larger ships are supposed to require more commitment, but not completely fall apart the moment they have to change targets.
Precision Tools Retuned
Precision Repair increased overheal conversion 50%->100%
Precision Repair reduced shield repair value to 200->180
Precision Status reduced reboot reduction 5.5->5
Both precision tools unselected component cooldown reduced 66%->50% base cooldown
Automaton Changes
Automaton Range Increased Significantly
Automaton Repair on non shield components increased
Automaton now only connects to a single weapon
Auto Shotgun Range Increase
Our short range engagements are a little further away than we anticipated. The shotgun was almost always ineffective in broadside engagements even at what most people would consider short range.
Burst Rifle Buffs
Ammo increased 15->18
Burst Delay Decreased .66->.5
Captain 2nd Ammo Slot replaced with Engineering Slot
This slot was rarely used, and a maximum of 1 engineering tool limited the Captain’s ability to deal with anything but simple damage for a large opportunity cost of not taking another pilot tool. Now all Captains have 1 engineering tool at all times, and can choose to take 2 with their any slot for a more interesting tradeoff.
Missile Changes
Missiles lock on faster
Hacking missile reduced to 1 ammo, but damage more than doubled.
Repulsor Ammo Rework
Now adds a consistent amount of total push per magazine
Vent Coolant
Cloud now blocks more vision and spotting
Increased downward speed 100->150
Increased cloud lifetime 10s->20s
Adjusted Booster Rockets force on several ships
Generally reduced the amount of extra thrust on ships that previously had very high effective speed from booster rockets. This should make it a little more consistent across ships. Players we’re boosting into walls unexpectedly a little more often than we liked, and it could be pretty unpredictably fast on some ships.
Guided Missile Changes
Larger Fighter Proximity detonation
Turns faster and controls tighter
Fixed Damage Passthrough
Damage done to components was not properly passing damage along to hull in Alpha 1, leading to non obvious inconsistencies and shots doing no damage
Fixed a graphics driver crash
We expect this will fix most midmatch screen blackout/crash to desktop issues on supported hardware.
Fixed Engine Damage not affecting ship turn rate
Engine damage is not intended to cause ship rotation, unlike Guns of Icarus. (That mechanic was moved to engine hack.) But it is supposed to slow your turn rate along the axes those engines would apply torque to your ship.
Map/Ship Diagram Reworks
A new full color map rendering solution, with better 3D indicators of ship position and coordinates. On the same screen, we’ve also adjusted the ship diagram to be a quick look at your ships loadout, with clickable stations to bring up their descriptions.
T Marking
Consolidated our “T” marking behavior in a few ways. Marking terrain points is now available on guns, in viewfinder, and on antenna. Players using the helm can also mark enemy ships temporarily. Marking terrain now always indicates distance to that point, which should help coordinate jumps and point out enemies who’ve left your view.
Enemy Aim Glint
See a red glint when enemy weapons are being operated, so you know where to avoid, or when you’ve caught someone’s attention.
Cosmetics and Marketplace
Earn gold through playtime
Unlock items with your gold in the marketplace
(Prices and gold earning rates are not final)
Removed Fighter Ammo mode
All ammo changes are made with cycle ammo button for fighters
A note on performance:
While we’ve made some performance improvements since Alpha 1, we’ve been working hard on some other fronts and haven’t had as much time on performance for Alpha 2 as we might have liked. We have to carefully balance our development time, and optimizing too frequently or too early can slow down other areas of development (as optimizations rely on rigid implementations that make certain things hard to change, and can introduce subtle and difficult to track bugs). We’re hoping to make more progress on this front when we enter Beta sometime next year.
A note on controller support
We’re still looking into ways to support more control schemes, especially around using multiple joystick/throttle hardware devices at the same time. We know you’re excited to get all sorts of sim rigs hooked up for this game, but we’re going to have to do a fair amount of custom work to make them all work. We’re working on it, but it’s going to take a bit more time than we initially budgeted. We hope we can support most setups in a flexible enough manner in the future.