Hey all!
Marty here. The Night Shift is now available in Unreal!
Since my last announcement, I have polished a lot of areas, squashed a bunch of bugs and tweaked a bunch of things based on play testers feedback.
This update brings a bunch of changes, more than I can count, so let's chat about a couple of them.
You can find more world building and more detail than before, utilising Unreal Engine 5, The Night Shift is an entirely new game. You will immediately notice the difference in visual fidelity, from the walls to chairs to even smaller items like notes and batteries to ray tracing. These new visuals allow for a more immersive world, and more frightening.
Gameplay has changed drastically. You are no longer confined to just walking (or sprinting for 2 seconds) on the ground. Starting from now, as you play The Night Shift you will have more ways to interact and navigate the environment. You can jump as much as you want, run for as long as you want, and you can even focus/zoom in to look at finer details of things. You can pick items up, inspect them, and add them to your inventory. Picking up and inspecting notes and items can give you useful information to assist you in furthering your progress or point you in the right direction of secrets.
The change to Unreal brings a lot of benefits to performance of The Night Shift. It's no secret that the previous version was poorly optimised for how it looked. In saying that, performance was something that was a main focus through the development of the Unreal update. If you find the performance is a little choppy, try changing the video settings (they actually work now). Talking about the settings, you can now change video settings whenever! From the main menu, and *drum roll* in game.
Before I wrap this up, I want to just raise that with the price changing from free to paid there are a couple things to note.
- If you had The Night Shift linked to your Steam account while it was free, it will remain on your account and you will be able to play it throughout Early Access to Release and beyond.
- Any reviews that were given to The Night Shift while it was free, won't count to the review score moving forward (They still appear)
- If you had The Night Shift linked to your Steam account while it was free, you will not be eligible to earn Trading Cards while playing The Night Shift.
Regarding that last one, The Night Shift doesn't have any trading card support so this won't affect anyone. If this changes, there will be an announcement.
As usual, please post any questions, concerns, suggestions or just plain ol' feedback, to the Steam Discussions or on the Discord. All of which helps better the future experience of The Night Shift.
Anyway, that's it from me. I can't wait for you to play and experience the new update.
Thanks and have fun,
Marty
